Most manufacturers have restrictions on where retailers can sell their product for exactly this reason. The fact that Amazon is doing this is just going to result in a lot of unnecessary billable hours.
Another reason they do not allow it is because if something is popular Amazon will make their own private label version.
> Through “Buy For Me,” customers were placing orders for Chua’s products on Amazon.com to be fulfilled through Chua’s Shopify account. Chua’s products have since been removed — she contacted Amazon at branddirect@amazon.com to opt out, per the company’s FAQ page for sellers — but Chua said other small online merchants like herself could be unknowingly opted into Amazon’s “Buy For Me” program.
It seems pretty likely that no one would even know that this exists in order to opt out of this until at least some purchases have been made. This isn't even "opting out" in the traditional (and already user-hostile) way of doing something by default that's orthogonal to what the user signed up for; it's a lot closer to the whole "shadow profile" thing Facebook does where the account exists without anyone signing up in the first place.
No - the obvious play here is for Amazon to undercut the original vendors by 15%, sell at a loss until all of the sales go through Amazon, and then pressure the vendors into cutting their pricing and becoming suppliers subservient to and dependent on Amazon, allowing Amazon to become a middle-man dipping into the revenue stream.
This actually happened to some restaurants who found their service on DoorDash. The restaurant owners were able to make a fine profit out of DoorDash’s arbitrage scheme.
Don’t worry. If Amazon decided to undercut by selling at a loss, they would absolutely put it in their ToS that retailers cannot exploit this loophole and they would sue to enforce their ToS.
These manufacturers never signed any ToS, and the most Amazon could do to retaliate would be to de-list the product that they never asked to be listed in the first place.
How about a DMCA notice for Amazon accessing and using the websites of the actual sellers against their terms? If we're not going to get rid of that law it should at least be applied fairly.
I am a bit confused here. First this reminded my of the traditional news sites trying to opt out of Google search, but with the very big difference that unlike Google's users never consuming the original site adds or subscriptions, in this case it is still your product sale, just through a new channel.
And yes. I do see how it can be a slippery slope leading to dependence on (paid) Amazon ranking and being roped into their (exploitative) ecosystem.
I can also see how this could cut into franchise or exclusive territory deals, or how this can disrupt your marketing campaigns.
But in the end, is this really different from people selling your products, new or used, on eBay? And would the actions needed to stop this maybe be worse than the actual disease?
Wouldn't this be violating copyrights left and right? Presumably most of these listings have pictures and I'd be surprised if Amazon were asking permission to reproduce them. Would the same apply to item descriptions...?
No. The producer of a good has no copyright in images made of that good by someone else. Ordinarily, the photographer holds the copyright to an image, unless it was a work for hire.
So if I buy a thing, take a photo of it, then use my photo to accompany a listing for that thing, the manufacturer of that thing has no recourse in copyright law.
Losing brand control (IP) and lack of control over your sales channels is a big problem for traders who want to comply with dozens of regulations, exclusions and restrictions required by manufacturers, other sellers, trademark owners etc. The article also mentions means tax and customs compliance problems, but this also affects other trade law related issues, like competition law problems (antitrust). It is surprisingly easy to breach these even for tiny sellers. You don't want exposure to these kinds of sales. It is never just selling, it is always also complying with lots of new laws, And rest assured, Amazon bots will not work that out for you.
And now, these guys have to scrutinize the email orders as for their source because all the compliance process they have built in their webshops or wherever they advertised, will simply be bypassed by Amazon bots.
Terrible idea.
Odd story. If you strip out the "Amazon" and "AI" stuff, the core seems to be that there's a tech company offering a service called Buy For Me which crawls various merchants who operate their own storefronts, lists the products they find for Buy For Me's users, and have a button the users can press which...buys the product.
Which is a little odd, and the value is questionable, but fundamentally seems...fine? You're a merchant, you're selling pencils on the internet, people are buying your pencils from you. And historically the way this might have been built would be something like a desktop application that users install, and which then goes and loads websites, displays them, fills in payment info, etc. Which of course is exactly what the web browser does already.
And all of the complaints about how it should be opt-in also feel odd. If you install WooCommerce and put a storefront up on the public internet, you've pretty obviously opted in to "selling your products on the internet". You don't need to tell Firefox that it's okay for people to use it to buy your stuff!
Of course, this isn't a desktop app, it's agentic AI run by Amazon, which certainly makes it feel different, but I'm not entirely sure how different it should make our analysis.
But also, the story raises a bunch of interesting questions and then doesn't answer any of them:
> Chua also received at least several orders for products that were either out of stock or no longer existed on her website.
How exactly did this happen? The story is that the orders are being placed through the normal storefront, right? So how exactly?
