@test 不允许在这里_“我们不在这里为他们服务”

There’s a famous scene in the original Star Wars movie where the bartender tells Luke “We don’t serve their kind here”, pointing to his droids (top). In The Mandalorian, set about 10 years later, the bartender at the same location is a droid (bottom):

最初的《星球大战》电影中有一个著名的场景，调酒师告诉卢克“我们在这里不提供这种服务”，指着他的机器人(上)。 在大约10年后的曼达洛式中，调酒师在同一位置 是 机器人(底部)：

机器人是电子商务的敌人吗？ (Are robots the enemy of ecommerce?)

We may still be a few years away from the anthropomorphic walking, talking robot companions of Star Wars, but robo-shopping is already here. And that’s a problem; few of the traditional retailers who have struggled to meet their human customers online are ready for roboshoppers. Most websites are explicitly set up to not serve robotic visitors; web site owners go to great lengths to stop automated ‘bots’ from accessing their sites.

我们可能距离《星际大战》的拟人走路，会说话的机器人同伴还差几年，但是机器人购物已经来了。 那是个问题； 很难在网上满足人类客户需求的传统零售商中，很少有人准备好成为抢劫犯。 大多数网站都已明确设置为不为机器人访问者提供服务； 网站所有者竭尽全力阻止自动化“机器人”访问其网站。

But why might they fear this cohort of customers? Already, some 50% of visits to a website may actually be from automated sources, not humans. Historically, these have been viewed as an annoyance and potentially injurious to the site, engaging in activities including:

但是为什么他们会担心这群客户呢？ 已经有大约50％的网站访问实际上来自自动化来源，而不是人类。 从历史上看，这些被视为烦人的事，并可能对该站点造成伤害，从事的活动包括：

• Posting fake reviews

  发布虚假评论

• Creating fake user accounts

  创建假用户帐户

• Polluting actual visitor data (rendering analytics useless)

  污染实际的访客数据(使分析无效)

• Overwhelming customer support channels with queries

  大量的客户支持渠道与查询

• Scraping prices and stock information

  削价和库存信息

• Degrading site performance

  降低网站性能

• Bulk Purchasing of restricted or limited items

  批量购买限制或限制项目

• Account Takeover/Hijack attempts

  帐户接管/劫持尝试

There’s an entire sub-industry of software solutions to stop automated bots. Market-leader reCAPTCHA is used by more than 5m websites and according to its owner Google: “reCAPTCHA uses an advanced risk analysis engine and adaptive challenges to keep automated software from engaging in abusive activities on your site”. Most of us have encountered the annoying versions of this technology that ask you to click on all the images that contain traffic lights rather than letting us shop. The latest iteration of the technology, reCAPTCHA V3, is invisible to users — it works by ranking a visitor on a scale, leaving the web site owners to decide how to respond to a low score that’s likely a bot.

整个软件解决方案子行业都可以阻止自动化机器人。 市场领导者reCAPTCHA被超过500万个网站所使用，据其所有者Google称 ：“ reCAPTCHA使用先进的风险分析引擎和适应性挑战，可防止自动化软件参与您网站上的滥用行为。” 我们大多数人都遇到过这种技术的烦人版本，要求您单击所有包含交通信号灯的图像，而不是让我们购物。 该技术的最新版本reCAPTCHA V3对用户是不可见的-它通过对访问者进行大规模排名来起作用，让网站所有者决定如何应对可能是机器人的低分。

But simply blocking automated visitors is fast becoming flawed, out-dated thinking. There’s now an increasing chance that automated traffic is a legitimate proxy/agent for a genuine human customer or beneficial traffic rather than a disruptive bot.

但是，仅仅阻止自动访问者正Swift成为有缺陷的过时思维。 现在，自动流量成为真正的人类客户或有益流量的合法代理/代理而不是破坏性机器人的机会越来越多。

好机器人/坏机器人 (Good Bot/Bad Bot)

Retailers depend on some bot traffic. Getting your site indexed by the Google search bot is of course valuable, perhaps essential. Price comparison and aggregation sites are also popular with consumers — according to the UK Competition and Markets Authority, 85% of all UK internet users have used a price comparison website at some time. These sites use bots to scrape information from a variety of sites to power their comparisons. Retailers who aren’t included may miss out on consumers who appreciate the one-stop-shop convenience of comparison sites.

