What's crazy is that the ToS is basically, "allow us, Amazon, to give you algorithmically higher prices- and if you try to circumvent that, you can't buy from us anymore".
I think the arguments for these kinds of near-monopoly companies being true market-driven capitalism seem more and more false.
The idea that Amazon will tell you that you don't even own the right to your own shopping experience tells you everything you need to know. Apple owns your device and Amazon owns the right to show you whatever price/product they want, regarless of your search intent.
How do you know they are standing up for users? From where I'm sitting it looks like they just are trying to protect Alexa Shopping's revenue and/or monopoly.
Ha. Amazon's in-app AI agent is called Rufus. It's incredibly annoying, and they love directing you to an 'Ask Rufus' page where you watch an AI agent not-quite-finish repeating your search terms back at you before you realize you're not actually on your search results page, and then spend some additional time trying to find the link to take you to said search results page.
I assume somewhere there's a team hitting their AI query KPI's due to this, but I really wish they'd shut off a few server racks and save everyone the annoyance instead.
This is not them standing up for the small guy, this is them seeing their actual profit center in retail (advertisement and paid promotion) evaporating if human beings never view their listings.
There's a lot to discuss here - agentic commerce, IMO, is where things are heading. I'm completely convinced that people _want_ to shop using agents. But I want to understand the dynamics at play here: will underlying inventory providers like Amazon give up control and allow agents to use their website?
I find this question very interesting and I want to predict where things will head. On one hand Amazon has a lot to lose by giving up control on how their website is used. Ideally they'd like to control the full end to end experience. What happens to the work they put in their UI? All those endless A/B experiments to make the buttons look perfect?
But on the other hand - this is where things are heading. They can't stop agents from using their website. Not for long. And they have a lot to gain because overall purchases will increase since. They can accept it and create a plugin and try to offer as much "branding" as possible inside it. Or they can completely go against agents and block it.
Then you have to wonder, what really is the moat here? Amazon's logistics and its relations with partners and customers (return policy etc) and the trust it brings. The UI part dissolves and is no longer important.
Maybe they want only an allowed list of agents access to Amazon? Maybe that's where things are heading? They sign deals with maybe just OpenAI (for example)? Its not like Amazon makes their own agent + model. I would hate it things fragment this much.
Anything is possible I suppose... I don't see a path that leads to Amazon actually further controlling the shopping experience inside a browser (where a local agent might have control that they can't reliably detect), short of forcing users into some kind of hardware-based attestation solution or something, but even that is not foolproof.
On one hand Amazon has a lot to lose by giving up control
The everyday person is told to get over it and accept that AI is here so adapt or die. Companies start reducing headcounts to be replaced with AI. So now, a company is having to accept that people are using AI in ways they don't like so they should adapt or die as well too, right? I have no tears to shed if Amazon loses control. Also, it'll be one billionaire battling another billionaire at that point, and I'm kind of okay with that chaos. My world is no longer in my control so fuck 'em is my stance
OK according to game theory, if this is correct, why even put up a fight? You have nothing to gain by fighting. Just accept it and play along. Make your damn MCP. You have 100,000 engineers. Why can't connect Amazon to ChatGPT today? I don't know.
Why can't connect Amazon to ChatGPT today? I don't know.
They just don't want to, because there's no ads. The human gets removed from the loop of visiting the site entirely. And it doesn't say Amazon all over it.
It’s an optimistic view on AI - brings power to the people by mediating all the garbage.
I’ve already used it to handle customer support request calls. I see 30+ minute hold+conversation times and generally the issue gets resolved. That is hugely empowering.
In theory, legislation could help. If there were a pro-consumer movement in government.
Something like declaring agents as representatives of consumers and blocking them violates ADA or just shouldn’t be allowed unless they are abusive.
Lacking that, it seems it’ll be an arms race between offense and defense. At some point, computer control probably wins (running my browser, on my computer, is pretty difficult to detect with reasonable f1 score)
Agents don't click through or interact with ads or get influenced by things like lightning deals, snap promotions, "others who bought X bought Y" and such the same way a human does. This is likely a large portion of the reasoning.
This is just going to get worse before it gets better. More large sites are likely going to block or attempt to block agents because they're so reliant on ads for revenue or exploiting human psychology.
Its a very good point. There are lots of orgs in company's whose whole job is to push shit from all possible points in the website - its probably called "real estate" internally.
These orgs have a lot to lose. But the company? Not so much, they will make it up and more - agents are great to use.
And yes ads are hard to place because agents let you bypass all this and give you a nice filtered view of exactly what you need.
Where do you think the world will head? Maybe Amazon will sell their inventory for agents at a hefty API price?