Or:
> Gorin sells wholesale through a password-protected section of her website, where retailers must submit resale or exemption certificates so orders are properly exempted from sales tax. She said she was still able to complete a “Buy for Me” purchase of a product pulled from her wholesale site despite never opting into the program — a scenario that could expose her business to tax liability if individual shoppers were able to place tax-exempt orders. Gorin also worries that surfacing wholesale pricing could undermine profit margins, allow competitors to undercut her prices or bypass minimum order requirements designed to keep wholesale sales viable.
That's just begging for an explanation. Is Amazon is somehow using stolen credentials to obtain price information? Or is Goren mistaken and the info isn't password protected at all? (And if not, why not?)
I'd also be interested in unpacking a bit more the legal and contractual implications of agreements like Mochi Kids has signed. The brand apparently doesn't allow its products on Amazon, and doesn't allow partners like Mochi Kids to sell on Amazon, but...Michi Kids isn't? Mechanically someone is buying the products at retail and effectively relisting them. Which...I dunno, feels legal? Is any agreement actually being violated here? Does the brand have a course of action? Does Mochi Kids have an actual legal obligation to opt out? Does Amazon have a legal obligation to let vendors opt out? Is Amazon legally buying anything from Mochi Kids, or is the customer the person using Amazon? Given the payment info being used is the customer's, I'm not sure Amazon has a commercial relationship with the brand or the vendor?
And so on. It feels like too much of the story is being carried by it being about Amazon and AI, which means the author felt fine just glossing over the details.
"Fundamentally fine"? How do you think Amazon would react to someone scraping their marketplace and posting the inventory under their own service? Unless the answer is "they'd be perfectly happy to have to opt out individually in each case", that's a double standard. The only reason they wouldn't actually need to care about this is because they have comparatively inexhaustive resources to be able to shut this sort of thing down with a sledgehammer without having to risk meaningful consequences rather than what they're telling sellers to do, which is to ask nicely to stop being included, and that's a sign of an unhealthy ecosystem where competition is non-existent.
I have bought items from AliExpress which somehow arrived from an Amazon warehouse, unexpectedly quickly. The price was right and I have no other complaints, so I think it does happen.
> Which is a little odd, and the value is questionable, but fundamentally seems...fine? You're a merchant, you're selling pencils on the internet, people are buying your pencils from you.
Why not apply your exact "its fine" standards to Amazon too ? Standards go BOTH ways, after all.
> In November, Amazon sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity over its new Comet browser, which lets users ask an AI agent to find and buy items on Amazon. In a statement, Amazon said third-party shopping agents should “operate openly and respect service provider decisions” on whether or not to participate.
These people want Amazon to "respect service provider decisions" - just like Amazon demands of other people.
Yeah, seems like there’s a big fight brewing over losing the status quo of having control of how humans interact with stuff, as agents come along and make it so we don’t need to wind our way through the digital ad mazes they’ve constructed to do things.
But the incumbents who don’t want to allow this seem destined to lose, this is a tsunami coming, where this is just obviously how things will be done in the future once performance is good enough, and any group who tries to force customers into the old way is just not going to succeed for one reason or another. This is just how the market is shifting.
>Which is a little odd, and the value is questionable, but fundamentally seems...fine?
1. Brand management is strict for a reason. You don't want some third party pretending to represent you and suddenly they become malicious or simply get hacked and have their customers (and indirectly, your customers) assosiswte you with frustration and danger. Or even something completely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things but a PR nightmare. Like having Nintendo products in a list next to some Magnum condoms.
2. There's subtle issues with making things "too convenient" to buy. Trackers and affiliates get frustrated, so it might make you less money in the long term. You might have related items to tempt buyers to buy more so spending goes down. Less users accounts (be it an email list, curation algorithms, or following on social media) weaken outreach for future holiday deals.
And those are 2 points when not considering a trillion dollar tech giant and the Ai concerns.
If I were a merchant and I was bothered by this, I’d start figuring out how to exploit it. Ask your developers to code in the ability to detect the AI buyer (email address is a dead giveaway for now) and give them higher prices. Oh, you have an automated buy-bot? I smell opportunity.
Yeah, this is structurally no different than hiring an assistant to shop for you.
The complaint isn't a moral one. It's fundamentally a trademark dispute. Manufacturers of goods want control about how their products are presented to consumers. Hermès doesn't want their stuff on the shelves at TJ-Max because it "dilutes their brand" or whatever.
Unfortunately trademark law doesn't speak to AI Agents, which is why there's a tech angle here. This is likely going to need to be solved with legislation.
> this is structurally no different than hiring an assistant to shop for you
In my opinion it's fundamentally not, because when you hire an assistant, you're hiring them with the intent to have them buy the product from the merchant.