零售商依赖一些机器人流量。 当然，让Google搜索机器人将您的网站编入索引非常有价值，也许是必不可少的。 价格比较和汇总网站也受到消费者欢迎-根据英国竞争和市场管理局的数据，英国所有互联网用户中有85％曾使用价格比较网站。 这些网站使用漫游器从各种网站中抓取信息，以进行比较。 未包括在内的零售商可能会错过那些欣赏比较站点的一站式便利的消费者。

But what if it’s your competitors, not your customers, who are harvesting information from your site? Secret shoppers and shopper intelligence isn’t a new concept of course — multiple sources, for example GfK Data, exist for traditional physical retail. Compared to older research techniques though, price scraping can gather the pricing details of thousands of products in seconds. Bots can be used to track when competitors place an item on sale or when they list new products, thus providing intelligence to undercut prices or make better competitive decisions.

但是，如果从您的站点中收集信息的是您的竞争对手而不是您的客户呢？ 秘密购物者和购物者情报当然不是一个新概念-传统实体零售业存在多种来源，例如GfK Data。 与旧的研究技术相比，价格搜寻可以在几秒钟内收集数千种产品的价格细节。 机器人可以用来跟踪竞争对手何时销售商品或何时列出新产品，从而提供情报以降低价格或做出更好的竞争决策。

In June, a number of retailers noticed an increase in the instances of abandoned carts — a mystery shopper was adding items to their basket but not checking out. As reported in the WSJ, this was, in fact, a Google Shopping bot checking that pricing information was accurate and retailers weren’t changing prices between the product detail pages and the checkout.

6月，许多零售商注意到废弃手推车的数量有所增加-一个神秘的购物者正在向他们的购物篮中添加物品，但没有结账。 正如《 华尔街日报》报道的那样，实际上，这是一个Google购物机器人，它检查定价信息是否准确，并且零售商没有在产品详细信息页面和结帐页面之间更改价格。

When Google unveiled its Duplex Assistant technology that can place voice calls on behalf of users, it boasted how a consumer could ask their Assistant to make a reservation and the Google Assistant would phone the relevant business and then use voice synthesis and artificial intelligence to converse with the human answering the phone to make the appointment. While Google presented it as a way for businesses without web technology to accept digital bookings, some saw it as a nuisance caller, being uncomfortable accepting calls from non-humans.

当Google推出其可以代表用户进行语音呼叫的Duplex Assistant技术时，它吹嘘消费者如何要求其Assistant进行预订，而Google Assistant会给相关业务打电话，然后使用语音合成和人工智能与之交谈。人类接听电话进行约会。 谷歌将其作为没有网络技术的企业接受数字预订的一种方式，但有人将其视为令人讨厌的呼叫者，不愿意接受非人类的呼叫。

On the other side of the relationship retailers are, of course, already deploying automation to better serve their human customers. Chatbots can represent retailers, triaging basic customer enquiries. While customers may prefer to deal with humans, chatbots are, increasingly, retailers’ first line of defense. But if we customers are expected to deal with automated agents, why shouldn’t retailers expect consumers to return the favour?

当然，在关系的另一端，零售商已经在部署自动化以更好地为其人类客户服务。 聊天机器人可以代表零售商，对基本的客户查询进行分类。 尽管客户可能更喜欢与人打交道，但聊天机器人越来越成为零售商的第一道防线。 但是，如果希望我们的客户与自动化代理打交道，为什么零售商不应该期望消费者返回青睐呢？

最快的购物者获胜 (The Fastest Shopper Wins)

If you’re in a store and look around at all the other shoppers, what’s the one thing they have in common? They’re all human. Online, your fellow shoppers are only 50% likely to be human. You’re often competing for retailers’ attention and inventory with highly efficient automated bots.

