Another reason they do not allow it is because if something is popular Amazon will make their own private label version.
Completely irresponsible behavior.
Seling something you bought is completely legal and perfectly normal.
Using an agent of some sort to figure out where to put how to pass the payment information seems more than a little irresponsible too, maybe illegally so.
It seems pretty likely that no one would even know that this exists in order to opt out of this until at least some purchases have been made. This isn't even "opting out" in the traditional (and already user-hostile) way of doing something by default that's orthogonal to what the user signed up for; it's a lot closer to the whole "shadow profile" thing Facebook does where the account exists without anyone signing up in the first place.
This seems like the same play.
This should lead to anti trust.
Buy from the seller, sell to the user. Seems pretty reasonable. You can resell things you buy from shops legally, not just wholesalers.
Moreover, I'm pretty sure purchasing a product does not give you the rights to use all the marketing materials for that product. Those copyrights are separate.
And the act of listing inherently happens before any purchase.
So if I buy a thing, take a photo of it, then use my photo to accompany a listing for that thing, the manufacturer of that thing has no recourse in copyright law.
(IAAL, not legal advice.)
And yes. I do see how it can be a slippery slope leading to dependence on (paid) Amazon ranking and being roped into their (exploitative) ecosystem.
I can also see how this could cut into franchise or exclusive territory deals, or how this can disrupt your marketing campaigns.
But in the end, is this really different from people selling your products, new or used, on eBay? And would the actions needed to stop this maybe be worse than the actual disease?
I can see both sides. Not sure which eay I lean.
Which is a little odd, and the value is questionable, but fundamentally seems...fine? You're a merchant, you're selling pencils on the internet, people are buying your pencils from you. And historically the way this might have been built would be something like a desktop application that users install, and which then goes and loads websites, displays them, fills in payment info, etc. Which of course is exactly what the web browser does already.
And all of the complaints about how it should be opt-in also feel odd. If you install WooCommerce and put a storefront up on the public internet, you've pretty obviously opted in to "selling your products on the internet". You don't need to tell Firefox that it's okay for people to use it to buy your stuff!
Of course, this isn't a desktop app, it's agentic AI run by Amazon, which certainly makes it feel different, but I'm not entirely sure how different it should make our analysis.
But also, the story raises a bunch of interesting questions and then doesn't answer any of them:
> Chua also received at least several orders for products that were either out of stock or no longer existed on her website.
How exactly did this happen? The story is that the orders are being placed through the normal storefront, right? So how exactly?
Or:
> Gorin sells wholesale through a password-protected section of her website, where retailers must submit resale or exemption certificates so orders are properly exempted from sales tax. She said she was still able to complete a “Buy for Me” purchase of a product pulled from her wholesale site despite never opting into the program — a scenario that could expose her business to tax liability if individual shoppers were able to place tax-exempt orders. Gorin also worries that surfacing wholesale pricing could undermine profit margins, allow competitors to undercut her prices or bypass minimum order requirements designed to keep wholesale sales viable.
That's just begging for an explanation. Is Amazon is somehow using stolen credentials to obtain price information? Or is Goren mistaken and the info isn't password protected at all? (And if not, why not?)
I'd also be interested in unpacking a bit more the legal and contractual implications of agreements like Mochi Kids has signed. The brand apparently doesn't allow its products on Amazon, and doesn't allow partners like Mochi Kids to sell on Amazon, but...Michi Kids isn't? Mechanically someone is buying the products at retail and effectively relisting them. Which...I dunno, feels legal? Is any agreement actually being violated here? Does the brand have a course of action? Does Mochi Kids have an actual legal obligation to opt out? Does Amazon have a legal obligation to let vendors opt out? Is Amazon legally buying anything from Mochi Kids, or is the customer the person using Amazon? Given the payment info being used is the customer's, I'm not sure Amazon has a commercial relationship with the brand or the vendor?
And so on. It feels like too much of the story is being carried by it being about Amazon and AI, which means the author felt fine just glossing over the details.
But that doesn't answer the question of what rights vendors actually have here (much less what rights they should have).
1. Brand management is strict for a reason. You don't want some third party pretending to represent you and suddenly they become malicious or simply get hacked and have their customers (and indirectly, your customers) assosiswte you with frustration and danger. Or even something completely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things but a PR nightmare. Like having Nintendo products in a list next to some Magnum condoms.
