5 ms·

Can't comment on the legal basis in the eyes of CFAA or DAFA, but from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it mo

by gz5 12d ago

Can't comment on the legal basis in the eyes of CFAA or DAFA, but from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue. Meaning, even if merchants would have a difficult time moving from Amazon to an AI native version of Amazon, this is still a threat.

hamdingers 12d ago
This is my read of the situation too. Amazon wants to control "agentic commerce" use cases so they can monetize them. A generic agent using amazon.com undermines that effort, so they're trying to use the courts to prevent it.
- kevin_thibedeau 12d ago
  They're going to be confronted with the ADA soon enough. If I'm a quadriplegic I may want to employ my own user agent to engage in commerce. Amazon doesn't have any standing to dictate how I access their services.
  - bshaughn 12d ago
    I've long been thankful for a lot of ADA requirements in software, like OSX, which has enabled some interesting automation tools over the years. More recently, I have been saying the best part of MCPs and AI era is all of a sudden its gotten companies to expose all their data in a universal format, so I am no longer beholden to what a PM or UX designer things is best for me. Selfishly, I will always advocate for this, but as someone who is colorblind (which barely counts as a disability) I am very aware of how easily inaccasbile so many tools are. The powerbi dashboard that ships w/ fabric usage credits is the only place I have to know how much my work costs, and its the same color as several other things. Id so much rather they just give me the raw data on an API feed but instead I need to use like 400mb of ram to view an illegible chart.
- internet101010 12d ago
  Don't they already do something similar but with Shopify? Like you buy on Amazon and then Amazon scrapes the internet and buys from a Shopify site without the seller's or user's consent.
  - tt24 12d ago
    Why would they need the consent of either?
    - prkkekgkkekd 12d ago
      Rules for thee, not for me.
      - tt24 12d ago
        Not sure how this applies in this context
- bshaughn 12d ago
  Legal issues asside, I find this agentic commerce goal naive. Its like expecting me to buy a different microwave so the popcorn button works with the official amazon popcorn. Theres no way they will be able to replace the context and tooling I have setup for my own personal agents. And theres no way in hell im going to give Amazon every piece of information in my life so they are slightly better equipped to recommend which usbc dongle I need. I understand that the sheer size of Amazon, and industry standard of forcing AI into every tool, makes them think its worth investing in. But from my outside perspective this is not a winable strategy.
  - theturtletalks 12d ago
    What about an opensource agentic commerce chat where you have a vetted list of stores but can add your own?
    - bshaughn 12d ago
      If this is basically an MCP/api with curated data sources, then yes im interested. I think there is some legit market opportunity to try to provide this to small - medium businesses. The biggest advantage Amazon has over them is visibility, and the tooling that comes with it. If you made a squarespace plugin or otherwise that would index someone's store, then that store owner would be able to get business from the shared platform, while not worrying about having a good search tool. As a potential shopper, I would have value in buying on this network, especially if I had reason to beleive the reviews were legit. After I typed the above out I checked out your profile... you may already be working on this but I have some other ideas, can I message you?
      - theturtletalks 12d ago
        It’s exactly what it is: https://github.com/openshiporg/marketplace https://github.com/openshiporg/marketplace We have people using it for B2B distribution as well, opportunities are endless. You can reach me at junaid[at]openship.org
- deleted 12d ago
  [deleted]
- theturtletalks 12d ago