如果您在商店里，到处都是其他购物者，他们的共同点是什么？ 他们都是人类。 在网上，您的同伴购物者只有50％是人类。 您经常使用高效的自动化机器人在争夺零售商的注意力和库存。

Although websites are efficient at presenting browsable information to consumers, they are quite inefficient for completing purchases in the case of consumers who know exactly what they want. Already two sectors in particular — sneakers and ticket sales — have seen a surge in automated shoppers, i.e. bots created with the aim of efficiently purchasing the latest sneakers or the hottest tickets faster than humans. Automated purchasing techniques you’d probably expect to find trading shares on Wall Street are now being used to procure hard-to-find sneakers and games consoles.

尽管网站能够有效地向消费者提供可浏览的信息，但是对于完全知道自己想要的消费者而言，它们在完成购买方面的效率很低。 特别是在运动鞋和票务销售这两个领域，自动化购物者的数量激增，例如，旨在高效地购买最新运动鞋或最热门的票证的机器人比人类更快。 您可能希望在华尔街上找到交易份额的自动购买技术现在正被用来采购难以找到的运动鞋和游戏机。

Shopping bots are the equivalent of being able to elbow your way to the top of every queue for a launch day special. There are several ‘bot’ products to help you purchase the latest limited edition sneakers or tickets that are valuable on the resale market. Although the websites selling these items try to level the playing field by banning the bots, the bot developers constantly try to work around any barriers placed in their way. The cost of a bot such as AIOBOT? $335, with no guarantee it’ll actually manage to get the sneakers you want. It may just “increase your chances”. In March 2019, a $20 mobile app called SupBot was the number one paid App in the App Store as interest in Supreme’s latest sneakers peaked.

购物机器人等同于能够在发布日特别活动中弯腰到每个队列的顶部。 有几种“机器人”产品可以帮助您购买在转售市场上有价值的最新限量版运动鞋或门票。 尽管出售这些商品的网站试图通过禁止漫游器来平整竞争环境，但漫游器开发人员仍在不断努力解决绕过它们的障碍。 像AIOBOT这样的机器人的成本是多少 ？ 335美元，但不能保证它能真正得到您想要的运动鞋。 它可能只是“增加机会”。 2019年3月，随着对Supreme品牌最新运动鞋的兴趣达到顶峰，一款售价20美元的移动应用程序SupBot在App Store中排名第一。

机器人警察？ (Robo-cop?)

Although retailers will continue to try to control automated purchases where they’re clearly not for personal use, regulators are showing an interest in this emerging space. The 2016 BOTS (Better Online Ticket Sales) Act was signed into law by President Obama. It was enacted specifically to prohibit the circumvention of purchase control and ticket allocation measures used by online ticket sellers to ensure equitable consumer access to tickets. A 2017 case from the New York Attorney General saw firms, using bots to buy concert tickets for resale, prosecuted. One company used bots to buy over 1,000 tickets in a minute, a rate of over 16 tickets per second.

尽管零售商将继续尝试控制显然不适合个人使用的自动购买，但监管机构对这一新兴领域表现出了浓厚的兴趣。 奥巴马总统签署了2016年《更好的在线售票(BOTS)法案》。 该法案是专门为禁止规避在线票务销售者使用的购买控制和票务分配措施而制定的，以确保消费者公平地使用车票。 纽约总检察长在2017年的一宗案件中，利用机器人购买转售演唱会门票的公司遭到起诉。 一家公司使用漫游器在一分钟内购买了1,000张票，每秒超过16张票。

有一个API (There’s an API for that)

So what’s the strategic solution — how can retailers manage automated traffic and how can consumers delegate their shopping to software? The answer is for retailers to use Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). APIs are like websites for computers — no fancy graphics or marketing messages — just an interface to exchange commands (orders) with maximum efficiency. They are a programmatic interface offering sanctioned and optimized access to data for automated consumers.

