Sellers who don’t sell on Amazon were shocked to see their store listings appear in its shopping app under Shop Direct and Buy for Me features. They learned that Amazon had scraped their web stores, displayed their listings in the Amazon shopping app, and in some cases placed orders on the sellers’ sites on behalf of Amazon buyers.
While the potential for greater visibility and increased sales sounds like a positive, merchants have legitimate concerns – but they learned that instead of having the choice to opt in to the program, Amazon required them to opt out if they didn’t like it, even those with whom Amazon has no relationship.
In April, Amazon announced the Shop Direct and Buy for Me features in beta saying they helped customers discover and seamlessly purchase select products from other brands’ sites if those items are not currently sold in Amazon’s store.
But last week, sellers took to social media to say Amazon never informed them it added their independent store listings, with at least one seller claiming the program was not representing her items accurately. Bobo Design Studio’s Instagram post went viral, with Marieke van Bruggen among the first to report it, writing on a LinkedIn post in part:
“They’re re-skinning independent businesses’ products and funnelling them into an Amazon-branded checkout – all without their consent. Though labelled as “innovation”, it’s actually an attempt to gather data to inform Amazon’s merchandising and target advertising.
“Amazon’s AI agents have also been shown to “hallucinate” product details, display outdated prices, and sell items that are long out of stock. Worse still, the sellers are left with ghost orders from anonymous proxy emails, making it impossible to provide support or build a real customer relationship.”
We asked Amazon about the claims made in Bobo Design Studio’s Instagram video. We specifically asked, “Beyond Bobo’s claims that she didn’t authorize or opt-in to the beta program, can you confirm her claims that the listings on Amazon were inaccurate and included photos that weren’t even from her listings?”
An Amazon spokesperson provided us with the following statement in response to our questions on Monday:
“Shop Direct and Buy for Me are programs we’re testing that help customers discover brands and products not currently sold in Amazon’s store, while helping businesses reach new customers and drive incremental sales. We have received positive feedback on these programs. Businesses can opt out at any time by emailing branddirect@amazon.com, and we remove them from these programs promptly. Amazon is a longstanding supporter of small and independent businesses, and today more than 60% of sales in our store are from independent sellers who leverage our innovative tools and services to run their businesses and serve customers.”
Amazon says it confirms that Buy for Me listings are in stock on the brand’s website and checks the accuracy of the price; it also says it doesn’t generate AI images of a brand’s products. We followed up by asking how a brand could tell if Amazon opted them in to the program and will update this article if the company responds.
Amazon’s website addresses one of the concerns raised by van Bruggen – that sellers are unable to provide support or build customer relationships with buyers who purchase through Amazon’s Buy for Me feature:
“When shopping with the help of AI, Amazon provides a secure, unique email address for each order to share communications with customers, including order confirmation and tracking details. Communications from your merchant are automatically forwarded to the customer, and when a customer replies to these emails, replies are sent directly back to your merchant’s email address. Our relay email system may reduce duplicative promotional emails to reduce customer frustration from receiving duplicative emails.”
Another issue of concern to branded sellers is addressed on Amazon’s FAQs for merchants page:
Q: Does Amazon have any visibility into customer’s behavior on my merchant site through this service?
A: When customers navigate to your merchant site via the “shop direct” link, we do not collect data about how customers interact with your merchant site through this service. When customers shop with the help of AI by tapping “Buy for me”, Amazon prohibits the use of the transaction information, which we collect when customers purchase your products using our service, to make sourcing, inventory level, and pricing decisions for products in our store, including for offerings of Amazon’s store merchant products.
van Bruggen also referred to Amazon’s Project Starfish in her post, which is helpful in understanding why the Buy for Me feature is much more than a convenient feature for buyers. Seller Labs wrote about Amazon Project Starfish last month, and included the following definition:
What Is Project Starfish?
According to internal documents leaked to Business Insider, Amazon’s newest AI initiative is designed to become “the ultimate source of product information for all products worldwide.”
Here’s what it’s doing right now:
- Scraping 200,000 brand websites for product data
- Auto-rewriting titles, bullets, and descriptions across millions of ASINs
- Generating product images and videos from existing content
- Filling missing information by pulling data from across the web
- A/B testing AI-enhanced vs. standard listings without telling you
Amazon projects Starfish will add $7.5 billion in GMV in 2025 by improving conversions through better product data.
Translation: Amazon is tired of sellers writing bad copy and leaving fields blank. So they built an AI to fix it—whether you want them to or not.
In evaluating the programs, sellers should distinguish between Shop Direct, which sends the Amazon buyer to the seller’s website, and Buy for Me, in which Amazon makes the purchase on behalf of the buyer. Unfortunately for those who might like the visibility but want to maintain control of transactions, it appears it’s all or nothing when opting out of the programs.
There’s some indication that Amazon is targeting merchants on platforms like Shopify, but so far, the ire from unhappy merchants has been directed at Amazon rather than the platforms that power their websites and whether those platforms are dropping the ball or perhaps complicit.
Once generative-AI was let out of the bottle, companies rushed to scrape content it could use to train their models, regardless of who owned the content – and product descriptions are content. Modern Retail and others have pointed out, “The timing of Amazon’s “Buy For Me” move is notable given that the company has taken an increasingly hard line against other companies using AI to access and scrape its marketplace.”
