Amazon Buy for Me Sparks Merchant Backlash | Fast Five Shorts

Small online merchants are upset after discovering their products were featured on Amazon through the Buy for Me AI feature without their permission, with brands forced to opt out after the fact.

According to modern retail, Amazon's Buy for Me feature, which uses agentic AI capabilities to allow customers to purchase products from third party websites without leaving Amazon's app or site, is causing, let's just call it a consternation.

Multiple business owners discovered that their entire Shopify catalogs were available on Amazon.com, without their knowledge or consent.

Brands say Amazon's opt out policy risks damaging their reputations and hurting customer experience.

Some received orders for products that were out of stock or no longer existed on their websites.

One founder was even concerned that Buy for Me could expose her wholesale pricing and create tax liability issues since Amazon pulled products from her password protected wholesale section.

Holy crap.

Amazon said businesses can opt out by emailing brand directmazon.com and stated they've quote, received positive feedback on these programs, end quote.

Though many merchants disagree.

And what do you think about Amazon's Buy for Me approach of opting merchants into agentic AI by default?

I think it's a reality of how brands are going to have to prepare for where and how they show up online and in these agents.

Um, unfortunately it's, it's not ideal, but this is what all the agents are going to continue to do.

Whether it's Amazon's Buy for Me agent, whether it's OpenAI, whether it's Google like this is a point that I think needs to be heavily emphasized within brands and a major focus of the resources within brands is how are you thinking about making sure that you aren't, you know, you're not putting your business in a precarious position by not having your data organized and clean and so that things like your password protected wholesale pricing is not exposed.

So I think this is, this is just again proving that most that brands need still need to pay attention to this because it is going to be a channel that your retailers are or sorry, customers are going to be coming from and you have to make sure that, that your foundation is in order at your own company to make sure that as these agents continue to scrape data from your site, you're prepared.

That said, I do think because Amazon is a retailer and not just an open AI or a Gemini that doesn't have their own storefront, I think that Amazon needs to make this even easier for brands to opt out of.

I think that it needs to be as clear as the unsubscribe on a Marketing email.

I think that having somebody have to email a brand site and do all these things, like, I think it has to be more, more front and center for brands.

And I think that that should be true also across other, other search engines down the road, but especially for Amazon because they're a retailer.

But that's, that's my hot take.

Chris, what do you think?

Yeah, I don't, I don't think my takes, I don't think my take's inherently that different.

I'd add a few pieces to it.

I think, I think this headline's a little salacious as I sit back here and think about it, you know, a day after the, picking it for this week's show.

But I think, I think the, the above, the above board thing to do, right, and the above board thing to do is to ask the, ask the brands to opt in, right?

Yeah, but opt out, is it unethical?

I don't know.

Is it that fundamentally different from having a personal assistant buy something for you in today's day and age of where tech is going?

Not really.

And that's the point you're making with like, you're not going to stop this.

Like it's going to come.

So.

And my hunch is, my hunch is Amazon is watching the vendors who are recording sales and then gauging the opt out rates versus those staying in the program to understand how they should approach this.

Because while the headline is catchy, it could also just be that there's a few crabby apples complaining while many others are potentially happy with the volume increase.

So the whole thing, in my opinion, just needs more time, study and background information before we all get upset about it.

Because Amazon is smart.

They're going to watch this and understand the impact that it's having on the brands.

And there could be, you know, it could be like 99% of them love it and there's like less than 1% that feel this way and you can still opt out.

So freaking opt out.

Like, you know, I don't know.

That's, that's my take.