A package is loaded onto a United States Postal Service (USPS) truck near the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Monday, November 24, 2025 in New York, USA.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon Some online retailers have expressed anger, saying they do not consent to having their products scraped and listed on the e-commerce giant’s vast marketplace.
In February, the company announced Shop Direct, a feature that allows consumers to browse products from other brands’ sites on Amazon. Some of these products include a button labeled “Buy for Me” that allows an artificial intelligence agent to buy products from other websites on the shopper’s behalf.
Amazon pitched the service, which is in testing for some U.S. users, as a way for shoppers to “find the products they want or need,” including items not available on its site. Over the past decade, Amazon has increasingly relied on third-party sellers to purchase products, with independent sellers now accounting for more than 60% of the retail platform’s sales.
In recent weeks, some companies have started objecting to their products being sold on Amazon without permission, according to posts on Reddit and Instagram. Retailers say in some cases the program has resulted in Amazon listing products they don’t sell themselves or that are out of stock.
“It sounds like a great program until the agent AI starts selling customers things they don’t have, but the stores don’t realize they’re sending customers the wrong item,” Virginia-based stationery store Hitchcock Paper said in an Instagram post in late December.
The paper retailer said it discovered it was part of the program when it started receiving orders for stress ball products, which it doesn’t sell, from a “buyforme.amazon” email address.
Angie Chua, CEO of Bobo Design Studio, said she started receiving orders from Amazon Buy for Me agents last week, even though she had not opted in to the program. Her company sells stationery and journaling accessories. Shopify Website and storefront in Palm Springs, California.
Chua told CNBC that she contacted the company based on Amazon’s instructions in the site’s FAQ and asked it to remove her products. The listing was removed within days, but she said the experience left her feeling “exploited.”
“We were forced to become drop shippers on platforms where we made a conscious decision not to participate,” Chua said of the online retail model of selling products to shoppers without storing inventory.
Shopify, Squarespace, WooCommerce, wicks Other platforms then contacted Chua to share that their products were also listed on Amazon without permission, she said.
An Amazon spokesperson told CNBC that Shop Direct and Buy for Me help customers find products that aren’t on sale on Amazon’s site, while also “helping businesses attract new customers and drive sales growth,” adding that the programs are “getting positive feedback.”
“Businesses can opt out at any time by emailing branddirect@amazon.com and we will immediately remove them from these programs,” the spokesperson said. The company said product and price information is taken from publicly available information on brands’ websites, and Amazon’s systems check that products are in stock and priced correctly.
Amazon said Buy for Me is still an “experiment” and will not collect fees when customers use it to make purchases. In November, the company announced that the number of products available through Buy for Me has increased from 65,000 at launch to more than 500,000.
It’s all part of Amazon’s push into e-commerce agents, a technology that has the potential to disrupt the way people shop online. Companies including OpenAI, google and Perplexity released the ability for consumers to purchase products from retail stores and online marketplaces without leaving the chatbot window.
Amazon has blocked dozens of agents from accessing its site while investing in its own AI tools, and the company sued Perplexity in November over agents in the startup’s Comet browser, which lets users make purchases on their behalf.
Amazon claimed in the complaint that Perplexity took steps to “hide” its agents so that it could continue to scrape Amazon’s websites without their approval. Perplexity called the lawsuit a “bullying tactic.”
In 2024, Amazon released its own shopping chatbot called Rufus. Several agent features have been added to this.
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