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Amazon wants to help you shop anywhere on the internet without ever really leaving Amazon. For small businesses, that comes at a cost.
Amazon's AI-powered Shop Direct now pulls products from more than 400,000 merchants and 100 million products into Amazon's shopping experience, according to Amazon's own announcement about the program.[1] For tens of millions of those products, its Buy for Me AI agent can go even further and complete the purchase on another retailer's website on your behalf.
But some small business owners, including Bobo Design Studio founder Angie Chua, say their products appeared on Amazon without them ever asking to be there.
Chua has deliberately avoided selling her stationery products on Amazon. She was understandably surprised when a customer told her that Bobo Design Studio products were showing up there.
In a video Chua posted showing what she found, she searches for her own company inside Amazon and finds its products available through Buy for Me.
“I did not authorize to put my products on Amazon,” Chua says in the video.
Chua said she started digging through previous orders and found purchases associated with @buyforme.amazon email addresses.
Some of the Amazon listings were also a mess. One Bobo vinyl sticker was paired with an image of pants, while other listings showed products the company no longer sold.
Chua wasn't alone. Modern Retail spoke with four other merchants who said Amazon listed their products without permission. Subsequently, Amazon told the publication that businesses could opt out by contacting the company and said it had received positive feedback about the programs.
Amazon has since made participation more formal. Merchants can now provide product feeds that keep inventory, pricing, and other information synced with Shop Direct.
For a small business, getting you onto its website can mean more than one sale. It can lead to repeat customers, email signups, and valuable insights into how people shop.
Buy for Me puts Amazon in the middle and gives businesses less control over how their products reach customers. Chua chose not to sell on Amazon, yet Bobo Design Studio products still appeared there.
The business gets the sale and handles the order, but Amazon gets a place in a customer relationship it was never invited into.
That’s what worries Chua. In a follow-up video about the controversy, she explained that independent businesses spend years building their websites, communities, organic traffic, and email lists to maintain direct relationships with customers.
Buy for Me shows where AI shopping could be headed: Amazon doesn’t have to sell you the product to become the place where you discover it and decide to buy it.
And whoever controls that shopping journey gets a valuable window into what you want, consider buying, and ultimately purchase.
Want an indication of how detailed Amazon's understanding of shoppers can become? Apparently, it might even know what your butt looks like.
A viral post this week prompted people to investigate Amazon's “About you” shopping data, where Amazon displays assumptions it has made based on customers' activity.
As TechCrunch reported, one shopper discovered that Amazon had inferred that she “has flat buttocks,” apparently after she purchased butt-scrunch leggings.
Other users found considerably less insulting assumptions about their hobbies, possessions, clothing preferences, and interests.
That said, every search, click, product comparison, and purchase can help a platform understand you and build a profile.
AI shopping agents can expand that picture beyond purchases made from one retailer. For example, if an Amazon AI agent increasingly becomes the tool you use to find and buy products sold elsewhere on the web, Amazon can remain part of shopping journeys that previously might have happened entirely outside its ecosystem.
AI companies increasingly want their assistants to do things for you, not just answer questions. Shopping is one such target because an agent that understands what you like could theoretically search stores and eventually make purchases without requiring you to visit every retailer yourself.
That's wonderfully convenient, but it also creates a new gatekeeper.
Instead of competing to get you onto their websites through Google, social media, advertising, or word of mouth, businesses compete to be recommended by whatever AI agent sits between you and the internet. AI agents can also claim credit for sales it didn't actually generate.
As AI agents compete to control the relationship between shoppers and sellers, small businesses like Bobo Design Studio are trying to hold onto their customers.
As Chua put it, “Nothing is free. The currency for Amazon is our data.”
Data removal service that covers 89–986 sites and re-scans every quarter to catch anything that reappears
Sends quarterly privacy reports showing what info was found, which brokers had your data, and how long each removal took
Includes email masking so you can share a stand-in address instead of your real one
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