Hey hey!
If you’ve known me for any length of time, you’ll know that I am deeply, profoundly, unembarrassedly lazy about certain things.
Not work things, obviously – I’ll rewrite a meta title sixteen times until it’s right, spend three hours on a single paragraph of SEO copy, and cheerfully go down a rabbit hole of Google Search Console data at 11pm on a Wednesday. I like to think that’s the opposite of laziness, more like enthusiasm with poor time management.
No, I mean the other stuff. The life admin. The things that could theoretically be delegated, automated, or handed off to someone else, but somehow never are.
Take Netflix.
Matt, my partner, has many excellent qualities. Choosing something to watch on Netflix is not one of them. His selections follow a predictable pattern – something that looks mildly interesting, starts slowly, and then just as I’ve decided to give it a proper chance, he falls asleep. So invariably I sit there, 45 minutes into something dreadful – not enjoying it, but completely invested in it.
I could let him choose every night. I don’t. Some decisions are too important to outsource.
Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to Walmart (bear with me…).
Walmart spent several months testing something called Instant Checkout – letting customers buy products directly inside ChatGPT without ever visiting the Walmart website. They listed around 200,000 products. They gave it a proper go.
The conversion rate was three times worse than when customers just clicked through to the Walmart website instead.
I mean something that has been touted as “the future of shopping online” has to go some way to be three times fucking worse, right?.
Their EVP of product called the experience “unsatisfying.” Which is a very corporate way of saying what I think we all instinctively knew – handing over money is something people want to do themselves, in a place they trust, in a way that feels familiar.
It turns out there’s a difference between things people are happy to let AI handle – research, comparisons, recommendations, figuring out which version of a thing they need – and the moment they actually have to commit. That last step, the one where they type in their details and press buy, still feels personal. Still feels like something they want control over.
Walmart’s figured this out now. They’re building their own chatbot into the ChatGPT experience instead, keeping the purchase itself inside their own environment where customers are comfortable.
I think about this kind of thing a lot when I hear businesses talking about automating their entire customer journey, or letting AI handle every touchpoint. Some parts of your business are absolutely worth streamlining. Some aren’t.
The question worth asking isn’t “can AI do this?” – it’s “is this one of the things my customers want to do themselves?”
Sometimes the answer is the same one I apply to Netflix. This one’s mine.
You can read the full story here.
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Worth your time this week
If you’re willing to outsource a small part of your time to me, here’s what’s worth it this week. One read, one listen, one subscribe.
Read: If you’ve ever nodded along to SEO advice from someone who went to a conference last Tuesday and came back a self-declared expert – this one’s for you. Dave’s been to a conference and now he’s an SEO expert.
Listen: When did you last actually read your own website? Not edit it, not skim it – read it like a visitor would. If the answer is “I can’t remember”, episode 18 of SEO F**king What is waiting for you. You haven’t read your own website, have you?
Subscribe: If you work in SEO or just need to keep an eye on what’s happening in search without spending your entire week reading about it, Aleyda Solis’s SEOFOMO newsletter does the hard work for you. Over 40,000 SEOs already get it.
That’s it for this week – now go watch something on Netflix that you actually chose yourself.
Always non-wanky,
Nx
P.S. I have some space open in April for SEO 1:1s – these always book up quickly so reserve now if you want to talk SEO.
