Also subscriber amount changes a lot depending the product and the way you build it. At one point i worked in a company who got over 80% of people buying from them to subscribe to mailing list and average unsubscribe per email was under 2%.
Another point that can skew the numbers a lot is the products them self. Are you selling single high price products or multiple different knick knacks. Also you can calculate that this percentage of your customers add additional products to their shopping cart when they are in your enviroment. If you have enough movement in the site you can use the law of big numbers to calculate excatly how much revenue you have lost. At that point its not "potential revenue" but number based fact.
And you have lost the ability to connect with the customer. As the ai agent is the one making the purchase you dont get any data from the customer and you cant ask for the marketing permissions to reach them with. So its impossible to make personalised ads and you have no way to contact the customer after the first delivery. Again, these are things you can calculate.
About the legality of using bots or ai agents. Thats something legistlation has not been able to keep up, and what you said about them not breaking tos etc is right, but i want to specify that this discussion started and still is about is it possible to put price on "building a relationship with a customer" and it most definedly is. Any company that is even somewhat professional will know the average CLV of their audience and most companies can show how their activation actions effect that.
Edit;
As a after tought. You could ask during the discovery what times the AI agent has been showing your products in the inventory and compare those times with your average traffic on your site and point out any possible irregulaties.
And the i already told you how to calculate how much traffic and sales you have lost. (The original thing what you claimed to be impossible to calculate) If amazon would choose they could respond with that argument. Looking back at most larger piracy law cases nobody has been able to defend them selfs "those guys would not have bought the movie if we would not had let them torrent it"
"building a relationship with your customers" has no quantifiable and measurable value which can be proven in court
With utm tags in weekly news letters etc. you can pretty easily calculate traffic coming to your site and conversion rates of how many people make purchases after clicking links.
And even without utm tags you can show spikes in purchases and traffic after sending emails.
It would be easy to show data:
This many people go to my site
This % of those people subscribe to my mailing list.
This many % of people buy after receiving the email.
Average purchase is xx$.
This many people never went to my site because amazon.
If train is late its not because of "few leafs".
Wet, smushed leafs pack on the rails like film that slows down both acceleration and braking, because there is not friction, but there needs to be shit ton of them.
Ice effects supricingly little to acceleration/braking. Trains are so heavy that the pressure on the tracks melts the ice allmost instantly. Bigger problem is the snow, that starts to pack on parts of the train.
Id imagine big part why trains in Sweden and Finland stay on time is because train companies know trains move slower in certain times so they adjust the schedule accordingly.
Most modern cars lock the doors when going faster than the walking speed so in case of crash the doors are more unlikely to fly open. Similary most modern cars unlock the doors after crash so passengers can get out from the car. Tesla included.
In case the door fails to unlock there usually are way to manualy open the locks, but Tesla has made it to a treasure hunt with multiple stages, hidden paths and there is a wizard at the end asking quizzes before you can open the door. So in the end Musk can say there is a way to mechanically open the doors, because there is. Its just not convinient or safe.
These are big reason for the push back also. Companies have spend hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars building the infrastructure for fossil fuels and they will fight for keeping those investments alive.
Another thing slowing down clean energy is that wind and solarpower arent yet as reliable as coal power. Cities and nations can calculate how much coal or fossil fuel they need to keep lights on and stockpile fossile fuels for future use easily and they work even if there is no wind or sky is cloudy.
Hydroelectric is renewable and quite reliable, but its not neccessarilly good for enviroment either. Geothermal would be great, but its really expensive and its not possible to harvest everywhere in the world.
My personal opinion is that nuclear power with auxilary solar, wind and hydroelectrics would be best compination. Especially since battery technology is currently taking big leap with solid state batteries and it seems we might soon have electric vechicles with reasonable range. Even more so if the new batteries are as safe as manufactorers claim and in case of accident there is less of an risk of the unholy hellfire batteryfires are currently.
