Amazon 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
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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.
Online retailers push back against Amazon's Shop Direct
Amazon’s AI-powered Shop Direct and Buy for Me tools are designed to help shoppers find products beyond its marketplace, but retailers argue the experiment exposes a deeper tension over data ownership, consent and who really controls the future of online shopping (Image source: © 123rf [[www.123rf.com 123rf]])Amazon is facing pushback from some online retailers who say that it has, through its AI-powered Shop Direct and Buy for Me tools, listed …
Amazon Scrapes Listings, Places Orders on Indie Seller Stores
Sellers who don’t sell on Amazon were shocked to see their store listings appear in its shopping app under Shop Direct and Buy for Me features. They learned that Amazon had scraped their web stores, displayed their listings in the Amazon shopping app, and in some cases placed orders on the sellers’ sites on behalf […]
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