The democratizing march of technology. Once the exclusive domain of tech giants, now even small businesses can integrate this service and attempt to sell fridges to customers who have recently bought a fridge.
What are you talking about? You just searched for an SNL skit. Are you telling me you don't want to now watch every single SNL episode ever made as well as join an improv troupe?!
That was Interest-based advertising several years ago (or at least the last time I surged around without an ad blocker). I found it ham-fisted. However - the interesting thing that comes out of this is that if someone buys, say, chocolate and marshmallows, there’s a reasonable chance they want to buy graham crackers. So why not offer them graham crackers at checkout if it’s not in their cart?
More insidiously - why not offer a higher price on graham crackers if they seek them out on their own? They’ve already made a decision.
To take it a bit further, you'd probably want to mark down the checkout suggestion to not only make it look better, but also because you're only suggesting a very limited amount of options, once customers are used to trusting the checkout suggestions for a good deal, you introduce higher-margin and/or promoted products.
More or less the same tactic Amazon used for search results: Return useful/functional results for a few years to train you users to trust what is near the top, then start putting promoted products at or near the top and generally ordering the search by what increases your revenue the most, rather than for any user-oriented goal, AKA "sort by relevance".
Also the same thing Amazon did with prices in general, get people used to thinking you're the market with the best price/deal, etc.
Amazon got massive backlash in 2001 for messing with prices during shopping experience. Some companies do it, but customers and news media hate being toyed with, and loss aversion bias means they tolerate "wait! Before you go!" discounts but not price increases.