那么，什么是战略解决方案-零售商如何管理自动流量，消费者如何将购物委托给软件？ 答案是让零售商使用应用程序编程接口(API)。 API就像计算机的网站一样，没有花哨的图形或营销信息，而只是用于以最高效率交换命令(订单)的界面。 它们是一个程序化界面，可为自动使用者提供经过批准和优化的数据访问。

Amazon is, perhaps not surprisingly, at the forefront of automated shopping. It has an entire sub-brand, Amazon Dash, designed for automated orders, selling only to devices acting on behalf of humans. Progressive retailers will continue to use tools to protect their websites from abuse, but proactively provide an API for legitimate automated customers.

亚马逊在自动购物的最前沿也许并不奇怪。 它拥有一个完整的子品牌Amazon Dash，专为自动订单而设计，仅销售给代表人类的设备。 渐进式零售商将继续使用工具来保护其网站免受滥用，但会主动为合法的自动客户提供API。

现实世界中的机器人 (Robots in the Real World)

Although I’ve been commenting here about the automation of online shopping, eventually we will see similar trends emerging in the physical world. Increasing automation of shopping will bring entirely new challenges to physical retailers. Already, sidewalk robots such as those from Starship Robots are being used extensively to deliver groceries and food orders, requiring new processes to load the orders — how many stores have a suitable space for robots to await loading?

尽管我在这里一直评论在线购物的自动化，但最终我们将在物理世界中看到类似的趋势。 购物自动化程度的提高将给实体零售商带来全新的挑战。 已经开始广泛使用人行道机器人(例如Starship Robots的人行道机器人)来运送杂货和食品订单，这需要新的流程来加载订单-多少商店有合适的空间供机器人等待加载？

Amazon has a patent on an autonomous robot that a consumer can send to pick up a package instead of having it delivered. But how would I feel at Starbucks if the customer in the queue in front of me is a robot? Will there be separate queues for robots at future Drive Thru restaurants?

亚马逊拥有自动机器人的专利，消费者可以发送专利以自动取回包裹，而不用交付包裹。 但是，如果在我前面排队的顾客是机器人，我对星巴克会有什么样的感觉？ 未来的Drive Thru餐厅将为机器人设置单独的队列吗？

卖给机器人？ (Selling to Robots?)

To prepare for the future, marketers and CMOs need to think how to market not just to people but to the robots who make decisions for them

为了为未来做准备，营销人员和CMO需要思考如何不仅向人们营销，而且向为他们做出决定的机器人营销

Cathy Hackl

凯茜·哈克

If you think the technical challenge of selling to automated consumers is hard, then consider the marketing one — traditional marketing is all about the (human) consumer. It’s never been necessary to put those parentheses in but, in the coming years, consumers will not necessarily be humans with emotions to manipulate. Selling to robots may be a lot harder than simply identifying them.

如果您认为向自动化消费者销售产品的技术挑战很艰巨，那么可以考虑市场营销-传统的市场营销与(人类)消费者有关。 从来没有必要加上这些括号，但是在未来几年中，消费者不一定是充满情感要操纵的人。 向机器人销售可能比仅识别它们困难得多。

与机器人和平共处 (Making Peace with the Robots)

In the ten years between the Star Wars scenes I mentioned, the retailer went from banning robots to be replaced by them. I’m sure there was a difficult interim phase where they grudgingly coexisted but retailers in this galaxy need to find ways to harness the power of automation without falling prey to its darker side. While continuing to manage the shorter term challenges of Covid-19, retailers somehow need to keep an eye on the future and as they reinvent their businesses, prepare to serve a lot more robots.

在我提到的《星球大战》场景之间的十年间，这家零售商从禁止使用机器人代替机器人开始。 我敢肯定，在艰难的过渡阶段中，他们勉强地共存了，但是这个银河系中的零售商需要找到方法来利用自动化的力量，而又不至于让它陷入黑暗。 在继续应对Covid-19的短期挑战的同时，零售商需要以某种方式关注未来，并在重塑自己的业务时，准备服务更多的机器人。

David Kerrigan is an author and speaker on the Future of Retail. His latest book, When Humans Stop Shopping is available exclusively on Amazon.

David Kerrigan是《零售的未来》一书的作者和演讲者。 他的最新著作《 人类停止购物时》仅在亚马逊上有售。