I’ve played around a bunch with ChatGPT Agent, including getting it to buy movie tickets for a date night with my wife. But, I haven’t used it to buy much else online as I tend to limit my e-commerce shopping to gifts I’ve obsessively researched ahead of time. But I’d seen reports that Amazon had put a blanket ban on AI agents shopping on its platform, so I decided to test it out by asking ChatGPT Agent to go on Amazon and buy some Purina dental chews for my new puppy.
Simply, the agent wasn’t able to do anything on Amazon at all. It ran into the “503 error” page, amusingly accompanied by a picture of a dog. Every attempt to get around the error page led to the same error page, albeit with different canines.
Finally, in its most apologetic tone, ChatGPT Agent admitted that it couldn’t complete the task because “network restrictions [were] making interactions with Amazon impossible.”
ChatGPT Agent is designed to do online shopping. It can browse websites, click buttons, and initiate checkouts with your permission. Just to test it, I asked it to buy the same treats at PetSmart, and it had no problem navigating the online store and multi-step checkout process. But when it comes to Amazon, it’s not a matter of patience. It’s a matter of Amazon not wanting it there.
No agents at Amazon
According to multiple reports, Amazon has updated its code to prevent not just ChatGPT’s shopping agent, but also Google Gemini. They’ve modified their robots.txt file to disallow agents, so they can’t even get in, let alone buy anything.
It’s hard to blame Amazon for wanting to keep third-party agents away. Without human oversight, Amazon loses control over what you see and the power to push you toward certain brands or display ads. The company has invested billions of dollars to become the starting point for online shopping. No wonder they don’t want ChatGPT or Gemini to become the middleman.
Of course, that makes things tricky for an AI developer bragging about their automated shopper. Those agents become much less useful if you can’t say, “Hey ChatGPT, order me toothpaste,” but instead have to say, “Hey ChatGPT, find me toothpaste on the few sites that allow you to operate, prepare a shopping cart, then ask me to complete the order manually like it’s 2005.”
Unless, of course, a deal is struck between Amazon and OpenAI or Google. But if Amazon’s rumored plans for its own shopping agent come to fruition, it’s hard to imagine what that deal would look like. The shape of AI-powered ecommerce is far from set, but if every big retailer builds its own walled-off shopping agent, we’re going to end up with a balkanized ecosystem of competing bots, like having a browser for every tab you want to open.
If you’re looking for a silver lining, smaller businesses might be the ones to benefit. Amazon and Shopify have the clout to resist AI agents, but smaller online retailers might be far more open to collaboration. If you’re running a niche site and want to make it easier for people to shop through ChatGPT or Gemini, why not welcome the agents?
It might be the new SEO, but instead of optimizing for search engines, you’d optimize for autonomous agents that do the shopping for their users. Get in early, and you might grab a slice of the future Amazon is trying to fence off.
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erichs211@gmail.com (Eric Hal Schwartz)