2. There's subtle issues with making things "too convenient" to buy. Trackers and affiliates get frustrated, so it might make you less money in the long term. You might have related items to tempt buyers to buy more so spending goes down. Less users accounts (be it an email list, curation algorithms, or following on social media) weaken outreach for future holiday deals.
And those are 2 points when not considering a trillion dollar tech giant and the Ai concerns.
Why not apply your exact "its fine" standards to Amazon too ? Standards go BOTH ways, after all.
> In November, Amazon sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity over its new Comet browser, which lets users ask an AI agent to find and buy items on Amazon. In a statement, Amazon said third-party shopping agents should “operate openly and respect service provider decisions” on whether or not to participate.
These people want Amazon to "respect service provider decisions" - just like Amazon demands of other people.
But the incumbents who don’t want to allow this seem destined to lose, this is a tsunami coming, where this is just obviously how things will be done in the future once performance is good enough, and any group who tries to force customers into the old way is just not going to succeed for one reason or another. This is just how the market is shifting.
The complaint isn't a moral one. It's fundamentally a trademark dispute. Manufacturers of goods want control about how their products are presented to consumers. Hermès doesn't want their stuff on the shelves at TJ-Max because it "dilutes their brand" or whatever.
Unfortunately trademark law doesn't speak to AI Agents, which is why there's a tech angle here. This is likely going to need to be solved with legislation.
In my opinion it's fundamentally not, because when you hire an assistant, you're hiring them with the intent to have them buy the product from the merchant.
Here, it would be like if you went to your local Safeway or other supermarket and there was a man standing at one of those sample carts who said "Hey, what you think of these papayas?" They're good, you look at them and decide you want two. "Great, I'll go in the back and get it." They disappear and come back with the papayas.
What's different:
1. You probably don't know where the papaya came from. Your intent in buying papayas didn't start with a clear understanding of the whole transaction.
2. You didn't interact with the merchant. If you want support, you have to go through the supermarket.
3. Whether you can file a credit card dispute is questionable. You likely won't win a dispute saying "I bought these and they're bad." You paid for a personal shopper, not a product. They substantially complied with their end of the transaction. You can't reliably dispute your instacart order saying "The papayas were disgusting." Instacart didn't sell you papayas, they sold you shopping services.
4. The merchant didn't sell to your email, they sold to some Amazon email. Good luck getting tracking details or getting customer support to talk to you directly. Good luck with returns.
5. Either Amazon is giving out your real credit card number (!) or using a virtual card. If it's the former, they've just invented credit card fraud as a service: you really going to trust Amazon's AI to hand out your card details safely? If it's the latter, you're probably going to get billed separately from the merchant charging you, which means Amazon is a middleman for refunds and payment issues.
In November I ordered a nozzle that I needed, which I knew had been discontinued. I ordered from a small seller, thinking they might still have some in stock. Turns out, they never even charged my card (probably because they don't have one and never will). I have been unable to get in touch with them about the order. I suspect this is very common, especially with drop shipping.
If Amazon charged me up front but they were not charged, that's outrageous. They don't even have a way for me to prove I didn't get my item (how could they?). Or will they mysteriously charge me at some point in the future? Who knows!
So I agree, it's very different.
That's... not a thing though. No such thing as "brand rights" [1] beyond stuff like trademark, which clearly doesn't apply here. In particular there's no inherent recognition of a manufacturers ability to control what happens to downstream goods. Stuff is stuff, if you sell stuff the people you sell it to can sell it too.
[1] Nor do we really want there to be? I mean, I get that this seems bad because ZOMG AMZN, but in general do we actually want to be handing more market control to manufacturers vs. middlemen and consumers?
I don't disagree with you on a personal opinion side, but the more expensive brands have a snobbery about who they sell to. To me it seems less about quality and more about "I'm rich" app style of fashion.
People are getting bent out of shape here, again, based on the specific player. But seriously what do you really think the solution is supposed to look like? I just don't see a fix here that won't make things worse, and I absolutely don't see one available under current law.
And there's absolutely zero chance the current administration is going to take any positive antitrust steps unless the target just happens to be one that seriously pisses off Trump.
"Monopolies shouldn't be allowed to control everything" is a practical, economic, and moral argument before it is a legal one. If there is no legal framework to protect small brands from a company like Amazon coming in and doing these things, then perhaps there should be. (It's possible, though unlikely, that there's no practical way to do so without sufficient negative side effects that it harms more than it helps: I haven't sat down and tried to work out the second- and third-order effects.)