Yeah subscriptions are another big one. So many profits today are generated by bleeding off customers that just can't deal with the hoops they need to jump through to get unsubscribed. Tasking that to an agent would destroy the whole model.
It’s funny watching all these large tech firms with so much resource commit the sin of innovation: starting with the tech and not the customer + economics of it all.
I get it. It’s tempting and alluring. But no - reimagining something takes a lot more work than sticky taping an agent on.
Impatiently waiting for all this agent stuff to fek off.
There's a difference between automated industrial scale scraping and well-behaved agents acting on the behalf of individuals. Right now there isn't a robust, standard way to distinguish between them, so sites just block known datacenter IPs and throw out the baby with the bathwater.
That's a main advantage of running your own local claw setup using your residential connection -- difficult/impossible to block.
That said, eventually a site blocking all agents would be like blocking all search engines, something that hurts more than it helps as agentic interactions become "the norm". WebMCP or similar support will likely be a basic expectation at some point.
It's worse than that, they will block all agents and specifically make exceptions for maybe 2 search engines per country. Thereby strengthening existing players and weakening all incumbants.
Cloudflare for instance does allow indexing by Google and Bing I think by default, but does challenge other bots. Double check me I am speaking from memory.
It is a money grab from Amazon I'm sure. They want to make a deal with meta to get paid for access. Maybe also worried about liability I imagine on accidental unauthorized purchases?
Returns cost money and if an agent generates more returns and hitting the margins or seller retention then that's something that's likely going to get increased scrutiny.
The generally quoted return rate is 5% to 15% (and it varies by category). If Muse identified purchases are generating returns of 10% to 30%, then amazon is probably going to crack down on it. (Amazon Sellers pay from 30% to 50% for customer returns from their own pockets. https://medium.com/@myrealprofit/how-much-do-refunds-really-... )
Amazon cant hold this off for the long run, nobody wants to scroll through a list of two hundred near identical packages of toilet paper. Agents will intermediate, and they will remove demand for low value items
Theh will probably consolidate more. Less choices even if they are worse is also easier for llms to do. Just look at how they pick technologies to use. Almost always the same for a given model.
I would hate it if every company comes up with their own agent and only their agent is allowed to access the API. EU do your thing instead of cookie banners plz.
that's what they're going to do, trying to get $20 out of the average person is terrible compared to giving away your product for free and getting an endless supply of metadata
This is already solved by the existence of hundreds of other stores that actually do some level of filtering and curation of products. I don't know why we want to play some cat and mouse game of getting an LLM to find the best toilet paper on Amazon versus just finding a reliable source of toilet paper to begin with.
I'm really enjoying muse+have used it to make some amazon orders. This is a big bummer to me, in future I'll find an alternative to amazon OR find an alternative to muse.
No matter what I'll continue to use some AI agent and some shopping provider.
Yeah I experimented with shopping and found it was really tedious jumping through the 2FA and other bot check hoops every third click. Agree it's a huge convenience if it would work though.
I’ve been purchasing more and more stuff from Walmart (good interaction with ChatGPT) and other stores.
It’s clear why Amazon is doing this from a business perspective, but this is a stop gap for them. They will need figure out a better plan for people using their agents.
I'm still annoyed that Amazon stopped sending order details in emails so that gmail can't show me when specific items are arriving. More recently 'getsauce.com' started to do the same thing, hiding order details behind an opaque link to their website. Every player in tech wants to force you to interact with their platforms purely on their own terms, to the detriment of the users.
We should blame Google for this, and not Amazon. Google added this data from your email to your advertisement profile and used it to increase their own revenue.
I ask this in every thread on muse / OpenClaw / whatever platform. I’ve never gotten a clear answer beyond “yeah me too”:
Does anyone have any meaningful use cases that have actually improved your life in some measurable way?
I’ve tried hard and beyond filling out some tedious forms in about the same time and energy as just doing it myself, I’ve not personally. I’ve tried hard. So I figure it’s probably my lack of creativity given the prevalence of fans. But every time I ask, I get no meaningful responses. So it makes me wonder if all the fans are just product managers on those products?
Why is it even Meta's job to announce that an AI agent is being used? Is there a law that actually forces them to make that known?
Otherwise people could just use local agents on their own machine controlling their existing browser/logins as they likely already do, without issues.
I guess it’s more that Amazon’s server queries for an answer and intentionally obfuscating a bad one comes across as lying.
What do you mean? Declaring the agent is transparency. You should be congratulating Meta for their rare good deed.
What's crazy is that the ToS is basically, "allow us, Amazon, to give you algorithmically higher prices- and if you try to circumvent that, you can't buy from us anymore".
I think the arguments for these kinds of near-monopoly companies being true market-driven capitalism seem more and more false.