Here, it would be like if you went to your local Safeway or other supermarket and there was a man standing at one of those sample carts who said "Hey, what you think of these papayas?" They're good, you look at them and decide you want two. "Great, I'll go in the back and get it." They disappear and come back with the papayas.
What's different:
1. You probably don't know where the papaya came from. Your intent in buying papayas didn't start with a clear understanding of the whole transaction.
2. You didn't interact with the merchant. If you want support, you have to go through the supermarket.
3. Whether you can file a credit card dispute is questionable. You likely won't win a dispute saying "I bought these and they're bad." You paid for a personal shopper, not a product. They substantially complied with their end of the transaction. You can't reliably dispute your instacart order saying "The papayas were disgusting." Instacart didn't sell you papayas, they sold you shopping services.
4. The merchant didn't sell to your email, they sold to some Amazon email. Good luck getting tracking details or getting customer support to talk to you directly. Good luck with returns.
5. Either Amazon is giving out your real credit card number (!) or using a virtual card. If it's the former, they've just invented credit card fraud as a service: you really going to trust Amazon's AI to hand out your card details safely? If it's the latter, you're probably going to get billed separately from the merchant charging you, which means Amazon is a middleman for refunds and payment issues.
In November I ordered a nozzle that I needed, which I knew had been discontinued. I ordered from a small seller, thinking they might still have some in stock. Turns out, they never even charged my card (probably because they don't have one and never will). I have been unable to get in touch with them about the order. I suspect this is very common, especially with drop shipping.
If Amazon charged me up front but they were not charged, that's outrageous. They don't even have a way for me to prove I didn't get my item (how could they?). Or will they mysteriously charge me at some point in the future? Who knows!
To add to this. Having a personal shopper is not new. Net-a-Porter for example do it. But you are paying for the personal shopper and the brands have a closer connection to their customers.
> the brands have a closer connection to their customers
That's... not a thing though. No such thing as "brand rights" [1] beyond stuff like trademark, which clearly doesn't apply here. In particular there's no inherent recognition of a manufacturers ability to control what happens to downstream goods. Stuff is stuff, if you sell stuff the people you sell it to can sell it too.
[1] Nor do we really want there to be? I mean, I get that this seems bad because ZOMG AMZN, but in general do we actually want to be handing more market control to manufacturers vs. middlemen and consumers?
> No such thing as "brand rights" [1] beyond stuff like trademark, which clearly doesn't apply here.
I don't disagree with you on a personal opinion side, but the more expensive brands have a snobbery about who they sell to. To me it seems less about quality and more about "I'm rich" app style of fashion.
It's not bad because ZOMG AMZN, it's bad because *Amazon is a monopoly*, and thus anything they do to take more control should be treated with extreme suspicion.
As the source article covers, some manufacturers routinely ensure this kind of closer connection through contractual promises from authorized retailers. (Obviously any individual person who buys a product can still resell it, but for things like clothes consumers widely understand this to be a separate "second-hand market".) Amazon invests a lot of effort themselves in the consumer experience, they understand very well that stuff isn't just stuff and it matters how you sell it.
But this is literally the point of MCF: third-party logistics for selling off-Amazon. All these brands chose not to sell on Amazon for one reason or another and yet, without explicit opt-in, were being surfaced on a marketplace they didn’t want to be on. If I send a video through gmail that doesn’t mean I want it on YouTube.
It is scumbags expanding on their nasty ways. Now watch the vampires at Amazon extend their undercut-and-absorb techniques on every single web shop, whether the operators like it or not.
Didn’t Amazon send a cease and desist to someone for doing almost the same thing? I think they had some kind of browser plug-in that could shop for you on Amazon.
When Amazon can buy stuff on your own website thats out of stock for wholesale prices without your knowledge, it's time to get your shit together.
Your shop software is at least misconfigured.
When you really lose trust from your partners because officially announced things Amazon does, like adding your products to their shop system, then your partners have no trust in you at all.
When you don't want that Amazon sells your products, cancel the orders you get from them. Add a link to the real shop and a explaination why to the cancel mail.
It could all be so easy.
And this are just the things everyone could do. Delivering doubled prices to AI crawlers would be a advanced thing.
"Amazon announced it" in some back alley press report and certainly not in a proactive outreach way to tell these folks they were listing their products. At the very least there's a trademark issue here because these sellers in no way gave Amazon permission to reuse the images and descriptions of their products.
If I announce in my local paper (you get to guess which one) that you'll be throwing a party outside your house, I don't think you'll be on the side of "just tell them to go away and my neighbors will totally understand it wasn't really me"
> “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.
Using images of something you are selling is nominative use of the trademark. Whether their actual listings contains something that falls outside the nominative use test I don't know.
