Amazon’s latest shopping experiment was supposed to make life easier for consumers. Instead, it’s setting off alarm bells among small retailers who say the company quietly pulled their products onto Amazon’s marketplace—without asking first.
At the center of the backlash is “Shop Direct,” a new Amazon feature announced in February that lets shoppers browse products from other brands’ websites without leaving Amazon. Some of those listings include a button labeled “Buy for Me,” an AI-powered agent that can place an order on an external website on the customer’s behalf.
For Amazon, it’s another step toward an AI-driven, everything-in-one-place shopping experience. For some merchants, it feels like a line was crossed.
What Shop Direct and “Buy for Me” actually do
Amazon says Shop Direct is designed to help customers “find any product they want and need,” even if it’s not sold directly on Amazon. The Buy for Me button uses an AI agent to complete purchases on third-party websites, effectively turning Amazon into a universal storefront.
The company has leaned heavily on third-party sellers for years—Amazon says more than 60% of its retail sales now come from independent merchants. Shop Direct is framed as an extension of that ecosystem, only without requiring sellers to formally join Amazon’s marketplace.
Buy for Me is still in testing for a limited number of U.S. users, and Amazon says it doesn’t collect a commission on these purchases. In November, the company said the number of products accessible through Buy for Me had jumped from 65,000 at launch to more than 500,000.
That rapid expansion is part of what’s making retailers nervous.
Retailers say they never opted in
In recent weeks, business owners began sharing complaints on Reddit and Instagram, saying their products appeared on Amazon without their consent—and sometimes with inaccurate information.
“Sounds like a great program until the agentic AI starts selling customers things you don’t have, all while your shop has no idea it’s sending the wrong items to the customer,” Hitchcock Paper, a Virginia-based stationery shop, wrote in an Instagram post in late December.
The company said it discovered it had been swept into the program after receiving orders from a “buyforme.amazon” email address—for a stress ball product it doesn’t even sell.
That wasn’t an isolated case.
‘We were forced to be dropshippers’
Angie Chua, CEO of Bobo Design Studio, said she began receiving Buy for Me orders last week, despite never agreeing to participate. Her company sells stationery and journaling accessories through its own Shopify site and a physical storefront in Palm Springs, California.
After digging through Amazon’s FAQ, Chua contacted the company to request removal. The listings were taken down within days, but the damage, she says, was already done.
“We were forced to be dropshippers on a platform that we have made a conscious decision not to be part of,” Chua told CNBC, referring to a retail model where sellers fulfill orders without holding inventory on the selling platform.
Since then, Chua says more than 180 businesses using Shopify, Squarespace, WooCommerce, Wix, and other platforms have reached out to her, reporting similar experiences.
For many of these sellers, the issue isn’t just visibility—it’s control. They worry about Amazon misrepresenting stock levels, prices, or products, and about being dragged into customer service disputes they never signed up for.
Amazon’s response: public data, opt-out anytime
Amazon pushes back on the idea that it’s acting improperly.
A company spokesperson told CNBC that Shop Direct and Buy for Me help customers discover products not sold on Amazon, “while helping businesses reach new customers and drive incremental sales.” The spokesperson added that the programs have “received positive feedback.”
According to Amazon, product and pricing information is pulled from publicly available data on brands’ websites, and its systems are designed to verify that items are in stock and priced correctly.
Crucially, Amazon says businesses can opt out at any time by emailing [email protected], and that removals happen promptly.
But critics argue that opt-out shouldn’t be the default—especially when Amazon is the one scraping data and initiating transactions.
AI shopping agents and a growing double standard
The controversy lands at an awkward moment for Amazon.
The company has been aggressively investing in agentic AI, including its shopping chatbot Rufus, which gained expanded capabilities in 2024. At the same time, Amazon has blocked dozens of external AI agents from accessing its own site.
In November, Amazon sued Perplexity, alleging the startup’s Comet browser used agents that “concealed” themselves to scrape Amazon’s website and make purchases without approval. Perplexity called the lawsuit a “bully tactic.”
That lawsuit makes the current situation harder for Amazon to defend in the court of public opinion. From the perspective of small merchants, Amazon appears to be doing exactly what it accuses others of doing—only at much larger scale.
The bigger picture: the future of online shopping
Shop Direct and Buy for Me are part of a broader shift in e-commerce. Companies like OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity are racing to build AI tools that let consumers browse and buy products without hopping between websites.
If these agents become mainstream, the traditional boundaries between platforms, marketplaces, and independent stores could blur—or disappear entirely.
For small businesses, that future feels less like innovation and more like loss of autonomy.
For Amazon, the risk isn’t regulatory—at least not yet. It’s reputational. If merchants begin to see the company as a silent middleman rather than a partner, resistance could grow fast.
Buy for Me may still be an “experiment,” as Amazon puts it. But judging by the backlash, it’s already answering a bigger question about AI-powered commerce: just because you can aggregate the internet, does that mean you should?
FAQs
Q. What is Amazon’s Buy for Me feature?
It’s an AI agent that can purchase products from external websites on a shopper’s behalf, without leaving Amazon.
Q. Did retailers agree to be listed on Amazon?
Some say no, claiming their products appeared without consent.
Q. Can businesses opt out of Shop Direct?
Yes. Amazon says businesses can email [email protected] to be removed.
Q. Does Amazon take a commission on Buy for Me purchases?
Amazon says it does not currently collect a commission.
Q. Why is this controversial?
Retailers worry about consent, inaccurate listings, and being forced into a sales model they didn’t choose.