The idea that Amazon will tell you that you don't even own the right to your own shopping experience tells you everything you need to know. Apple owns your device and Amazon owns the right to show you whatever price/product they want, regarless of your search intent.
Thank you Amazon for standing up for everyman Rufus. We don't need AI agent from evil ad giants.
How do you know they are standing up for users? From where I'm sitting it looks like they just are trying to protect Alexa Shopping's revenue and/or monopoly.
Amazon: famously not evil ad giant.
I assume it was sarcasm, Rufus is an Amazon AI product.
And there go my Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure memories. George Carlin's Rufus was a "good 'un."
Ha. Amazon's in-app AI agent is called Rufus. It's incredibly annoying, and they love directing you to an 'Ask Rufus' page where you watch an AI agent not-quite-finish repeating your search terms back at you before you realize you're not actually on your search results page, and then spend some additional time trying to find the link to take you to said search results page.
I assume somewhere there's a team hitting their AI query KPI's due to this, but I really wish they'd shut off a few server racks and save everyone the annoyance instead.
There was internal JIRA ticket to rename Rufus -> Doofus as to dramatically improve performance and sentiment among shoppers on Amazon site.
We should see this improved version soon.
This is not them standing up for the small guy, this is them seeing their actual profit center in retail (advertisement and paid promotion) evaporating if human beings never view their listings.
There's a lot to discuss here - agentic commerce, IMO, is where things are heading. I'm completely convinced that people _want_ to shop using agents. But I want to understand the dynamics at play here: will underlying inventory providers like Amazon give up control and allow agents to use their website?
I find this question very interesting and I want to predict where things will head. On one hand Amazon has a lot to lose by giving up control on how their website is used. Ideally they'd like to control the full end to end experience. What happens to the work they put in their UI? All those endless A/B experiments to make the buttons look perfect?
But on the other hand - this is where things are heading. They can't stop agents from using their website. Not for long. And they have a lot to gain because overall purchases will increase since. They can accept it and create a plugin and try to offer as much "branding" as possible inside it. Or they can completely go against agents and block it.
Then you have to wonder, what really is the moat here? Amazon's logistics and its relations with partners and customers (return policy etc) and the trust it brings. The UI part dissolves and is no longer important.
Maybe they want only an allowed list of agents access to Amazon? Maybe that's where things are heading? They sign deals with maybe just OpenAI (for example)? Its not like Amazon makes their own agent + model. I would hate it things fragment this much.
Anything is possible I suppose... I don't see a path that leads to Amazon actually further controlling the shopping experience inside a browser (where a local agent might have control that they can't reliably detect), short of forcing users into some kind of hardware-based attestation solution or something, but even that is not foolproof.
The everyday person is told to get over it and accept that AI is here so adapt or die. Companies start reducing headcounts to be replaced with AI. So now, a company is having to accept that people are using AI in ways they don't like so they should adapt or die as well too, right? I have no tears to shed if Amazon loses control. Also, it'll be one billionaire battling another billionaire at that point, and I'm kind of okay with that chaos. My world is no longer in my control so fuck 'em is my stance
OK according to game theory, if this is correct, why even put up a fight? You have nothing to gain by fighting. Just accept it and play along. Make your damn MCP. You have 100,000 engineers. Why can't connect Amazon to ChatGPT today? I don't know.
They just don't want to, because there's no ads. The human gets removed from the loop of visiting the site entirely. And it doesn't say Amazon all over it.
It’s an optimistic view on AI - brings power to the people by mediating all the garbage.
I’ve already used it to handle customer support request calls. I see 30+ minute hold+conversation times and generally the issue gets resolved. That is hugely empowering.
In theory, legislation could help. If there were a pro-consumer movement in government.
Something like declaring agents as representatives of consumers and blocking them violates ADA or just shouldn’t be allowed unless they are abusive.
Lacking that, it seems it’ll be an arms race between offense and defense. At some point, computer control probably wins (running my browser, on my computer, is pretty difficult to detect with reasonable f1 score)
Agents don't click through or interact with ads or get influenced by things like lightning deals, snap promotions, "others who bought X bought Y" and such the same way a human does. This is likely a large portion of the reasoning.
This is just going to get worse before it gets better. More large sites are likely going to block or attempt to block agents because they're so reliant on ads for revenue or exploiting human psychology.
Its a very good point. There are lots of orgs in company's whose whole job is to push shit from all possible points in the website - its probably called "real estate" internally.
These orgs have a lot to lose. But the company? Not so much, they will make it up and more - agents are great to use.
And yes ads are hard to place because agents let you bypass all this and give you a nice filtered view of exactly what you need.
Where do you think the world will head? Maybe Amazon will sell their inventory for agents at a hefty API price?