Well the cant was more in the terms of "you cant have a viable business" than "its physically impossible". I mean in a theory it would be possible to create moonbase and power it up with AA-batteries, but its just not something that can be done.
Also with batteries you did not say anything about what would happen to the empty ones. There would be logistical hurdle to overcome with those. Even the cheapest industrial sized battery would still be leagues more expensive than the sheetmetal used to transport oil.
Again, not talking trying to defend fossilfuels. Just making points why big companies are fighting against the change.
What happens to those expensive batteries containing rare-earthminerals after whom ever has used them? Do you just let them have those or do you buy them back and transport them empty or what?
Converting energy to create hydrogen is fairly inefficient and transporting it need lot of preparations and the buyer has to have magnitudes more expensive equipment to use it limiting the markets where to sell it.
Im not advocating for fossil fuels here. Im just stating why its more convinient for big oil to sell easily transportable oil barrels that can be packed in to basically free steel sheets or plastics and are easy to redirect towards whom ever pays the best.
How do you propose you make those power cables from lets say USA to Australia? And if suddenly some other country wants to make a better deal for that energy you cant just redirect those cables to lets say Italy.
Or with batteries. What happens to those expensive batteries containing rare-earthminerals after whom ever has used them? Do you just let them have those or do you buy them back and transport them empty or what?
Im not advocating for fossil fuels here. Im just stating why its more convinient for big oil to sell easily transportable oil barrels that can be packed in to basically free steel sheets or plastics and are easy to redirect towards whom ever pays the best.
Also you can transport and sell a barrel of oil to anywhere on the planet, but you cant bottle wind or solar energy and transport it outside of your powergrid.
Every now and then there are headlines how some restaurant made their immigrant chefs work absurd work days with very little pay, or how some construction workers had been told they cant leave the site at all and they are made to live in shipping containers etc etc.
Prostitution has deep connection to human trafficing and using narcotics to controll the workers with addiction, so its not like every professional of love would magically be saved in an instant.
My knowledge is not really on date but as far as i know we still have no battery system good enough for long term electricity storing and what we are using right now are used for short term energy peaks, not storing the energy in summer so we could use it on the winter.
Yes we have HVDC, but it has its problems when electricity is coming from multiple smaller plants, especially when there production and demand is not even. Basically i mean that if there is side of a country that is not producing anything and if there is a other side that is overproducing, the current system we have, is not able to smooth that out. Granted it is a problem that could be solved with tossing money and engineers at it.
I love hating epic just as much as anybody else, but those exclusivity deals are not necessary just bribing the devs.
The first Hades game would have been much smaller in scope and features, without epic funding them and helping them implementing something like EOS, the game would be definedly worse than it is.
Remedy has also stated they could not make Alan Wake 2 without Epics funding. People often say the Epic exclusivity ruined its salea, but realistically without it there would not be a game.
But even so, i think them suing Steam is a asshole move.
Id love if world could just ditch the fossil fuels and move to renewals, but it often seems people does not account how hard it is to make nation wide electric grid from wind and solar.
I live in a part of the world where during the winter when the electricity demand is on its highest, there are only few hours of sunlight per day at best.
And wind is wind. There is sometimes too much of it so the windmills are not safe to run and sometimes there are too little to generate enough electricity.
Even if there would be enough wind and solafarms to in theory to run the whole country, we have no real means to tranfer the electricity for long distances and we dont have any way to store the generated electricity long term, so it could be used at the times when farms are not producing enough.
Oil and coal on the other hand are easy to stockpile and transfer if needed and the plants can be build almost anywhere. Also the tech is simple enough, so replacement parts are fairly easy to make, so those can be repaired and jury rigged even if there would be situation where trade would halt. I get why some countries want to make sure they have security of electricity supply.
Hopefully the new generations of solid state batteries will live to the hype and help with the transfer and long term storage problems renevables currently have.
I think for an individual, the closest equivalent to what science is for society is science...