Latest / Retail Media Breakfast Club / I Got Prime Deals. Or Did I? Why Consumer Distrust Is AI Shopping's Real Opening
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- I Got Prime Deals. Or Did I? Why Consumer Distrust Is AI Shopping's Real Opening === [00:00:00] Kiri Masters: Last week I bought a few things during Amazon's big deal days, events, the packages have arrived, and now I'm sitting here with an uncomfortable question, did I actually get a deal? I have an underlying sense that I didn't, but it's honestly [00:00:15] too hard to check. I didn't screenshot the percentage off claims at checkout, [00:00:20] and while I can pull up the price history on Camel, camel, camel, I can't reconstruct what Amazon told me the discount was when I handed over my money. [00:00:30] Amazon controls that narrative, and once the promotion ends, the evidence disappears. I'm privileged enough that I don't have to watch every penny, but I keep thinking about shoppers who need to and for them, this is just nuts. [00:00:43] [00:00:45] Kiri Masters: Welcome to e-Commerce in 2025. Shopping online kind of sucks Now it's become exhausting Detective work for millions of customers. I'm not alone in my doubts about what kind of deals I got last week, [00:00:59] [00:01:00] according to numerator research satisfaction with Amazon's Prime Big Deal days in October this year dropped to 58% compared to 66% satisfaction in July's Prime Day event. [00:01:13] more telling [00:01:15] 55% of shoppers actively compared prices across competing retailers. That's defensive shopping, not casual browsing. [00:01:22] I posit that trust has eroded in the eCommerce ecosystem, [00:01:26] And there's five big reasons why. Number one is opaque pricing, [00:01:30] which is what I was just talking about. Retailers, or sometimes the brands selling there pump up their list prices to create new reference pricing that makes discounts look bigger than they really are, and consumers are getting hip to this just [00:01:45] last month in September. Two Amazon customers filed a federal class action lawsuit alleging that prime day promotions are fraudulent. [00:01:53] The complaint claims that Amazon inflated list prices immediately before Prime Day to make discounts look bigger than they were. [00:02:00] Now, anyone in this industry knows exactly how that happens and why, it's not that Amazon is evil or the company's selling their evil, it's that the incentives are insane on these [00:02:15] retail platforms. [00:02:16] Brands are getting strong armed into providing deals because Amazon wants to keep that streak going of continued growth across. Big deal days and created a virtuous cycle of [00:02:30] growth, which is supposed to ultimately support brands as well. But it ends up having these twisted incentives have the result of eventually sort of coming to the surface for consumers and now they are aware of it. [00:02:43] They don't trust the pricing [00:02:45] on these retailers anymore, so it'll be interesting to see where this lawsuit goes and if it does sort of continue through, there's gonna be a lot more distrust of pricing on retailer dot com's. The second reason why online shopping [00:03:00] kind of sucks now is inconsistent product information. [00:03:03] This is not a new problem. This has been for around for a long time where product detail pages routinely have contradictory specs. One section says leather. The title says Synthetic, that these content [00:03:15] errors and inconsistencies have plagued retailer websites for at least a decade, , and continue to create doubt about what you're actually buying. [00:03:24] Other issues with the online shopping experience right now. Hidden costs with free [00:03:30] shipping, uh, return policies that are buried in fine print delivery windows that you're unsure of. You have to actually build a cart and go to checkout to understand what the shipping speed and costs are going to be. [00:03:44] I am [00:03:45] often building shopping baskets across multiple retailers to check what I'm going to be charged. Um, all said and done another big issue that that continues is manipulated social proof review gamings, retailers and brands, gaming reviews, gaming [00:04:00] ratings, incentivized feedback. Badly designed review systems. [00:04:04] Make it difficult to gauge genuine product quality and feedback from real customers. And finally, overload. I'm sympathetic to this concern that some people have that there's [00:04:15] just too many ads on retailer.com websites. I'm skeptical that it is truly broken because sponsored product ads just work too well to be completely terrible for shoppers. [00:04:25] But there's certainly a perception of manipulation that matters consumers. [00:04:30] Tend to complain about ads, at least the ones that they noticed. Now, each of these five issues requires a lot of work on the part of the