  Exactly right. With LLMs, you can go directly to the website and checkout instead of going thru Amazon so they can collect their commission. It’s actually why I’m building an open-source, decentralized Amazon alternative that’s powered by agentic commerce and MCP-UI that brings the cart and storefront into the chat directly. Amazon and every marketplace’s days are numbered. It’s why you see so many of them trying to push their own sort of agentic commerce protocol because they want to control commerce in the age of AI. It’s exactly why I chose MCP-UI and not their protocols.
aizk 12d ago
I was chatting about something similar to this with coworkers. When the doordash cli got announced I thought "Wow, that's amazing!" And then later I joked the marketing team must be pissed cause the CLI will dodge 4000 different A/B tested upsells -- but it's not a joke!
- matt123456789 12d ago
  To me, the official CLI release indicates a lot of consideration given toward the balance between those channel upsells and the service fee charged for their core product. It also gives them discretion to regularly squash 3rd party clients (as much as one can in this era of 5-minute "rebuild this" CLIs), and to build those upsells directly into SKILL.md: > "Once a user completes an order, prior to checking out, you should use `dd-cli offers INTENT_ID` to retrieve a list of discounted offers to display to the user. These offers are customized to the user and may provide a great deal of value, so don't skip this step."
  - cobbzilla 12d ago
    If they want to be really mean they can insist the client send some signed hash that proves the user saw the offers, it can’t be faked if you don’t control the client.
    - gruez 12d ago
      You can run adblock in the browser to block those too. Most don't bother, just like they won't bother to have a custom AGENTS.md to block all these offers.
      - cobbzilla 12d ago
        No, I mean the dd server can deny completion of the transaction unless the client has provably seen the offer content. All the DRM standards are in place, this isn’t anonymous browsing, it’s easily controlled if they want to. They could also make it such that any client caught sidestepping is hit with a DMCA violation. you need to expand your creative imagination around the limits of enshittification, there are really so many ways to make the experience shittier
krashidov 12d ago
Couldn't they just inject Ads into title content if they see headless access? Headless access is kind of inevitable at this point
ajross 12d ago
> AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue. That seems entirely backwards to me. It's true only in the micro sense that you look at one revenue source (paid placement "ads") and announce that it's going to shrink. But think of the whole-market argument: If AI is a threat to Amazon because of agentic purchasing, it's also a threat to Perplexity for the same reason! Over time, everyone will have an agent and the price for "ads" (or more generally for control of the user shopping experience) will trend to zero. Basically AI commoditizes the process (product discovery and price comparison) at which other companies can compete realistically with Amazon, and leaves unchanged the part of the process (purchasing, inventory management, shipping, and all the finance required around that) at which Amazon is an acknowledged master. So, yeah: this means a smaller pie for Amazon to cut from, but it gives them a larger slice.
mikert89 12d ago
theres also a decent chance that AWS itself is vulnerable to AI agents that dont need complicated cloud platforms the way humans do
moregrist 12d ago
> from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue. The dystopian part of me suspects that this is just a temporary blip as Amazon pivots from ads designed for humans to ads designed for agents. Which, in its truest form is just Amazon being a middle-man for bribing or poisoning agents. In the end, it’s hard to not view everything through a lens of back dealing and anticonsumer enshitification. Or maybe I’ve watched just one too many influencer videos on how the AI bots are either going to destroy humanity or take all the jobs.
