AI shopping agents run into retailers that block them
Access is inconsistent and cart reservations can hold stock away from other buyers, so agents may not complete purchases reliably.
Shopping agents from Meta, Google, OpenAI and others are being promoted as personal assistants, but in practice they keep running into retailers that block them. Amazon sued Perplexity over an agent it said ignored requests to stop, and later asked Meta to remove Amazon from its Muse agent. Access is also inconsistent even where no blanket ban exists, since bot-protection systems blocked Muse from Target on some attempts and allowed it through on others. The reporter's test on The RealReal showed a further risk: an agent that bulk-added ten items to a cart would temporarily reserve them for 20 minutes, blocking other shoppers from buying them. For developers and companies building agentic commerce, retailer cooperation and bot-detection rules appear to be the main obstacles.
Why it matters
For shoppers, an agent may stop working partway through a purchase or fail to get a consistent result from one day to the next. Retailers are deciding case by case whether to let outside agents in, and some are pushing back hard. Banks are also drawing a line; JPMorgan Chase's CEO said the bank would not let outside agents access accounts because the risk is too high. Until those decisions settle, the shopping agents being promoted as personal assistants will depend on which sites choose to let them through.
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Sources
- The Verge