But at the end of the day you can't stop someone from reselling your stuff no matter how much you hate it, that has been clearly established by the First Sale Doctrine.
> If I announce in my local paper (you get to guess which one) that you'll be throwing a party outside your house, I don't think you'll be on the side of "just tell them to go away and my neighbors will totally understand it wasn't really me"
The comparison here would be that you are selling tickets to a party outside your house, which I don't think anyone would bat an eye at if the local newspaper announces?
> When Amazon can buy stuff on your own website thats out of stock for wholesale prices without your knowledge, it's time to get your shit together. Your shop software is at least misconfigured.
I really wish the article had dug into that more, because it made very little sense.
> Delivering doubled prices to AI crawlers would be a advanced thing.
Doubling prices to the AI now means you're product shows up twice as expensive on Amazon. Nobody is comparing Amazon to your site directly, they're comparing your product on Amazon to the next item on Amazon. Now instead of this person going to Google to find your product, they're skipping your product entirely.
That is, if I go to Amazon and search "Krater23 Widget" and don't find it, I might search elsewhere. If I find it and see it's outrageously priced, I'm probably no longer buying it.
What a bunch of BS. Once I buy a product I can resell it elsewhere. That's how ownership works. I do not need "permission" for this, beyond that guaranteed by the legal system, and exceptions such as export restrictions notwithstanding. There is a term for this that currently eludes me (first sale doctrine is a similar concept but not exactly.)
If I was a seller, I'd probably find this a good thing --- Amazon is effectively giving me more customers for free.
Overtones designed to stoke outrage aside, this is very much in line with what the original vision of the Web was about. Amazon's tech here is acting as the user agent. (It happens to be that this UA that operates on/with the data that is supplied by some far-off website (the vendor's) is a UA that is itself presented in a web browser and accepts commands that way, and ferries them off the user's local device instead of processing the commands in right there e.g. with a native binary.)
This is a win for user control over how they interact with content on the Web.
It is reasonable to be very skeptical of Amazon AI to act wholly and transparently in the end user's interest, as was the 'original vision' of a user agent. Frankly, to be otherwise requires a level of naivety that ignores the common thread through Amazon's entire history.
If user agents didn’t exist and were invented today, with the same implementation and use pattern that they currently do, would anyone call them a user agent?
I’m fairly confident that 95%+ of human users on the internet don’t even know what a user agent is, and it’s controlled by parties other than the user.
It’s not a win for user control if only a extremely small niche of users are able to take advantage of it
Crazy take. If you could control the UA I would agree with you, but this "user agent" is totally controlled by Amazon. So it's not a user agent at all - it's in fact an Amazon agent and the inevitable direction here is that Amazon will use this leverage to make itself more money, likely at the expense of the user.
I agree, even if you say that my browser is a user agent using Amazon that's also a user agent, it's a real stretch to say that it's giving me any control at all.
My browser speaks TLS and HTTP for me. Maybe it talks if I'm low vision. Maybe it adjusts the page to be more visually appealing. What is Amazon doing? They're using the same interface that I am. They're completing an identical transaction to me. I'm maybe sure I could sit down with a sufficiently large piece of paper and a sufficiently advanced calculator and crunch the numbers to speak TLS (for a packet or two, at least). Not enough to complete a transaction, though.
But I can confidently place an online order. There's no control that Amazon can offer. In fact, they're essentially just giving me a rebranded interface to perform the same action I can perform on another page.
Just because it's a service doesn't make it a user agent.
Most manufacturers have restrictions on where retailers can sell their product for exactly this reason. The fact that Amazon is doing this is just going to result in a lot of unnecessary billable hours.
Another reason they do not allow it is because if something is popular Amazon will make their own private label version.
Completely irresponsible behavior.
Those are only in the case of specific contracts, but Amazon did not enter into any contract with the manufacturers.
Seling something you bought is completely legal and perfectly normal.
> Through “Buy For Me,” customers were placing orders for Chua’s products on Amazon.com to be fulfilled through Chua’s Shopify account. Chua’s products have since been removed — she contacted Amazon at branddirect@amazon.com to opt out, per the company’s FAQ page for sellers — but Chua said other small online merchants like herself could be unknowingly opted into Amazon’s “Buy For Me” program.
It seems pretty likely that no one would even know that this exists in order to opt out of this until at least some purchases have been made. This isn't even "opting out" in the traditional (and already user-hostile) way of doing something by default that's orthogonal to what the user signed up for; it's a lot closer to the whole "shadow profile" thing Facebook does where the account exists without anyone signing up in the first place.
Is this like when food delivery places started offering fake web sites for local restaurants without their permission?
This seems like the same play.
Yep. Up next: Amazon will mark the items up 15%.