In case it's not abundantly clear, one very likely endgame of this for Amazon is picking the products within this subset that do the best, ripping them off itself (either fully legally, for simple manufactured goods, or questionably or outright illegally for things one buys because of the design—like shirts with particular art on them), and selling those under the cost the original creators need to be profitable. Those creators then go out of business. Then Amazon can, if they wish, raise the prices to whatever the market will bear.
The creators lose. The consumers lose. Even the wholesalers and manufacturers likely lose, if they're still involved, because Amazon is going to be paying them less for the same product due to economies of scale.
The only one that wins is Amazon. By design.
Ahem, I said that, in the comment to which you responded. Forgive me for making assumptions about the context of discussion.
But that said, I still don't see where you're going with this. No fix for what you want exists that wouldn't also outlaw stuff like fashion consultants, custom PC builders and thrift shops.
Amazon leads to one-off sales, with your product becoming indistinguishable from hundreds of different stores. There is no reason to return to your store, because the customer isn't even aware they bought from your store!
And it can get nasty real quick if you are the only seller and Amazon messes up. A negative review of your product due to bad handling by Amazon means you are now being held responsible, in the eyes of the community. A widely-spread "I bought a $500, it was packaged poorly arrived broken, and they refused a replacement/refund" can easily kill a small company - especially if they try to do aftersales and conclude that the complainer never ordered from them - who then of course shows pictures seemingly proving the opposite...
It is scumbags expanding on their nasty ways. Now watch the vampires at Amazon extend their undercut-and-absorb techniques on every single web shop, whether the operators like it or not.
When you really lose trust from your partners because officially announced things Amazon does, like adding your products to their shop system, then your partners have no trust in you at all.
When you don't want that Amazon sells your products, cancel the orders you get from them. Add a link to the real shop and a explaination why to the cancel mail.
It could all be so easy. And this are just the things everyone could do. Delivering doubled prices to AI crawlers would be a advanced thing.
If I announce in my local paper (you get to guess which one) that you'll be throwing a party outside your house, I don't think you'll be on the side of "just tell them to go away and my neighbors will totally understand it wasn't really me"
But at the end of the day you can't stop someone from reselling your stuff no matter how much you hate it, that has been clearly established by the First Sale Doctrine.
> If I announce in my local paper (you get to guess which one) that you'll be throwing a party outside your house, I don't think you'll be on the side of "just tell them to go away and my neighbors will totally understand it wasn't really me"
The comparison here would be that you are selling tickets to a party outside your house, which I don't think anyone would bat an eye at if the local newspaper announces?
Good luck claiming damages with an "and then I sold more of my things at the advertised price" kind of argument.
I really wish the article had dug into that more, because it made very little sense.
Doubling prices to the AI now means you're product shows up twice as expensive on Amazon. Nobody is comparing Amazon to your site directly, they're comparing your product on Amazon to the next item on Amazon. Now instead of this person going to Google to find your product, they're skipping your product entirely.
That is, if I go to Amazon and search "Krater23 Widget" and don't find it, I might search elsewhere. If I find it and see it's outrageously priced, I'm probably no longer buying it.
I'm really sad this one couldn't be "Slop Direct"
Evil amazon dont list my products but pls still fulfill my orders.
If I was a seller, I'd probably find this a good thing --- Amazon is effectively giving me more customers for free.
This is a win for user control over how they interact with content on the Web.
It is reasonable to be very skeptical of Amazon AI to act wholly and transparently in the end user's interest, as was the 'original vision' of a user agent. Frankly, to be otherwise requires a level of naivety that ignores the common thread through Amazon's entire history.
I’m fairly confident that 95%+ of human users on the internet don’t even know what a user agent is, and it’s controlled by parties other than the user.
It’s not a win for user control if only a extremely small niche of users are able to take advantage of it
My browser speaks TLS and HTTP for me. Maybe it talks if I'm low vision. Maybe it adjusts the page to be more visually appealing. What is Amazon doing? They're using the same interface that I am. They're completing an identical transaction to me. I'm maybe sure I could sit down with a sufficiently large piece of paper and a sufficiently advanced calculator and crunch the numbers to speak TLS (for a packet or two, at least). Not enough to complete a transaction, though.
But I can confidently place an online order. There's no control that Amazon can offer. In fact, they're essentially just giving me a rebranded interface to perform the same action I can perform on another page.
Just because it's a service doesn't make it a user agent.