- Amazon’s Buy for Me feature uses AI to order products from other retailers
- Some small businesses found their items listed on Amazon without ever opting in
- Amazon calls the feature an experiment that’s still working out kinks
Amazon’s latest experiment in AI-powered shopping may be helping you find the perfect purchase by running roughshod over third-party businesses. The Shop Direct and Buy for Me features that Amazon began testing last year streamline the process of finding and buying items that Amazon may not have in its inventory.
If you click the Buy for Me button, Amazon’s system uses information pulled from a brand’s public website to place the order on your behalf using your details. From the shopper’s point of view, it feels like you’re just buying something on Amazon. But, from the retailer’s point of view, Amazon just walked into their store uninvited and started ringing up customers.
In recent weeks, online retailers have begun complaining to Amazon and sharing stories on social media about how they were never asked if they wanted to participate. Some say they didn’t even know the program existed until orders began landing in their inboxes from unfamiliar “buyforme.amazon” email addresses. Others say Amazon listed products that were out of stock or never intended for direct-to-consumer sales.
You might not have noticed if you’re just shopping on Amazon. You search for something, see a product that looks legitimate, and the purchase all happens in the background. The aggravation is all on the retailer side of things.
“Products I don’t even have anymore (like fully deleted from the back end) are being sold under this “shop stores directly” section of the app,” one retailer related on Reddit. They use AI images of items that aren’t mine, and authorizing orders to my site for items that are out of stock. I did not opt in to this nor is there an easy way to opt out.”
Amazon has said the AI tool isn’t doing anything untoward since the listings are based on publicly available product and pricing information. The system is also supposed to check that items are in stock and correctly priced before offering them to customers. Should there be an issue, Amazon has an email address listed for merchants to send an opt-out request.
AI shopper sneaking in
Putting the burden of avoiding Amazon’s AI agent on the third-party brands understandably annoys some of those retailers. Plus, it doesn’t help them with the orders already placed. Not to mention the businesses that intentionally stay away from Amazon for financial or marketing reasons might not like being dragged onto the platform by ambitious AI shoppers.
And that’s even before considering accuracy issues like the one described by the Reddit post. AI systems are only as good as the data they ingest, and if Amazon uses outdated or mismatched products and images, it’s the brand getting the order that has to scramble to explain.
There’s an extra element of irony in this situation since Amazon has pushed hard against any external AI agents scraping its own platform for data. It outright blocks bots from Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity. Now, Amazon itself is using AI to scrape other retailers’ sites in the name of convenience.
For shoppers, this contradiction mostly fades into the background. It’s easy to imagine how appealing an AI shopper finding products and comparing prices across the internet might be. But after years of companies scraping public information with little pushback, having the process directly tied to AI purchasing might make the problems more tangible, and Amazon’s AI shoppers may have to start knocking and announcing themselves before they take over the register.
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ESchwartzwrites@gmail.com (Eric Hal Schwartz)