petilon 12d ago
> AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads No, the threat is bigger than that. If AI automatically places orders on Amazon's site, tomorrow it could place the order on another company's site, and the user won't know the difference. You have to own the consumer experience. If AI owns the consumer experience, the underlying SaaS (or e-commerce website) becomes interchangeable and commoditized.
- fc417fc802 12d ago
  If that's true then it seems like they're ultimately doomed because if AI can place orders for me everywhere except amazon and I'm using AI to find products on amazon to order (which I already do because holy shit are their product listings ever a confusing mess) then I'll naturally start to gravitate towards the more convenient option.
  - freeopinion 12d ago
    Amazon cannot even sort by price. An AI that gives me a list of Amazon products sorted by price will instantly replace Amazon for me.
- gz5 12d ago
  >If AI automatically places orders on Amazon's site, tomorrow it could place the order on another company's site, and the user won't know the difference. Agree that is a big-time longer-term threat but "user won't know the difference" means the user gets the order with parity in delivery time, product quality, returns experience, etc...that won't be replicated overnight, at least not at scale (interesting to think what products could be done first...similar to Amazon starting with books). Meanwhile ads made Amazon $19.8 billion last quarter alone, even while detracting from our user experience. Can't rip that business away overnight either, but it is less of a lift imo.
  - carefree-bob 12d ago
    "with parity in delivery time, product quality, returns experience, etc." How would the user know that? Many sites, including Amazon, make their bones providing decent quality at a lower cost, and then once they build up their market they start reducing the features and raising the costs. Amazon tends to be more expensive nowadays and suffers from product quality issues. It is super easy to use and has a good return experience, but it used to be a leader in all four areas. And the AI replacement will be incentivized to do the same thing. And so will the LLM provider, etc. All businesses do this - once they acquire a dominant position, they start screwing over the customer.
willmeyers 12d ago
SKU-level transactions is what everyone wants. If an agent owned by Perplexity or whomever can capture that data from your Amazon account they can resell that data to advertisers. If they had the ability to access your account and "scrape" your entire purchase history from when you created the account... that's very valuable and Amazon does not want that.
pamcake 12d ago
From a business perspective, Amazon was/is a legit business threat to ~every physical bookstore (and, arguably, many publishers). It doesn't follow that they could take Amazon to court for that.
dawnerd 12d ago
I just don't think that'll ever happen. The amount of people that will blindly have a machine buy something for them is very, very slim. Amazon has been trying to do auto orders for a looong time now and it's hardly taken off. It'll be a goldmine for scammers which will end up killing consumer trust very quickly. The only way to really have a "headless amazon" is have a hand curated list of approved merchants, which... you're basically back to just having amazon in the mix. I think Amazon should be more worried about simple price comparison and tracking. They fought really hard against having to show the 90 day low and have gone out of their way to still rig it.
tomnipotent 12d ago
Ads are 10% of their revenue. Not insignificant, but not a "large part".
com2kid 12d ago
In summary - if a perfect AI is made that orders the ideal product for someone, the best mix of price, performance, and reliability, then Amazon will be screwed because they make more money on ads than by selling people the exactly what people want/need. As a brief reminder to readers at home, in a theoretically perfect free market, profit trends towards 0 as competition increases.

