Amazon built its marketplace on a simple contract: sellers opt in, list their products, and the platform handles distribution in exchange for a cut. For nearly three decades, that arrangement defined the boundary between Amazon and the wider commerce web. Everything inside the fence played by Amazon’s rules; everything outside it was somebody else’s business. That boundary is now being redrawn — not by a policy memo, and not with the sellers’ agreement, but by an AI agent acting on Amazon’s behalf.
The feature is called “Buy For Me.” It is live in the Amazon Shopping app on iOS and Android for a subset of US customers, and it does something Amazon has never done at scale before: it surfaces and sells products from brands that never agreed to be there. The controversy is not the ambition — agentic shopping is a reasonable bet. The controversy is the consent, and who was asked before their catalog became part of Amazon’s storefront.
How the mechanism actually works
The flow is deceptively simple from the shopper’s side. A customer searches for an item Amazon doesn’t stock. Rather than returning an empty result, Amazon’s agentic AI locates the product on an external brand’s website, generates a listing inside the Amazon Shopping app, and — if the customer taps “Buy For Me” — completes the checkout on the brand’s own site, securely passing the customer’s encrypted name, address, and payment details to finish the order.
Amazon confirms the system runs on Amazon Bedrock, using Amazon Nova and Anthropic’s Claude models to power the app’s agentic capabilities. Delivery, returns, exchanges, and customer service are all managed by the brand store, not Amazon. On paper, that division of labor sounds clean: Amazon brings the shopper, the brand fulfills the order. In practice, it means Amazon has inserted itself as the discovery and checkout layer for a transaction it does not fulfill and a relationship it does not own — the intermediary between a shopper’s intent and a seller who never applied to be found.
Why brands are pushing back
The friction is not theoretical. Independent retailers report that their sites were scraped for the app without permission, that AI-generated images were substituted for their own product photography, and that Amazon surfaced products they had already discontinued. One owner, of Bobo Design Studio, described products “fully deleted from the back end” still being sold under the app’s shop-direct section, with AI images of items that were not hers.
For a small brand, the damage compounds in ways the headline complaint misses. An order the seller cannot fulfill — because the item is out of stock or discontinued — does not simply fail quietly. It produces a refund, a frustrated customer who blames the brand rather than the intermediary, and often a negative review attached to a purchase the brand never chose to accept. The brand absorbs the reputational cost of a transaction Amazon initiated. Meanwhile, an AI-generated image that misrepresents the product invites returns and, in regulated categories, potential compliance exposure. The brand carries the liability for a listing it did not write.
The deeper objection is about consent architecture. A brand is included by default and must actively request removal. When the burden of opting out sits with the party that never opted in, the balance of power has already shifted. And in March 2026, Amazon signaled this was no experiment: it opened the underlying technology further, offering “Buy For Me” and a related “Shop Direct” capability to outside merchants who wanted to plug in deliberately. The pilot became infrastructure — a standing capability Amazon intends to scale, not a test it might quietly retire.
The bigger current: agentic commerce is arriving fast
To understand why Amazon is moving this aggressively, look at the numbers reshaping the channel. AI-referred traffic to US retailers grew 393% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2026, with March alone up 269%, according to Adobe Analytics. By March 2026, that traffic was converting 42% better than non-AI traffic — a record in Adobe’s data — with those shoppers spending 48% more time on the page and browsing 13% more pages per visit.
Consumer adoption is following the traffic. Adobe found that 39% of US consumers have used AI for online shopping, and 85% of that group said it improved their experience. During Cyber Week 2025, Salesforce reported that AI and agents drove $67 billion in sales and influenced 20% of all global orders — and that retailers using its Agentforce agents grew sales 32% faster than those without. These are not early-adopter curiosities; they are mainstream behaviors forming in real time.
The long-range projection explains the urgency. McKinsey estimates agentic commerce could reach $3–5 trillion globally by 2030. When a channel of that size is forming, the platform that controls the point of discovery — the moment an agent decides which product to surface — captures disproportionate value. Amazon is not defending a niche. It is racing to own the layer through which a growing share of all commerce will flow, and “Buy For Me” extends that layer beyond its own catalog.
Amazon’s own agent is the tell
The clearest signal of intent is Rufus, Amazon’s AI shopping assistant. On the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call, Amazon said monthly active users for Rufus were up more than 115% and engagement was up nearly 400% year-over-year, and that nearly 20% of shoppers who interact with a brand prompt in Rufus continue the conversation about that brand. Those are the numbers of a feature graduating from experiment to habit.
Seen against that backdrop, “Buy For Me” is not a standalone feature. It is the outward-facing edge of a strategy in which Amazon’s AI mediates discovery even for products Amazon does not sell — extending the company’s reach beyond its own catalog and into the open web. The brands whose products are being surfaced are, in effect, supplying inventory to a channel they do not control and did not choose. The agent that recommends a product and the agent that completes the purchase are increasingly the same system, owned by the same company, pointed at a catalog assembled without the seller’s involvement.
The counterargument, and why it only goes so far
There is a case for the feature, and it deserves a fair hearing. For a small brand with little organic traffic, being surfaced to Amazon’s enormous shopper base is exposure it could never buy. Some merchants will convert customers they would otherwise never have reached, and fulfillment stays in their hands, so the margin structure is theirs. Handled with genuine opt-in and accurate data, “Buy For Me” could be a real acquisition channel rather than a threat.
But that case rests on conditions Amazon has not met: explicit consent, accurate listings, and real-time inventory sync. Exposure a brand cannot decline is not a marketing channel — it is a loss of control over how the brand is represented. The difference between the two is entirely a matter of governance, and right now the governance is trailing the capability.
The structural shift beneath the dispute
This is where the story stops being a listing complaint and becomes something larger. For its entire history, Amazon has been the intermediary between buyers and sellers who agreed to its terms. “Buy For Me” extends that role to companies that never signed up at all. These are not third-party sellers operating inside Amazon’s rules. They are brands whose catalogs, pricing, and imagery now appear inside Amazon’s app, mediated by Amazon’s AI, on terms they did not negotiate — and, in some cases, did not know existed.
For sellers, the practical takeaway is uncomfortable but clear. The channel is expanding whether or not they participate, and passive discovery is now a risk to manage, not a gift to accept. That means monitoring where their products appear, auditing how their imagery and pricing are represented across surfaces they do not own, keeping inventory data clean enough that no agent can sell what they cannot ship, and deciding deliberately — through the opt-out process if necessary — whether agentic exposure serves the brand or exposes it.
Final Thought
Every platform eventually reaches the point where its own growth creates friction with the ecosystem that made it possible. Amazon is at that point now. The brands resisting “Buy For Me” are not anti-technology — many of them sell through agentic channels elsewhere and welcome the traffic. What they are marking is the line between discovery and extraction: between a platform that surfaces you with permission and one that absorbs you without it. As agentic commerce scales toward a multi-trillion-dollar channel, that line will be drawn and redrawn across the entire industry. Where Amazon chooses to stand on it will say more about its next decade than any figure it reports on Prime Day.
Sources
- About Amazon (official) — Buy for Me button
- Value Added Resource — Buy For Me backlash
- Digital Commerce 360 — Buy for Me / Shop Direct to merchants
- Adobe Analytics (via Yahoo Finance) — AI traffic +393%
- Salesforce (official) — Cyber Week $67B / 20% / +32%
- McKinsey — The agentic commerce opportunity
- PYMNTS — Rufus MAU +115%, engagement +400%
Erene Araojo