No - the obvious play here is for Amazon to undercut the original vendors by 15%, sell at a loss until all of the sales go through Amazon, and then pressure the vendors into cutting their pricing and becoming suppliers subservient to and dependent on Amazon, allowing Amazon to become a middle-man dipping into the revenue stream.
But then brands could buy their own products back for cheaper and just get a real life infinite money glitch?
This actually happened to some restaurants who found their service on DoorDash. The restaurant owners were able to make a fine profit out of DoorDash’s arbitrage scheme.
Indeed! Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23216852
Don’t worry. If Amazon decided to undercut by selling at a loss, they would absolutely put it in their ToS that retailers cannot exploit this loophole and they would sue to enforce their ToS.
Retailers could put into their TOS that they are exempt from those clauses when buying things bought from them.
I like this. “By purchasing from us you agree that you cannot enforce your ridiculous terms of service and if you try, you also owe us a pony.”
These manufacturers never signed any ToS, and the most Amazon could do to retaliate would be to de-list the product that they never asked to be listed in the first place.
When the manufacturer buys their own product via Amazon’s service they would become subject to their TOS as a buyer.
It looks like a good idea, this works better for refrigerators than pizza.
It is a data play. Which shops/product lines/customer segments can we take over profitably.
This should lead to anti trust.
How about a DMCA notice for Amazon accessing and using the websites of the actual sellers against their terms? If we're not going to get rid of that law it should at least be applied fairly.
I am a bit confused here. First this reminded my of the traditional news sites trying to opt out of Google search, but with the very big difference that unlike Google's users never consuming the original site adds or subscriptions, in this case it is still your product sale, just through a new channel.
And yes. I do see how it can be a slippery slope leading to dependence on (paid) Amazon ranking and being roped into their (exploitative) ecosystem.
I can also see how this could cut into franchise or exclusive territory deals, or how this can disrupt your marketing campaigns.
But in the end, is this really different from people selling your products, new or used, on eBay? And would the actions needed to stop this maybe be worse than the actual disease?
I can see both sides. Not sure which eay I lean.
Wouldn't this be violating copyrights left and right? Presumably most of these listings have pictures and I'd be surprised if Amazon were asking permission to reproduce them. Would the same apply to item descriptions...?
No. The producer of a good has no copyright in images made of that good by someone else. Ordinarily, the photographer holds the copyright to an image, unless it was a work for hire.
So if I buy a thing, take a photo of it, then use my photo to accompany a listing for that thing, the manufacturer of that thing has no recourse in copyright law.
Unless the design of the object is copyrightable (which it often is!) in which case the photo is a derivative work.
Search engines would have been violating copyright for the last 20 years.
Could someone explain to me - for the seller what's the downside? Isn't this just more sales? Isn't that positive?
Losing brand control (IP) and lack of control over your sales channels is a big problem for traders who want to comply with dozens of regulations, exclusions and restrictions required by manufacturers, other sellers, trademark owners etc. The article also mentions means tax and customs compliance problems, but this also affects other trade law related issues, like competition law problems (antitrust). It is surprisingly easy to breach these even for tiny sellers. You don't want exposure to these kinds of sales. It is never just selling, it is always also complying with lots of new laws, And rest assured, Amazon bots will not work that out for you. And now, these guys have to scrutinize the email orders as for their source because all the compliance process they have built in their webshops or wherever they advertised, will simply be bypassed by Amazon bots. Terrible idea.
Thank you!
Odd story. If you strip out the "Amazon" and "AI" stuff, the core seems to be that there's a tech company offering a service called Buy For Me which crawls various merchants who operate their own storefronts, lists the products they find for Buy For Me's users, and have a button the users can press which...buys the product.
Which is a little odd, and the value is questionable, but fundamentally seems...fine? You're a merchant, you're selling pencils on the internet, people are buying your pencils from you. And historically the way this might have been built would be something like a desktop application that users install, and which then goes and loads websites, displays them, fills in payment info, etc. Which of course is exactly what the web browser does already.
And all of the complaints about how it should be opt-in also feel odd. If you install WooCommerce and put a storefront up on the public internet, you've pretty obviously opted in to "selling your products on the internet". You don't need to tell Firefox that it's okay for people to use it to buy your stuff!
Of course, this isn't a desktop app, it's agentic AI run by Amazon, which certainly makes it feel different, but I'm not entirely sure how different it should make our analysis.
But also, the story raises a bunch of interesting questions and then doesn't answer any of them:
> Chua also received at least several orders for products that were either out of stock or no longer existed on her website.
How exactly did this happen? The story is that the orders are being placed through the normal storefront, right? So how exactly?