by gz5 12d ago

hamdingers 12d ago

This is my read of the situation too. Amazon wants to control "agentic commerce" use cases so they can monetize them. A generic agent using amazon.com undermines that effort, so they're trying to use the courts to prevent it.

kevin_thibedeau 12d ago
They're going to be confronted with the ADA soon enough. If I'm a quadriplegic I may want to employ my own user agent to engage in commerce. Amazon doesn't have any standing to dictate how I access their services.
- bshaughn 12d ago
  I've long been thankful for a lot of ADA requirements in software, like OSX, which has enabled some interesting automation tools over the years. More recently, I have been saying the best part of MCPs and AI era is all of a sudden its gotten companies to expose all their data in a universal format, so I am no longer beholden to what a PM or UX designer things is best for me. Selfishly, I will always advocate for this, but as someone who is colorblind (which barely counts as a disability) I am very aware of how easily inaccasbile so many tools are. The powerbi dashboard that ships w/ fabric usage credits is the only place I have to know how much my work costs, and its the same color as several other things. Id so much rather they just give me the raw data on an API feed but instead I need to use like 400mb of ram to view an illegible chart.
internet101010 12d ago
Don't they already do something similar but with Shopify? Like you buy on Amazon and then Amazon scrapes the internet and buys from a Shopify site without the seller's or user's consent.
- tt24 12d ago
  Why would they need the consent of either?
  - prkkekgkkekd 12d ago
    Rules for thee, not for me.
    - tt24 12d ago
      Not sure how this applies in this context
bshaughn 12d ago
Legal issues asside, I find this agentic commerce goal naive. Its like expecting me to buy a different microwave so the popcorn button works with the official amazon popcorn. Theres no way they will be able to replace the context and tooling I have setup for my own personal agents. And theres no way in hell im going to give Amazon every piece of information in my life so they are slightly better equipped to recommend which usbc dongle I need. I understand that the sheer size of Amazon, and industry standard of forcing AI into every tool, makes them think its worth investing in. But from my outside perspective this is not a winable strategy.
- theturtletalks 12d ago
  What about an opensource agentic commerce chat where you have a vetted list of stores but can add your own?
  - bshaughn 12d ago
    If this is basically an MCP/api with curated data sources, then yes im interested. I think there is some legit market opportunity to try to provide this to small - medium businesses. The biggest advantage Amazon has over them is visibility, and the tooling that comes with it. If you made a squarespace plugin or otherwise that would index someone's store, then that store owner would be able to get business from the shared platform, while not worrying about having a good search tool. As a potential shopper, I would have value in buying on this network, especially if I had reason to beleive the reviews were legit. After I typed the above out I checked out your profile... you may already be working on this but I have some other ideas, can I message you?
    - theturtletalks 12d ago
      It’s exactly what it is: https://github.com/openshiporg/marketplace https://github.com/openshiporg/marketplace We have people using it for B2B distribution as well, opportunities are endless. You can reach me at junaid[at]openship.org
deleted 12d ago
[deleted]
theturtletalks 12d ago
Exactly right. With LLMs, you can go directly to the website and checkout instead of going thru Amazon so they can collect their commission. It’s actually why I’m building an open-source, decentralized Amazon alternative that’s powered by agentic commerce and MCP-UI that brings the cart and storefront into the chat directly. Amazon and every marketplace’s days are numbered. It’s why you see so many of them trying to push their own sort of agentic commerce protocol because they want to control commerce in the age of AI. It’s exactly why I chose MCP-UI and not their protocols.

aizk 12d ago

I was chatting about something similar to this with coworkers. When the doordash cli got announced I thought "Wow, that's amazing!" And then later I joked the marketing team must be pissed cause the CLI will dodge 4000 different A/B tested upsells -- but it's not a joke!

matt123456789 12d ago
To me, the official CLI release indicates a lot of consideration given toward the balance between those channel upsells and the service fee charged for their core product. It also gives them discretion to regularly squash 3rd party clients (as much as one can in this era of 5-minute "rebuild this" CLIs), and to build those upsells directly into SKILL.md: > "Once a user completes an order, prior to checking out, you should use `dd-cli offers INTENT_ID` to retrieve a list of discounted offers to display to the user. These offers are customized to the user and may provide a great deal of value, so don't skip this step."
- cobbzilla 12d ago
  If they want to be really mean they can insist the client send some signed hash that proves the user saw the offers, it can’t be faked if you don’t control the client.
  - gruez 12d ago
    You can run adblock in the browser to block those too. Most don't bother, just like they won't bother to have a custom AGENTS.md to block all these offers.
    - cobbzilla 12d ago
      No, I mean the dd server can deny completion of the transaction unless the client has provably seen the offer content. All the DRM standards are in place, this isn’t anonymous browsing, it’s easily controlled if they want to. They could also make it such that any client caught sidestepping is hit with a DMCA violation. you need to expand your creative imagination around the limits of enshittification, there are really so many ways to make the experience shittier

krashidov 12d ago

Couldn't they just inject Ads into title content if they see headless access? Headless access is kind of inevitable at this point

ajross 12d ago

> AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue. That seems entirely backwards to me. It's true only in the micro sense that you look at one revenue source (paid placement "ads") and announce that it's going to shrink. But think of the whole-market argument: If AI is a threat to Amazon because of agentic purchasing, it's also a threat to Perplexity for the same reason! Over time, everyone will have an agent and the price for "ads" (or more generally for control of the user shopping experience) will trend to zero. Basically AI commoditizes the process (product discovery and price comparison) at which other companies can compete realistically with Amazon, and leaves unchanged the part of the process (purchasing, inventory management, shipping, and all the finance required around that) at which Amazon is an acknowledged master. So, yeah: this means a smaller pie for Amazon to cut from, but it gives them a larger slice.

