ChatGPT Atlas Demo Replay
Thanks to everyone that joined us live on all our platforms, this was also our first time experimenting with the Substack live video feature and we had great attendance there as well! If you missed it, the recording is at the top here, or if you prefer, here’s the Youtube recording link if you prefer to watch it there→
Amazon Releases ‘Help Me Decide’ AI Powered Feature.
On Thursday, Sept 23rd, Amazon announced a new AI feature called Help Me Decide:
The way this works is the Amazon app or website detect you are looking at multiple products in the same category and then pops up this little ‘Help me decide’ button in the upper right with their ‘AI Sparkle’:
In this post I’m going to let the feature do the talking and walk you through two examples. At the end I’ll wrap up with some thoughts→
Example 1: Toaster Ovens
I looked at somewhere in the 5-8 PDPs for Toaster Ovens and got the HMD sparkle!
Pressing that immediately took me to this 4 checkbox experience, not unlike the ux for ‘buy for me’. Here you can see they are:
Analyzing 700+ products - Wow, that’s a lot of toasters
Evaluating product criteria - It must be looking at commonalities in the sub-set I viewed?
Analyzing 108k+ reviews - Doesn’t Rufus do this too?
Comparing prices and return rates- Prices Rufus does, return rates is an interesting one that’s definitely an internal, not on the PDP datapoint that now it looks like Amazon’s AI has access too 🤔
This takes about 60-120 seconds, it’s not fast, so it ‘feels’ like it’s doing some work:
Poof, it’s done! It now gives me three options:
Your Top Pick - Where it lands you ($159/4.4)
Budget Pick - Highly rated, but less expensive ($78/4.3) (swipe left)
Upgrade Pick - Highly rated, but a bit more expensive ($270/4.5) (swipe right)
There’s a thing in retail that the consumer only really wants three choices: Good, Better, Best. This one puts me into Better, offers me a ‘back to good, forward to best’ option.
Example 2: Electric Griddle:
I actually tried monitors, pickeball paddles and ultimate figured, hmm, maybe they are focused on appliances, so went back in there and looked for an electric griddle. Here I got to 5 and it popped a sparkle→
Now we see way more products: 1.8k+ and thus more reviews 170k+ - it did take about 2-3mins this time, so there was a correlation to the product/review scope and time to analyze.
Help Me Decide Analysis
I keep having these Amazon AI experiences where Rufus is to the point that I prefer it to the search experience for many things and this Help Me Decide is great. While I don’t want to wait 2-3mins, if I’m honest, I spend 10-20 getting lost in the sea (1800 griddles!) of products and ads and it’s nice to a. get the ads out of the way and b. I like the good/better/best, it’s kind of how I shop. For example, I didn’t know there was a warming tray option and the budget option had some negatives, but for 10 more getting the highly rated one feels good. Whereas with the toaster that extra bump isn’t worth it.
I can’t ‘get to that’ decision on core Amazon.
I particularly like the ‘customers say’ and I hate to say this, but it seems ‘inspired’ by ChatGPT or Perplexity product cards, where they take all that review noise (170k review? Come on, nobody reads all that) and boils it down. I like, for example, the one griddle, how it isn’t just positive - the first one at a 4.3 it’s good to know it has uneven cooking. That’s what’s wrong with my current one (my bacon is burnin!) so I don’t want that again and am willing to pay a bit more to not have that situation.
I give this a solid B+ What’s keeping it from an A+:
It should be faster - index or cache this stuff
It’s a hard to find feature. Flip it, let me go into it from the homepage and tell it a category or one product to start with - I’m cool if it asks me what I’m looking for or what’s important vs. me having to ‘drown in choice’ first before it throws me a life preserver. 🛟
Amazon - please please please, do not add sponsored products to this experience. Since you added ads to Rufus, this is my most trusted experience on the entire site. Give us one little island without billboards on it 🙏.
