ChatGPT Tell Me What to Buy vs. Buy This for Me

Putting Amazon’s new AI shopping assistant to the test.

Written by Brook Schaaf

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Named after a corgi, Amazon says their beta-version shopping assistant Rufus is “designed to help customers save time and make more informed purchase decisions by answering questions on a variety of shopping needs and products.”

But what little press I’ve seen about it hasn’t been great. The Marketplace Pulse article notes that the AI shopping assistant doesn’t answer current or historical pricing or best product questions and that what it does answer “takes a lot longer than 100ms” (the threshold for a decrease in the conversion rate). 

In my personal test, I asked about Thermapen, a high-end food thermometer Amazon doesn’t sell. (At a trade show years ago, a company executive gave me an earful about staying off Amazon.) Rufus reported back information about the product — it seemed accurate, though I didn’t double-check if any of the stats were hallucinations. What I did notice was that the provided product links weren’t for actual Thermapens, but Amazon’s comparable products. Unlike other retailers, Amazon is notorious for not revealing if they don’t sell a particular brand, presumably because they don’t want to create any friction (as with latency) that would prevent you from buying.

It’s one thing to experience this with a “consume more” results page (as with videos unrelated to your search on YouTube for how to fix your appliance issue) but it feels slightly disturbing to experience it with a chatbot, almost like it’s a person deceiving you. 

Rufus also won’t place an order for you, which I don’t expect I’d ever want it to, given my lack of trust. The words of Richard Barton, founder of Expedia, came to mind, when he talked about his frustration with travel agents: “I wanted to jump through the phone, turn the screen my way, and do it myself … putting barriers between people and information is unsustainable in the world of technology.”

As of now it seems possible, even likely, that we’re going to live through a recapitulation of this with AI chatbots in the role of the ineffectual travel agent who frustrates most buyer segments (i.e., technology as the barrier between people and information). If this holds true, this means that there will be no foreclosure on the role information brokers, such as affiliate sites, can play.