Yeah subscriptions are another big one. So many profits today are generated by bleeding off customers that just can't deal with the hoops they need to jump through to get unsubscribed. Tasking that to an agent would destroy the whole model.
You’re deluded if you think it’s as an easy as ‘send agent task, hey Presto - done’.
It’s funny watching all these large tech firms with so much resource commit the sin of innovation: starting with the tech and not the customer + economics of it all.
I get it. It’s tempting and alluring. But no - reimagining something takes a lot more work than sticky taping an agent on. Impatiently waiting for all this agent stuff to fek off.
its not going anywhere. Agents are the future.
There's a difference between automated industrial scale scraping and well-behaved agents acting on the behalf of individuals. Right now there isn't a robust, standard way to distinguish between them, so sites just block known datacenter IPs and throw out the baby with the bathwater.
That's a main advantage of running your own local claw setup using your residential connection -- difficult/impossible to block.
That said, eventually a site blocking all agents would be like blocking all search engines, something that hurts more than it helps as agentic interactions become "the norm". WebMCP or similar support will likely be a basic expectation at some point.
There is, it’s called an API
It's worse than that, they will block all agents and specifically make exceptions for maybe 2 search engines per country. Thereby strengthening existing players and weakening all incumbants.
Cloudflare for instance does allow indexing by Google and Bing I think by default, but does challenge other bots. Double check me I am speaking from memory.
https://aws.amazon.com/waf/features/bot-control/
It is a money grab from Amazon I'm sure. They want to make a deal with meta to get paid for access. Maybe also worried about liability I imagine on accidental unauthorized purchases?
Returns cost money and if an agent generates more returns and hitting the margins or seller retention then that's something that's likely going to get increased scrutiny.
The generally quoted return rate is 5% to 15% (and it varies by category). If Muse identified purchases are generating returns of 10% to 30%, then amazon is probably going to crack down on it. (Amazon Sellers pay from 30% to 50% for customer returns from their own pockets. https://medium.com/@myrealprofit/how-much-do-refunds-really-... )
Amazon cant hold this off for the long run, nobody wants to scroll through a list of two hundred near identical packages of toilet paper. Agents will intermediate, and they will remove demand for low value items
Theh will probably consolidate more. Less choices even if they are worse is also easier for llms to do. Just look at how they pick technologies to use. Almost always the same for a given model.
Amazon is just trying to get you to use their agent, so they're not anti-agent, just anti-someone-else's
I would hate it if every company comes up with their own agent and only their agent is allowed to access the API. EU do your thing instead of cookie banners plz.
that's what they're going to do, trying to get $20 out of the average person is terrible compared to giving away your product for free and getting an endless supply of metadata
This is already solved by the existence of hundreds of other stores that actually do some level of filtering and curation of products. I don't know why we want to play some cat and mouse game of getting an LLM to find the best toilet paper on Amazon versus just finding a reliable source of toilet paper to begin with.
I'm really enjoying muse+have used it to make some amazon orders. This is a big bummer to me, in future I'll find an alternative to amazon OR find an alternative to muse.
No matter what I'll continue to use some AI agent and some shopping provider.
Yeah I experimented with shopping and found it was really tedious jumping through the 2FA and other bot check hoops every third click. Agree it's a huge convenience if it would work though.
I’ve been purchasing more and more stuff from Walmart (good interaction with ChatGPT) and other stores.
It’s clear why Amazon is doing this from a business perspective, but this is a stop gap for them. They will need figure out a better plan for people using their agents.
I'm still annoyed that Amazon stopped sending order details in emails so that gmail can't show me when specific items are arriving. More recently 'getsauce.com' started to do the same thing, hiding order details behind an opaque link to their website. Every player in tech wants to force you to interact with their platforms purely on their own terms, to the detriment of the users.
We should blame Google for this, and not Amazon. Google added this data from your email to your advertisement profile and used it to increase their own revenue.
This is why the chrome driver plugin and similar tools are so important. The site shouldn't know or care if its me or my agent working on my behalf.
I ask this in every thread on muse / OpenClaw / whatever platform. I’ve never gotten a clear answer beyond “yeah me too”:
Does anyone have any meaningful use cases that have actually improved your life in some measurable way?
I’ve tried hard and beyond filling out some tedious forms in about the same time and energy as just doing it myself, I’ve not personally. I’ve tried hard. So I figure it’s probably my lack of creativity given the prevalence of fans. But every time I ask, I get no meaningful responses. So it makes me wonder if all the fans are just product managers on those products?
I made appointment with my doctor and haircut all using chatgpt. Also bought some stuff on a local website.
I hate having to work through random UI. I just wanna get stuff done.