Or:
> Gorin sells wholesale through a password-protected section of her website, where retailers must submit resale or exemption certificates so orders are properly exempted from sales tax. She said she was still able to complete a “Buy for Me” purchase of a product pulled from her wholesale site despite never opting into the program — a scenario that could expose her business to tax liability if individual shoppers were able to place tax-exempt orders. Gorin also worries that surfacing wholesale pricing could undermine profit margins, allow competitors to undercut her prices or bypass minimum order requirements designed to keep wholesale sales viable.
That's just begging for an explanation. Is Amazon is somehow using stolen credentials to obtain price information? Or is Goren mistaken and the info isn't password protected at all? (And if not, why not?)
I'd also be interested in unpacking a bit more the legal and contractual implications of agreements like Mochi Kids has signed. The brand apparently doesn't allow its products on Amazon, and doesn't allow partners like Mochi Kids to sell on Amazon, but...Michi Kids isn't? Mechanically someone is buying the products at retail and effectively relisting them. Which...I dunno, feels legal? Is any agreement actually being violated here? Does the brand have a course of action? Does Mochi Kids have an actual legal obligation to opt out? Does Amazon have a legal obligation to let vendors opt out? Is Amazon legally buying anything from Mochi Kids, or is the customer the person using Amazon? Given the payment info being used is the customer's, I'm not sure Amazon has a commercial relationship with the brand or the vendor?
And so on. It feels like too much of the story is being carried by it being about Amazon and AI, which means the author felt fine just glossing over the details.
"Fundamentally fine"? How do you think Amazon would react to someone scraping their marketplace and posting the inventory under their own service? Unless the answer is "they'd be perfectly happy to have to opt out individually in each case", that's a double standard. The only reason they wouldn't actually need to care about this is because they have comparatively inexhaustive resources to be able to shut this sort of thing down with a sledgehammer without having to risk meaningful consequences rather than what they're telling sellers to do, which is to ask nicely to stop being included, and that's a sign of an unhealthy ecosystem where competition is non-existent.
As someone else noted, Amazon sent a cease and desist letter when someone tried more-or-less the same thing on them (https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-perplex...), so it's absolutely a double standard, yes.
But that doesn't answer the question of what rights vendors actually have here (much less what rights they should have).
copyright on pictures, text descriptions, use of their brand names?
I have bought items from AliExpress which somehow arrived from an Amazon warehouse, unexpectedly quickly. The price was right and I have no other complaints, so I think it does happen.
> Which is a little odd, and the value is questionable, but fundamentally seems...fine? You're a merchant, you're selling pencils on the internet, people are buying your pencils from you.
Why not apply your exact "its fine" standards to Amazon too ? Standards go BOTH ways, after all.
> In November, Amazon sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity over its new Comet browser, which lets users ask an AI agent to find and buy items on Amazon. In a statement, Amazon said third-party shopping agents should “operate openly and respect service provider decisions” on whether or not to participate.
These people want Amazon to "respect service provider decisions" - just like Amazon demands of other people.
I mean, I'm inclined to think Amazon was wrong over the Comet browser thing too, so...
Yeah, seems like there’s a big fight brewing over losing the status quo of having control of how humans interact with stuff, as agents come along and make it so we don’t need to wind our way through the digital ad mazes they’ve constructed to do things.
But the incumbents who don’t want to allow this seem destined to lose, this is a tsunami coming, where this is just obviously how things will be done in the future once performance is good enough, and any group who tries to force customers into the old way is just not going to succeed for one reason or another. This is just how the market is shifting.
>Which is a little odd, and the value is questionable, but fundamentally seems...fine?
1. Brand management is strict for a reason. You don't want some third party pretending to represent you and suddenly they become malicious or simply get hacked and have their customers (and indirectly, your customers) assosiswte you with frustration and danger. Or even something completely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things but a PR nightmare. Like having Nintendo products in a list next to some Magnum condoms.
2. There's subtle issues with making things "too convenient" to buy. Trackers and affiliates get frustrated, so it might make you less money in the long term. You might have related items to tempt buyers to buy more so spending goes down. Less users accounts (be it an email list, curation algorithms, or following on social media) weaken outreach for future holiday deals.
And those are 2 points when not considering a trillion dollar tech giant and the Ai concerns.
What you described in the first bit is essentially what the Shop app does (but in clear partnership with the retailers).
If I were a merchant and I was bothered by this, I’d start figuring out how to exploit it. Ask your developers to code in the ability to detect the AI buyer (email address is a dead giveaway for now) and give them higher prices. Oh, you have an automated buy-bot? I smell opportunity.
If you strip out the Microsoft and Internet Explorer there was just some rando tech company giving away a free as in beer browser license. No biggie.
Yeah, this is structurally no different than hiring an assistant to shop for you.
