Amazon may have introduced agentic AI shopping features, but third-party merchants are not that excited about it.
Amazon’s newest experimental AI-driven shopping tools, including the “Shop Direct” feature and the “Buy For Me” AI agent, have triggered significant criticism after small retailers discovered their products listed and sold on Amazon without their consent, raising a firestorm of concerns about transparency, consent, and seller rights.
The controversy centers on Amazon’s efforts to expand its e-commerce ecosystem by using AI to identify products not available on its marketplace, then either link to them from external retailers’ sites (via Shop Direct) or duplicate the listings directly on Amazon and enable automatic agentic purchases through Buy For Me. These tools automatically pull product names, prices, images, and stock information from publicly available brand websites and insert them into Amazon’s shopping interface. The problem with this neat AI shopping scheme is that it often happens without any prior notice to the merchants whose goods appear and are ordered via Amazon’s beta-testing tools.
SMB merchants say the rollout caught many of them completely off guard. Several independent brands that have deliberately avoided selling through Amazon found their catalogs listed on the platform after customers placed orders through the Buy For Me feature. Many sellers only discovered the situation after seeing orders arrive from anonymous Amazon-associated email addresses or hearing from customers confused by incorrect product details.
Besides objections to unauthorized listings themselves, retailers also reported a range of issues stemming from these automated sales. Some described inaccurate product descriptions or images, such as items showing photos unrelated to the actual merchandise, while others complained that products marked as available on Amazon were actually out of stock on their own websites. These errors in AI-assisted shopping scenarios have led to customer complaints, refund requests, and additional fulfillment headaches for brands that had not agreed to participate in Amazon’s initiative in the first place.
Amazon has responded to the backlash by emphasizing that Shop Direct and Buy For Me are experimental programs meant to help customers discover products and drive incremental exposure for businesses, ensuring that merchants can opt out by contacting a designated email address. The company says the tools have received positive feedback overall and that participation is voluntary in theory.
However, critics argue that Amazon’s opt-out process fails to address deeper concerns about consent and control, since brands are effectively enrolled by default without clear notification or prior agreement. Additionally, unresolved issues remain around who owns the customer relationship, as sellers do not receive customer contact information for orders generated through these AI tools, making it difficult to build loyalty or manage post-sale service.
Some business owners have also raised potential legal and contractual issues, noting that unauthorized listings could violate intellectual property agreements or supplier contracts that prohibit sales through Amazon. Combined with fears about brand dilution and inaccurate representation, these gaps in Amazon’s current policies suggest the backlash could continue unless the company revises how consent, transparency and merchant control are handled in its evolving AI shopping ecosystem.
The controvercy and shortcomings of these experimental AI e-commerce purchases also underscore consumer scepticism about trusting AI agents with their shopping at the present stage of AI economy.
