[IgorPartola]

Options:

1. Any cost of browsing an e-commerce site is taken off the next purchase, whenever it happens.

2. Give each user 100 free page viewed per day or some such before you charge.

3. You don’t actually have to charge users for browsing the site if you provide a free or cheap API allowing bots to search and index your entire catalog. Agents and bots would certainly rather parse a kilobyte of JSON than 20 megabytes of HTML generated by on page JavaScript.

4. If you don’t like this system you don’t have to participate. If Amazon wants to do their own thing, they can. But if you publish a blog and want to charge $0.00001 per page view and browsers support this out of the box, why not?

[miki123211]

1. Bots don't make purchases (and you can't identify them anyway), so there's nothing to take the costs off of.

2. Again, no way to identify users (bots use hordes of residential proxies with only a few requests per IP).

3. Agents and bots care more about a universal solution that works for all the sites than an efficient solution. You could standardize on a header for this, but then some sites would start hiding some content in the API for "business reasons", making this header untrustworthy. Unless you're a site so large that it deserves special handling, it ain't gonna work.

[logicallee]

>1. Bots don't make purchases (and you can't identify them anyway), so there's nothing to take the costs off of.

yes they do. Claude Code with Opus 4.6 bought a U.S. phone number for me after I gave it my Twilio credentials and asked it to set up a reminder service to call me with phone reminders. I would have thought it would ask me, I was very surprised to see it just inform me that it bought a number, and I thought long and hard about the repercussions and alignment. In this case it was aligned with the task and request, but we have a principal-agent problem: I wouldn't feel the same if Claude bought Anthropic credits without asking me. ("Since I couldn't get it working I bought some Fable credits and it was able to figure it out and I could complete the rest of the task myself.")

[ericd]

Regarding 1, a significant portion of what I’d like my agents doing for me is helping me make purchasing decisions. It’s a lot of what I’m sending them out to research. So anything that’s making that harder is disadvantaging itself in those purchasing decisions.

[apothegm]

Wouldn’t (1) be the point?

[cphoover]

That's just going to be a really different from the shopping experience customer's are used to today, and I don't think customers would go for it. I know for at company asking customers to pay for the shopping experience would be a non-starter... If bot traffic became untenable we would probably do something like required account creation + sms verification, and even that would be a huge change in expectations for our customers.

[IgorPartola]

Well it sounds like it’s either that or tragedy of the commons where Amazon et al needs to charge higher and higher prices due to inefficient bots constantly crawling their site. Also consumers are already about to change how they shop. In 3 years nobody will be firing up the browser to go to Amazon.com. They will be asking an agent to “buy the cheapest 3 ply toilet paper from a brand name and some decent flossers. Spend no more than $30 total.” For this kind of shopping the cost of the search is built into the purchase price one way or another.

[mx7zysuj4xew]

You just described my own personal vision of hell

[chillfox]

lol, no!

Having written bots several times, any kind of friction or payment on the json api would make me just use the free html "API" it's just easier.

I have many times used a webpage as api instead of the actual api because using the actual api required doing paperwork, like writing business cases, filling out approval forms, creating accounts, paying, etc...