> Anyone know why Amazon wants AI agents to stop making purchases?

Because it bypasses their efforts to promote preferred products in the short term and, more importantly, in the long term someone else becoming the front door to purchasing also enables that actor to commodify Amazon the same way Amazon commodifies other sellers, and before long to cut out Amazon as a middleman entirely and become the marketplace where buyers purchase from a diverse array of functionally anonymous, interchangeable sellers.

> Anyone know why Amazon wants AI agents to stop making purchasess

For the same reasons Amazon intentionally removed their search box's ability to require or exclude terms and target phrases. More efficient, faster searches for YOU reduces their opportunities to shovel more "not what you're looking for right now" in front of your eyeballs to increase impulse sales of adjacent goods.

Probably a few things:

1. When you visit amazon.com looking for a product, even if you are looking for a very specific product, they'll put other products in front of you. You might end up buying one of these other products, and that might make someone more money than if you bought the product you initially planned to buy.

2. You might buy more than you initially intended if you visit the site yourself, via the "Customers Also Bought" links, and other advertising.

3. Agents aren't perfect, and it's possible that they were making ordering mistakes at (much?) higher rates than humans were doing, which was costing Amazon more processing returns or other customer service inquiries.

4. Amazon wants to control the experience of buying a product through them, from start to finish. If they can't do that, they just become a commodity product aggregation site. An agent making purchases for someone can find the same product from another retailer, perhaps with better pricing, faster shipping, a better return policy, etc.

Of course, if other sites allow agents to make purchases, and that eventually becomes the way a significant number of customers want to shop, Amazon will have to get on board.

Simplest possibility: agent-sourced purchases are incorrect and returned at a notably higher rate, perhaps even enough to be unprofitable as a category.

It would very easily allow someone to undermine their business. If you could shop at Walmart, by walking into Target it would be very easy for Target to say "here is the same item for $0.01 less"

If people find a benefit from using AI to shop on Amazon at scale then there's really no reason to keep Amazon in the loop at all. Especially for products that are high margin.

Large retailers rely on all sorts of psychological tricks and UI work to steer you to the most profitable transactions, some of which we have labelled Dark Patterns. Not just Amazon, not just online. All that is gone with agents. At least until they work out how to manipulate the agents as well as a person, most likely by buying control of the the popular agents before their competitors do.

> One theory I have is that an AI agent can more efficiently price-compare

If AI enables regular people to sleeplessly and ruthlessly exploit the market, like large companies do, it would be a really really good thing.

This is exactly what I saw as the benefit of using ChatGPT to purchase goods. Helping me find healthier options of the same item, or even the cheaper of a x number of brands for that shop.

It means ChatGPT just gives me more of just what I'm asking for rather than giving Amazon the opportunity to push something else on me.

Probably because it's taking away from their ads/sponsored business?

I think its more to do with obfuscation than simple agent buying stuff. Perplexity disguises its agents as chrome browser, and that messes up things at Amazon's end. Not saying its good or bad, but think of ad relevance, then recommendations effectiveness, placements etc. because by default an agent is going to click more and more randomly than a user.

Then, when the agent buys stuff, my guess is that returns are a higher %age (because naturally agents have no preference model so end users might not like what they purchased eventually and returned). I don't know if enough people returned for it to matter, but as a user, if an agent is making a purchase and i know its super easy to return, i won't check everything agent did, just buy and then return if I dont like it.

I don't think it's always a price comparison or margin thing at this point. Given their margins and volume, the agent purchases woudl need to be an order of magnitude more to matter on that front.

I’m sure it’s for many reasons but I guarantee that one is that they don’t get the ancillary sales. Eg I go to Amazon looking for socks, they have lots of time to show me other things I might buy. Maybe some other customers who bought socks liked these shoes etc.

If an agent can go and buy exactly and only the thing I need that is going to crush those other sales.

It’s probably because their paid advertising spots are being viewed by bots instead of humans. Amazon still charges the advertisers, since it detects the traffic as coming from a non-bot user based on the user agent.

One of Amazon's biggest growing segments is ads which agents circumvent. Owning the platform they are in a position to block and it's probably reasonable to. Google is in a much worse situation since their ads are on content they don't own - when agents go straight to the content nothing they can do really. Wonder how they'll manage - lots of YouTube videos maybe.

Because they want users to use their own agent (which obviously will maximize their own profitability).

It's an extremely effective adblock. You're no longer exposed to any recommendation algorithms or distractions. They're obligated to shut that down.

I’d guess they want to reserve the right to charge LLM vendors to use a proprietary AI purchasing process

You never want to lose direct contact with your customers. Having someone insert themselves between you and the customer is a recipe for disaster.