Retail marketplaces like Amazon and eBay face a quandary when it comes to artificial intelligence shopping robots roaming their enormous digital bazaars, which were designed for humans.
Merchants pay fees to access these sites’ huge pools of shoppers and for a variety of other services, such as shipping, logistics, payment support, product returns, marketing assistance and selling tools. Over time, consumer shopping agents are expected to move from product research – with humans still completing the payment – to fully autonomous, end-to-end transactions.
For marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, the large language models that are moving swiftly into agentic commerce – including Perplexity AI, OpenAI and Google – are potentially disruptive to their model, said Adam Behrens, the CEO of New Generation. The San Francisco-based software startup builds agentic commerce tools for merchants. (The company’s parent is Internet Forest.)
“You can look at what ChatGPT and Google are trying to do as kind of like opening the doors for an LLM to act as the marketplace where, if you just connect supply into that language model and then a consumer interacts with it, why do you ever need to go to Amazon?” Behrens, a former Stripe executive, said in an interview last month.
In that model, the traditional e-commerce marketplace “just becomes the back-end fulfillment,” he added.
The marketplaces aren’t sitting still.
eBay has updated its user agreement, effective Feb. 20, to block any agentic commerce tools, including “buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that attempts to place orders without human review” without the company’s permission.
That update aims to “keep interactions predictable and safe, so we can protect buyers and sellers, apply appropriate safeguard and usage limits, and maintain a reliable experience,” an eBay spokesperson said Tuesday in an email.
Other merchants are also likely to view agentic commerce warily.
The technology poses a potential double-edged threat: Erosion of a customer relationship and the potential for increased fraud on the transaction side if they “effectively outsource” payment-trust decisions to systems outside their control, said Jeff Otto, the chief marketing officer of New York-based Riskified, which sells merchants software to manage fraud and chargebacks.
“You’re kind of losing on both sides, your brand exposure, loyalty, all those things that create customer lifetime value – you lose all that when it's inside of a ChatGPT interface, and then second, you’re taking on this risk,” Otto said in an interview Monday.
The change comes as the San Jose, California-based marketplace has piloted its own “in-house” LLMs to facilitate commerce, Chief Executive Jamie Iannone said during the company’s most recent earnings call in October. “We’re now poised to gradually bring agentic capabilities into the core of eBay’s business through the main search experience over the coming quarters,” he said.
That new platform “enables a fully connected experience via eBay agents and third-party agents like OpenAI in real-time,” Iannone added.
eBay is working with partners to make its inventory available to third-party agents that understand “eBay’s valued-added services,” such as managed shipping and money-back guarantees, the spokesperson said. The company’s goal is “to maintain eBay's unique value proposition within agent-to-agent interactions.”
In November, Amazon sued Perplexity AI in federal court in San Francisco, seeking an injunction to stop the AI firm’s agentic shopping tool, Comet, from accessing the retail store and customer data. Amazon is also driving consumers to Rufus, its AI shopping assistant.
“No different than any other intruder, Perplexity is not allowed to go where it has been expressly told it cannot; that Perplexity’s trespass involves code rather than a lockpick makes it no less unlawful,” Amazon wrote in its complaint, alleging violations of U.S. and federal computer fraud and abuse laws.
According to the retailer, its store “is more than a catalog of webpages: it is an integrated, dynamic environment that provides Amazon customers with a secure, curated, and individualized shopping experience.”
In a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity days before its lawsuit, Amazon said it “shares the industry’s excitement about AI innovations and sees significant potential for agentic AI to improve customer experiences in a range of areas.”
However, it added, AI agents must operate “transparently” as this “protects a service provider’s right to monitor AI agents and restrict conduct that degrades the customer shopping experience, erodes customer trust, and creates security risks.”
Merchants – whether it’s an Amazon-sized emporium or an individual entrepreneur in a rural village – are navigating how to best approach agentic commerce.
“The imperative for a merchant becomes: How am I going to expose my brand, my data, my products, to this ecosystem in a way that I maintain some level of control, that I still benefit from it, that it translates to real revenue?” Behrens said.