consumer work to compare prices, verify product [00:04:45] information, et cetera, et cetera. [00:04:47] And this is all work that AI agents can do invisibly and instantly, [00:04:51] new research from Adobe shows that 38% of consumers have already used generative AI for shopping with 36%, specifically [00:05:00] seeking deals through AI tools. So these aren't just tech enthusiasts playing with the newest toys. They're everyday shoppers doing defensive shopping. [00:05:15] When your time, budget and team are already maxed out. Keeping up with retailer platforms and media requirements can feel like a never ending labyrinth. That's why even the best brands bring in an execution [00:05:30] partner. [00:05:30] Acosta Group makes retail media execution simpler. They stay ahead of every platform. Update tech shift. And media spec, so your campaigns actually show up and perform without draining your [00:05:45] team. [00:05:45] Let Acosta group handle the chaos behind the scenes so you can keep building the brand. Check out Acosta Group and tell them Retail Media Breakfast Club sent you. That's A-C-O-S-T group. [00:05:59] [00:06:01] Kiri Masters: Now the AI skeptics say that everything is already fine. Fellow retail analyst, Andrew Lipman, someone who I greatly respect. Recently dropped a ballsy essay arguing that AI shopping agents are [00:06:15] overhyped and a solution looking for a problem. One of his points is that he walks through his last five purchases that he made online, a basketball pump, Claritin, a shirt, running shoes, a compost spin. [00:06:27] He says these easy purchases required [00:06:30] almost no thought and very little time to complete for complex ones. He's certain that an agent would fail. Buying stuff on the internet is already efficient. He argues why complicated with ai, but his almost no thought required framing reveals something. [00:06:44] [00:06:45] He trusts what he's seeing. Now. Last month I spent two hours trying to buy a specific type of boot for the winter, not because I couldn't find them, but because I couldn't trust what I was seeing. I eventually landed on the [00:07:00] shoe mall, product page for these boots because they had the lowest price, but they had contradictory product information on the page. [00:07:08] I had to go to a number of different retailer websites to figure out what the pricing would be at the [00:07:15] checkout. Once I'd factored in shipping costs and coupons and things like that. And by the time I completed the purchase I'd. Cross-referenced four different retail websites and I still wasn't confident that I got the best deal. [00:07:26] This is the quote, unquote, easy [00:07:30] shopping that Andrew describes. If you are willing to do exhausting detective work, if you have time to verify everything, if a few dollars here or there won't meaningfully impact your family's budget for millions of shoppers. That trust is gone [00:07:45] and what's left is a paradox of confusing choices, more busy work, and potentially extra cost too. [00:07:51] So let's talk about how AI agents actually help. They can do that exhausting verification work that's become [00:08:00] prerequisite to confident purchasing. They crosscheck prices across retailers. Passing contradictory product specs, evaluating review authenticity, calculating true all in shipping costs. [00:08:13] And that's why we're going to see [00:08:15] more consumers use these agents [00:08:17] to help them make better decisions. [00:08:19] Now, one irony that I wanna point out here is that, look, Amazon didn't. Design a master plan to a road trust and then sell the solution with its roofer [00:08:30] shopping agent. But think about 15 years of optimization decisions, each one rational in isolation. [00:08:38] Eventually, these trust gaps get built. Now Amazon is blocking external agents [00:08:45] while building Rufuss their own shopping assistant. And the consequence is consumers who've lost faith in Amazon's pricing must now trust Amazon's AI to verify. [00:08:55] Amazon's deals now. I just don't think that that can hold. [00:09:00] Walmart's taking the opposite approach. They're building systems that welcome external agents. Whether retailers like it or not, consumers are already turning to chat. BT Perplexity and other tools to comparison shop and verify claims. [00:09:13] So just wrapping up here, look, [00:09:15] Andrew is right that transacting is easy. You can buy almost anything in minutes, but trusting what you're transacting on has become pretty hard. AI shopping agents aren't solving a made up problem. They're responding to a real [00:09:30] erosion of trust in the retail ecosystem that's been building for years. [00:09:34] I still don't know if I got a deal last week, the proof will be in the pudding. If I could actually see the pudding next time. I'm asking chat GPT to check [00:09:45] first. [00:09:45]