Major online retailers are drawing very different lines on whether third-party AI shopping agents get through the front door. Reporting from The Wall Street Journal, summarized by PYMNTS on October 16, shows Amazon blocking prominent outside agents, Target admitting only approved providers, and Walmart actively partnering with AI companies to pull in agent-driven traffic.
Highlights#
- Three divergent playbooks. Amazon has banned agents including Meta's Muse and OpenAI's dots from shopping on its platform, protecting its direct customer relationship and advertising business. Target permits agents from an approved list. Walmart has partnered with OpenAI and Google, with its U.S. chief David Guggina reporting new customers and strong conversion rates from those channels.
- Agent traffic is compounding fast. BrightEdge estimates purchases made through agents are growing 43% month over month and have roughly quadrupled since April, yet only about 3% of the eCommerce companies it works with currently let agents complete transactions for consumers.
- Payment authority is the hard problem. Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller put it plainly in a recent speech: the question shifts from proving a buyer is an authorized payer to proving an agent has the authority to pay on the buyer's behalf. Delegated authority is becoming the central control issue.
- Merchants lose the signal. Unlike human shoppers, third-party agents reveal little about who they represent, which weakens merchants' ability to read demand and raises the stakes on purchase errors, returns, and chargebacks.
- Merchants are building their own. DoorDash's Ask assistant is one example of a platform-operated agent that can draw on live inventory and fulfillment data rather than scraping from outside.
Why it matters#
Whether agents are blocked, allowlisted, or welcomed, every path converges on the same need: verifiable proof of what an agent is authorized to spend and settlement rails both sides can trust. Retailer access lists are an early, manual version of the agent identity and escrow layer that will eventually have to operate at machine speed.