Angie Chua built Bobo Design Studio precisely to avoid Amazon. The Palm Springs stationery maker cultivated a small‑brand aesthetic and steered clear of the marketplace’s reseller churn — until late December, when orders started arriving from an address that ended in “@buyforme.amazon.”
She hadn’t signed up for anything. Her Shopify catalog, she later discovered, had been surfaced on Amazon’s site through a new set of features the company is quietly testing: “Shop Direct,” which lets shoppers see items sold on other merchants’ sites inside Amazon search, and “Buy For Me,” an AI agent that can actually complete a purchase on a third‑party site on the customer’s behalf.
The result: independent brands say Amazon listed — and in some cases allowed purchases of — items they never consented to sell on the marketplace, including out‑of‑stock items, discontinued products and, in one reported case, a listing that paired a sticker with a random pants photo.
What merchants are saying
Interviews and social posts collected by reporters show a pattern. A number of small retailers on platforms like Shopify, Squarespace and WooCommerce found their entire catalogs appearable on Amazon without any onboarding step. Some received multiple Buy For Me orders they only noticed after fulfilling them or being pinged by confused wholesale partners. Others worried about wholesale pricing, tax exemptions, contract clauses that bar partners from selling on Amazon, and damage to brand reputation.
“It builds distrust,” said one founder who had deliberately avoided Amazon. Another worried that exposure of wholesale pages could undermine margins or void contractual protections. Bobo Design Studio’s Chua launched a survey that gathered more than 140 responses from merchants who believed they’d been listed without permission.
Merchants describe Amazon’s approach as opt‑out rather than opt‑in. The company’s stated remedy is an email — [email protected] — merchants can use to ask to be removed.
How Buy For Me works (according to Amazon)
Amazon says Shop Direct and Buy For Me are experiments designed to help shoppers find products not sold on Amazon while driving incremental traffic to merchants. Product details — descriptions, images, prices and ratings — are pulled from public pages on brands’ sites, Amazon says, and the system checks availability and price before enabling a Buy For Me purchase. The company also says it doesn’t take a commission on Buy For Me transactions and that businesses can opt out at any time.
But vendors report mismatches: listings for items no longer sold, incorrect images, and orders placed for products that were removed from merchants’ own stores. Some merchants had to cancel orders and refund buyers after discovering the source was Amazon’s agent.
Why this is a bigger test for agentic shopping
Buy For Me sits at the center of a much larger race to build “agentic” shopping tools — AI systems that can search, compare and buy for users without hand‑holding. Amazon’s move mirrors broader industry trends: Google and other tech companies are experimenting with agentic booking and buying flows, pushing the customer experience toward convenience but away from the direct merchant relationship. See how Google has been leaning into agentic booking and commerce in its AI experiments here. At the same time, new image and multimodal models change what product pages can look like; those shifts complicate provenance and attribution for merchants (one relevant example of AI imaging work is discussed here).
Amazon itself has been aggressive about policing third‑party agents scraping its own site, sending cease‑and‑desist letters and even suing companies that it says tried to hide agent access. Yet this time the company is the one surfacing external merchants’ listings in a way some sellers call surprising — and harmful.
The business and legal headaches
Merchants flag several concrete risks.
- Contractual: brands that prohibit wholesale partners from selling on Amazon may find those relationships strained when their products appear there anyway.
- Tax and compliance: one seller reported that items from a password‑protected wholesale catalogue — designed to hide tax‑exempt pricing — became available via Buy For Me, potentially exposing the merchant to tax issues.
- Reputation: shoppers used to Amazon’s UX may assume a product is sold by Amazon, not a separate independent brand, creating confusion when shipping, returns or product quality differ.
Shopify has rolled out default protections intended to block unauthorized scraping; many merchants are adopting robots and agent policies to push back. But for small operations already stretched thin, the burden of monitoring Amazon and policing listings falls on them.
What merchants can do now
If a seller discovers their listings on Amazon through Buy For Me, Amazon says they can email [email protected] to be removed. Beyond that, merchants should: review site robots and agent policies, monitor search results on major marketplaces, and, when necessary, consult IP counsel about contracts and possible remedies.
For Amazon, the episode highlights a delicate tradeoff: agentic shopping promises frictionless discovery and extra sales — but when convenience erodes merchant consent and control, the platform may sow distrust among the very businesses it says it wants to help.
This isn’t just a PR hiccup. It’s an early test of how commerce will work when AI starts handling checkout on behalf of customers. The technology can be seamless; whether the commercial rules, disclosure practices and legal frameworks keep up is another question altogether.