The complaint isn't a moral one. It's fundamentally a trademark dispute. Manufacturers of goods want control about how their products are presented to consumers. Hermès doesn't want their stuff on the shelves at TJ-Max because it "dilutes their brand" or whatever.
Unfortunately trademark law doesn't speak to AI Agents, which is why there's a tech angle here. This is likely going to need to be solved with legislation.
> this is structurally no different than hiring an assistant to shop for you
In my opinion it's fundamentally not, because when you hire an assistant, you're hiring them with the intent to have them buy the product from the merchant.
Here, it would be like if you went to your local Safeway or other supermarket and there was a man standing at one of those sample carts who said "Hey, what you think of these papayas?" They're good, you look at them and decide you want two. "Great, I'll go in the back and get it." They disappear and come back with the papayas.
What's different:
1. You probably don't know where the papaya came from. Your intent in buying papayas didn't start with a clear understanding of the whole transaction.
2. You didn't interact with the merchant. If you want support, you have to go through the supermarket.
3. Whether you can file a credit card dispute is questionable. You likely won't win a dispute saying "I bought these and they're bad." You paid for a personal shopper, not a product. They substantially complied with their end of the transaction. You can't reliably dispute your instacart order saying "The papayas were disgusting." Instacart didn't sell you papayas, they sold you shopping services.
4. The merchant didn't sell to your email, they sold to some Amazon email. Good luck getting tracking details or getting customer support to talk to you directly. Good luck with returns.
5. Either Amazon is giving out your real credit card number (!) or using a virtual card. If it's the former, they've just invented credit card fraud as a service: you really going to trust Amazon's AI to hand out your card details safely? If it's the latter, you're probably going to get billed separately from the merchant charging you, which means Amazon is a middleman for refunds and payment issues.
In November I ordered a nozzle that I needed, which I knew had been discontinued. I ordered from a small seller, thinking they might still have some in stock. Turns out, they never even charged my card (probably because they don't have one and never will). I have been unable to get in touch with them about the order. I suspect this is very common, especially with drop shipping.
If Amazon charged me up front but they were not charged, that's outrageous. They don't even have a way for me to prove I didn't get my item (how could they?). Or will they mysteriously charge me at some point in the future? Who knows!
To add to this. Having a personal shopper is not new. Net-a-Porter for example do it. But you are paying for the personal shopper and the brands have a closer connection to their customers.
So I agree, it's very different.
> the brands have a closer connection to their customers
That's... not a thing though. No such thing as "brand rights" [1] beyond stuff like trademark, which clearly doesn't apply here. In particular there's no inherent recognition of a manufacturers ability to control what happens to downstream goods. Stuff is stuff, if you sell stuff the people you sell it to can sell it too.
[1] Nor do we really want there to be? I mean, I get that this seems bad because ZOMG AMZN, but in general do we actually want to be handing more market control to manufacturers vs. middlemen and consumers?
> No such thing as "brand rights" [1] beyond stuff like trademark, which clearly doesn't apply here.
I don't disagree with you on a personal opinion side, but the more expensive brands have a snobbery about who they sell to. To me it seems less about quality and more about "I'm rich" app style of fashion.
It's not bad because ZOMG AMZN, it's bad because *Amazon is a monopoly*, and thus anything they do to take more control should be treated with extreme suspicion.
As the source article covers, some manufacturers routinely ensure this kind of closer connection through contractual promises from authorized retailers. (Obviously any individual person who buys a product can still resell it, but for things like clothes consumers widely understand this to be a separate "second-hand market".) Amazon invests a lot of effort themselves in the consumer experience, they understand very well that stuff isn't just stuff and it matters how you sell it.
Thank you for this careful comment.
This is like inverse drop shipping.
Bet these merchants already agreed to this by signing up for Amazon MCF with Shopify.
Evil amazon dont list my products but pls still fulfill my orders.
But this is literally the point of MCF: third-party logistics for selling off-Amazon. All these brands chose not to sell on Amazon for one reason or another and yet, without explicit opt-in, were being surfaced on a marketplace they didn’t want to be on. If I send a video through gmail that doesn’t mean I want it on YouTube.
Remember when AI was supposed to cure cancer?
It is scumbags expanding on their nasty ways. Now watch the vampires at Amazon extend their undercut-and-absorb techniques on every single web shop, whether the operators like it or not.
Didn’t Amazon send a cease and desist to someone for doing almost the same thing? I think they had some kind of browser plug-in that could shop for you on Amazon.
Given that the feature this replaces/competes with was called "Shop Direct"...
I'm really sad this one couldn't be "Slop Direct"
When Amazon can buy stuff on your own website thats out of stock for wholesale prices without your knowledge, it's time to get your shit together. Your shop software is at least misconfigured.
