Packages in a United States Postal Service (USPS) truck near the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, US, on Monday, Nov. 24, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon has angered some online retailers that say they didn’t consent to have their products scraped and listed on the e-commerce giant’s sprawling marketplace.
In February, the company announced “Shop Direct,” a feature that lets consumers browse items from other brands’ sites on Amazon. Some of those items include a button labeled “Buy for Me,” an artificial intelligence agent that can purchase products from other websites on a shopper’s behalf.
Amazon pitched the services, which are in testing phase for some U.S. users, as a way for shoppers to “find any product they want and need,” including items that aren’t available on its site. Over the past decade, Amazon has increasingly turned to third-party merchants for products, and now says more than 60% of sales on its retail platform are from independent sellers.
In recent weeks, some businesses began to object to their products being sold on Amazon without their permission, according to posts on Reddit and Instagram. Retailers, in some instances, said the program resulted in Amazon listing products that they never sold or that were out of stock.
“Sounds like a great program until the agentic AI starts selling customers things you don’t have, all while your shop has no idea it’s sending the wrong items to the customer,” Hitchcock Paper, a Virginia-based stationery shop, said in an Instagram post in late December.
The paper retailer said it discovered it was part of the program when it began receiving orders for a stress ball product, which it doesn’t sell, from a “buyforme.amazon” email address.
Bobo Design Studio CEO Angie Chua said she started receiving orders from Amazon’s Buy for Me agent last week even though she hadn’t opted in to the program. Her company sells stationery and journaling accessories through its Shopify website as well as a storefront in Palm Springs, California.
Chua told CNBC that, based on Amazon’s instructions in an FAQ on its site, she reached out to the company to request that it pull her products. The listings were taken down within a few days, but she said the experience left her feeling “exploited.”
“We were forced to be dropshippers on a platform that we have made a conscious decision not to be part of,” Chua said, referring to an online retail model that involves selling products to shoppers without storing the inventory.
More than 180 businesses who sell their goods on Shopify, Squarespace, WooCommerce, Wix and other platforms have since contacted Chua to share that their products were also listed on Amazon without their permission, she said.
An Amazon spokesperson told CNBC that Shop Direct and Buy for Me help customers find products not sold on its site, “while helping businesses reach new customers and drive incremental sales,” and that the programs have “received positive feedback.”
“Businesses can opt out at any time by emailing branddirect@amazon.com, and we remove them from these programs promptly,” the spokesperson said. The company said product and pricing information are pulled from public information on a brand’s website and that Amazon’s system checks to make sure the item is in stock and the price is right.
Amazon has said that Buy for Me remains an “experiment” and that it doesn’t collect a commission when customers use it to make a purchase. In November, the company said the number of products available through Buy for Me had increased from 65,000 at launch to more 500,000.
It’s all part of Amazon’s push into e-commerce agents, a technology that could potentially disrupt how people shop online. Companies including OpenAI, Google and Perplexity have released features that allow consumers to purchase products from retailers and online marketplaces without leaving a chatbot window.
Amazon has blocked dozens of agents from accessing its site, while investing in its homegrown AI tools, and in November the company sued Perplexity over an agent in the startup’s Comet browser that allows it to make purchases on a user’s behalf.
In the complaint, Amazon alleged Perplexity took steps to “conceal” its agents so they could continue to scrape Amazon’s website without its approval. Perplexity called the lawsuit a “bully tactic.”
In 2024, Amazon released its own shopping chatbot called Rufus, which now has some agentic capabilities.