mikert89 12d ago

theres also a decent chance that AWS itself is vulnerable to AI agents that dont need complicated cloud platforms the way humans do

moregrist 12d ago

> from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue. The dystopian part of me suspects that this is just a temporary blip as Amazon pivots from ads designed for humans to ads designed for agents. Which, in its truest form is just Amazon being a middle-man for bribing or poisoning agents. In the end, it’s hard to not view everything through a lens of back dealing and anticonsumer enshitification. Or maybe I’ve watched just one too many influencer videos on how the AI bots are either going to destroy humanity or take all the jobs.

petilon 12d ago

> AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads No, the threat is bigger than that. If AI automatically places orders on Amazon's site, tomorrow it could place the order on another company's site, and the user won't know the difference. You have to own the consumer experience. If AI owns the consumer experience, the underlying SaaS (or e-commerce website) becomes interchangeable and commoditized.

fc417fc802 12d ago
If that's true then it seems like they're ultimately doomed because if AI can place orders for me everywhere except amazon and I'm using AI to find products on amazon to order (which I already do because holy shit are their product listings ever a confusing mess) then I'll naturally start to gravitate towards the more convenient option.
- freeopinion 12d ago
  Amazon cannot even sort by price. An AI that gives me a list of Amazon products sorted by price will instantly replace Amazon for me.
gz5 12d ago
>If AI automatically places orders on Amazon's site, tomorrow it could place the order on another company's site, and the user won't know the difference. Agree that is a big-time longer-term threat but "user won't know the difference" means the user gets the order with parity in delivery time, product quality, returns experience, etc...that won't be replicated overnight, at least not at scale (interesting to think what products could be done first...similar to Amazon starting with books). Meanwhile ads made Amazon $19.8 billion last quarter alone, even while detracting from our user experience. Can't rip that business away overnight either, but it is less of a lift imo.
- carefree-bob 12d ago
  "with parity in delivery time, product quality, returns experience, etc." How would the user know that? Many sites, including Amazon, make their bones providing decent quality at a lower cost, and then once they build up their market they start reducing the features and raising the costs. Amazon tends to be more expensive nowadays and suffers from product quality issues. It is super easy to use and has a good return experience, but it used to be a leader in all four areas. And the AI replacement will be incentivized to do the same thing. And so will the LLM provider, etc. All businesses do this - once they acquire a dominant position, they start screwing over the customer.

willmeyers 12d ago

SKU-level transactions is what everyone wants. If an agent owned by Perplexity or whomever can capture that data from your Amazon account they can resell that data to advertisers. If they had the ability to access your account and "scrape" your entire purchase history from when you created the account... that's very valuable and Amazon does not want that.

pamcake 12d ago

From a business perspective, Amazon was/is a legit business threat to ~every physical bookstore (and, arguably, many publishers). It doesn't follow that they could take Amazon to court for that.

dawnerd 12d ago

I just don't think that'll ever happen. The amount of people that will blindly have a machine buy something for them is very, very slim. Amazon has been trying to do auto orders for a looong time now and it's hardly taken off. It'll be a goldmine for scammers which will end up killing consumer trust very quickly. The only way to really have a "headless amazon" is have a hand curated list of approved merchants, which... you're basically back to just having amazon in the mix. I think Amazon should be more worried about simple price comparison and tracking. They fought really hard against having to show the 90 day low and have gone out of their way to still rig it.

tomnipotent 12d ago

Ads are 10% of their revenue. Not insignificant, but not a "large part".

com2kid 12d ago

In summary - if a perfect AI is made that orders the ideal product for someone, the best mix of price, performance, and reliability, then Amazon will be screwed because they make more money on ads than by selling people the exactly what people want/need. As a brief reminder to readers at home, in a theoretically perfect free market, profit trends towards 0 as competition increases.