When you really lose trust from your partners because officially announced things Amazon does, like adding your products to their shop system, then your partners have no trust in you at all.
When you don't want that Amazon sells your products, cancel the orders you get from them. Add a link to the real shop and a explaination why to the cancel mail.
It could all be so easy. And this are just the things everyone could do. Delivering doubled prices to AI crawlers would be a advanced thing.
"Amazon announced it" in some back alley press report and certainly not in a proactive outreach way to tell these folks they were listing their products. At the very least there's a trademark issue here because these sellers in no way gave Amazon permission to reuse the images and descriptions of their products.
If I announce in my local paper (you get to guess which one) that you'll be throwing a party outside your house, I don't think you'll be on the side of "just tell them to go away and my neighbors will totally understand it wasn't really me"
Reminiscent of the Vogon plans for the highway through Arthur Dent's house being on display in Alpha Centauri for 50 Earth years.
> “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.
Using images of something you are selling is nominative use of the trademark. Whether their actual listings contains something that falls outside the nominative use test I don't know.
But at the end of the day you can't stop someone from reselling your stuff no matter how much you hate it, that has been clearly established by the First Sale Doctrine.
> If I announce in my local paper (you get to guess which one) that you'll be throwing a party outside your house, I don't think you'll be on the side of "just tell them to go away and my neighbors will totally understand it wasn't really me"
The comparison here would be that you are selling tickets to a party outside your house, which I don't think anyone would bat an eye at if the local newspaper announces?
>there's a trademark issue here because these sellers in no way gave Amazon permission to reuse the images and descriptions of their products
Good luck claiming damages with an "and then I sold more of my things at the advertised price" kind of argument.
> When Amazon can buy stuff on your own website thats out of stock for wholesale prices without your knowledge, it's time to get your shit together. Your shop software is at least misconfigured.
I really wish the article had dug into that more, because it made very little sense.
> Delivering doubled prices to AI crawlers would be a advanced thing.
Doubling prices to the AI now means you're product shows up twice as expensive on Amazon. Nobody is comparing Amazon to your site directly, they're comparing your product on Amazon to the next item on Amazon. Now instead of this person going to Google to find your product, they're skipping your product entirely.
That is, if I go to Amazon and search "Krater23 Widget" and don't find it, I might search elsewhere. If I find it and see it's outrageously priced, I'm probably no longer buying it.
What a bunch of BS. Once I buy a product I can resell it elsewhere. That's how ownership works. I do not need "permission" for this, beyond that guaranteed by the legal system, and exceptions such as export restrictions notwithstanding. There is a term for this that currently eludes me (first sale doctrine is a similar concept but not exactly.)
If I was a seller, I'd probably find this a good thing --- Amazon is effectively giving me more customers for free.
Overtones designed to stoke outrage aside, this is very much in line with what the original vision of the Web was about. Amazon's tech here is acting as the user agent. (It happens to be that this UA that operates on/with the data that is supplied by some far-off website (the vendor's) is a UA that is itself presented in a web browser and accepts commands that way, and ferries them off the user's local device instead of processing the commands in right there e.g. with a native binary.)
This is a win for user control over how they interact with content on the Web.
>This is a win for user control
It is reasonable to be very skeptical of Amazon AI to act wholly and transparently in the end user's interest, as was the 'original vision' of a user agent. Frankly, to be otherwise requires a level of naivety that ignores the common thread through Amazon's entire history.
If user agents didn’t exist and were invented today, with the same implementation and use pattern that they currently do, would anyone call them a user agent?
I’m fairly confident that 95%+ of human users on the internet don’t even know what a user agent is, and it’s controlled by parties other than the user.
It’s not a win for user control if only a extremely small niche of users are able to take advantage of it
Crazy take. If you could control the UA I would agree with you, but this "user agent" is totally controlled by Amazon. So it's not a user agent at all - it's in fact an Amazon agent and the inevitable direction here is that Amazon will use this leverage to make itself more money, likely at the expense of the user.
I agree, even if you say that my browser is a user agent using Amazon that's also a user agent, it's a real stretch to say that it's giving me any control at all.
My browser speaks TLS and HTTP for me. Maybe it talks if I'm low vision. Maybe it adjusts the page to be more visually appealing. What is Amazon doing? They're using the same interface that I am. They're completing an identical transaction to me. I'm maybe sure I could sit down with a sufficiently large piece of paper and a sufficiently advanced calculator and crunch the numbers to speak TLS (for a packet or two, at least). Not enough to complete a transaction, though.
But I can confidently place an online order. There's no control that Amazon can offer. In fact, they're essentially just giving me a rebranded interface to perform the same action I can perform on another page.
Just because it's a service doesn't make it a user agent.