US EditionAmazon AI Tool Blindsides Merchants by Offering Products without Their Knowledge
Amazon's AI tools list products from over 180 retailers without consent, sometimes showing wrong details, raising copyright and trust concerns among small sellers.
- In recent weeks, Amazon has tested Shop Direct and Buy For Me to list products from other retailers without their consent, prompting small businesses to raise concerns on social media.
- Internal documents show Amazon says the tools pull product and pricing data from public brand websites and a plan envisioned crawling 200,000 external sites as part of Project Starfish.
- Sometime around Christmas, Sarah Burzio, Hitchcock Paper, found duplicated listings with wrong images and customers receiving wrong items, prompting refund demands.
- Karla Hackman asked Amazon to take listings down on Jan 3, and the products were removed by Jan 6, while Angie Chua said she felt `exploited` after the removals.
- Amazon sued Perplexity in November and blocked dozens of agents while Buy For Me expanded from about 65,000 to more than 500,000 items, signaling rapid agentic shopping growth.
16 Articles
16 Articles
TechXplore
Amazon AI tool blindsides merchants by offering products without their knowledge
Sometime around Christmas, Sarah Burzio noticed that the holiday sales bump for her stationery business included some mysterious new customers: a flurry of orders from anonymous email addresses associated with Amazon.com Inc.
Amazon faces backlash after AI agent sells retailers’ products without permission - Tech Startups
Amazon is learning, again, that convenience for shoppers can come at a cost for sellers. Earlier this year, Amazon quietly rolled out a test called Shop Direct, a feature that lets shoppers browse products from outside Amazon’s own marketplace. In […] The post Amazon faces backlash after AI agent sells retailers’ products without permission first appeared on Tech Startups.
Amazon’s AI Shopping Tool Faces Retailer Backlash Over Website Scraping
Amazon’s latest AI experiment has backfired, igniting a revolt amongst small retailers. The e-commerce giant quietly launched a feature that scrapes competitor websites without permission, and now hundreds of small businesses are fighting back. Amazon’s “Shop Direct” feature, launched in February 2025, was designed to make shopping easier by letting customers browse products from other retailers directly on Amazon’s platform. But what seemed lik…
Amazon accused of listing goods from other websites without consent
Online retailer Amazon has been accused of listing items from independent retailers without their permission. The ecommerce giant has listed some independent retailers’ full inventory on its website without seeking consent, four business owners told the Financial Times, allowing customers to shop via Amazon instead of directly purchasing goods. Two independent retailers told the publication they also received orders for items that were either o…
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