Comment by koverda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by koverda | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Not buying it from this guy.

He says things are going to move to conversational commerce? Alexa at best can re-order something that I've bought before. If I need a new product, the amount of information and comparison that I do (as well as checking reviews) doesn't lead well to a conversational model.

It's not like we walk into a B&M store and just talk to a salesperson. We examine the products, the packaging, the information presented about those products, we look around near by and see what else in a similar category is in the store.

Conversational commerce moves to an even lower bandwidth information transfer. With websites we can absorb way more info than we can with a chat bot. At best it will augment current experiences.

Maybe I'm wrong, and there are some products that are well suited to this model, but I'm failing to come up with any.

I hate conversations when I'm shopping. If a chipper salesperson walks over and starts chatting me up or making small talk, I will immediately turn around and walk out, and I'm an extrovert. I want to look at price, price per unit/spec, hold the thing if quality is relevant, then make a purchase. The less you pitch to me, the more likely I'll buy.

'I will immediately turn around and walk out...'

I worked in retail over 20 years ago and this is one of the first lessons I learned. If somebody wants help making a buying decision they will, usually, come and ask for it.

If you let someone look around and walk out without bothering them they'll often come back later and buy something. It may be in the next hour or the next week or the next month but (assuming you have something people want) they do come back.

I'm not saying completely ignore them, a simple 'hello' or 'how's it going?' will suffice.

If they don't ever come back the place has got bigger problems than the salesman can fix.

Of course there are exceptions where people are pressured into buying something they didn't want to buy. They're the outliers that drive this kind of perverse retail policy. But you can guarantee these people only ever buy once.

Some of this is applicable to e-commerce today. Annoying chat boxes, false discounting and time limited offers are just another way of forcing a sale at the cost of building a long-term relationship.

I agree. There is this marketing principle: people love to buy, but hate to be sold.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com