Anyone know why Amazon wants AI agents to stop making purchases?
I used to make Amazon purchases through ChatGPT Agent before Amazon blocked them. I could take a picture of a wrapper and say "buy a new one on Amazon" and it would handle the whole process. Awesome. I actually started shopping at other retailers when Amazon blocked their agent.
One theory I have is that an AI agent can more efficiently price-compare the dozens of different listings of the same item and order the cheapest, cutting into Amazon's margins.
> Anyone know why Amazon wants AI agents to stop making purchasess
For the same reasons Amazon intentionally removed their search box's ability to require or exclude terms and target phrases. More efficient, faster searches for YOU reduces their opportunities to shovel more "not what you're looking for right now" in front of your eyeballs to increase impulse sales of adjacent goods.
> Anyone know why Amazon wants AI agents to stop making purchases?
Because it bypasses their efforts to promote preferred products in the short term and, more importantly, in the long term someone else becoming the front door to purchasing also enables that actor to commodify Amazon the same way Amazon commodifies other sellers, and before long to cut out Amazon as a middleman entirely and become the marketplace where buyers purchase from a diverse array of functionally anonymous, interchangeable sellers.
It would very easily allow someone to undermine their business. If you could shop at Walmart, by walking into Target it would be very easy for Target to say "here is the same item for $0.01 less"
If people find a benefit from using AI to shop on Amazon at scale then there's really no reason to keep Amazon in the loop at all. Especially for products that are high margin.
Amazon's strategy is based more on fast, fairly reliable delivery of an enormous range of products rather than being the cheapest. Whenever I need anything I can be pretty sure that Amazon will have it in stock and deliver it within a couple days. Sure they're occasionally out of stock or they screw up deliveries but Target isn't any better. So it's worth keeping a Prime membership and Amazon remains the default option.
Simplest possibility: agent-sourced purchases are incorrect and returned at a notably higher rate, perhaps even enough to be unprofitable as a category.
I’m sure it’s for many reasons but I guarantee that one is that they don’t get the ancillary sales. Eg I go to Amazon looking for socks, they have lots of time to show me other things I might buy. Maybe some other customers who bought socks liked these shoes etc.
If an agent can go and buy exactly and only the thing I need that is going to crush those other sales.
This is the correct take. I was at Amazon not long ago and their Ads business is now absolutely massive and growing. Anything that takes away from that is bad news for their growth numbers.
Let's hope they will still allow me to use Kagi to search for the product I want to buy.
The official Amazon search is so bad and deliberately pushes "promoted" or overly expensive products to the top that I would say it's only a matter of time until someone reverses the enshittification by building a 3rd party Amazon client. And it looks like that's precisely what Perplexity did here: They offer an agent that works for you, not for Amazon. And, predictably, Amazon hates it. It reduces their power to strong-arm brands into purchasing advertisements for their own product names.
https://archive.ph/nGmOJ
Anyone know why Amazon wants AI agents to stop making purchases?
I used to make Amazon purchases through ChatGPT Agent before Amazon blocked them. I could take a picture of a wrapper and say "buy a new one on Amazon" and it would handle the whole process. Awesome. I actually started shopping at other retailers when Amazon blocked their agent.
One theory I have is that an AI agent can more efficiently price-compare the dozens of different listings of the same item and order the cheapest, cutting into Amazon's margins.
> Anyone know why Amazon wants AI agents to stop making purchasess
For the same reasons Amazon intentionally removed their search box's ability to require or exclude terms and target phrases. More efficient, faster searches for YOU reduces their opportunities to shovel more "not what you're looking for right now" in front of your eyeballs to increase impulse sales of adjacent goods.
> Anyone know why Amazon wants AI agents to stop making purchases?
Because it bypasses their efforts to promote preferred products in the short term and, more importantly, in the long term someone else becoming the front door to purchasing also enables that actor to commodify Amazon the same way Amazon commodifies other sellers, and before long to cut out Amazon as a middleman entirely and become the marketplace where buyers purchase from a diverse array of functionally anonymous, interchangeable sellers.
It would very easily allow someone to undermine their business. If you could shop at Walmart, by walking into Target it would be very easy for Target to say "here is the same item for $0.01 less"
If people find a benefit from using AI to shop on Amazon at scale then there's really no reason to keep Amazon in the loop at all. Especially for products that are high margin.
Amazon's strategy is based more on fast, fairly reliable delivery of an enormous range of products rather than being the cheapest. Whenever I need anything I can be pretty sure that Amazon will have it in stock and deliver it within a couple days. Sure they're occasionally out of stock or they screw up deliveries but Target isn't any better. So it's worth keeping a Prime membership and Amazon remains the default option.
Simplest possibility: agent-sourced purchases are incorrect and returned at a notably higher rate, perhaps even enough to be unprofitable as a category.
I’m sure it’s for many reasons but I guarantee that one is that they don’t get the ancillary sales. Eg I go to Amazon looking for socks, they have lots of time to show me other things I might buy. Maybe some other customers who bought socks liked these shoes etc.
If an agent can go and buy exactly and only the thing I need that is going to crush those other sales.
Probably because it's taking away from their ads/sponsored business?
This is the correct take. I was at Amazon not long ago and their Ads business is now absolutely massive and growing. Anything that takes away from that is bad news for their growth numbers.
You never want to lose direct contact with your customers. Having someone insert themselves between you and the customer is a recipe for disaster.
Let's hope they will still allow me to use Kagi to search for the product I want to buy.
The official Amazon search is so bad and deliberately pushes "promoted" or overly expensive products to the top that I would say it's only a matter of time until someone reverses the enshittification by building a 3rd party Amazon client. And it looks like that's precisely what Perplexity did here: They offer an agent that works for you, not for Amazon. And, predictably, Amazon hates it. It reduces their power to strong-arm brands into purchasing advertisements for their own product names.
Searching with site:amazon.com has always been the only useful way to find the thing you actually wanted.
Well, that is if you use a real, functional search engine
Because Amazon has Rufus in beta which they want to push going forward?
The original source is being discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45814846
Pot has words with kettle.
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