Amazon’s latest AI experiment has backfired, igniting a revolt amongst small retailers.
The e-commerce giant quietly launched a feature that scrapes competitor websites without permission, and now hundreds of small businesses are fighting back.
Amazon’s “Shop Direct” feature, launched in February 2025, was designed to make shopping easier by letting customers browse products from other retailers directly on Amazon’s platform.
But what seemed like innovation has turned into a nightmare for small businesses who never agreed to participate. The program uses AI to automatically scrape product data from external websites, sometimes with inaccurate information appearing on Amazon’s marketplace. Even more concerning, the “Buy for Me” feature lets Amazon’s AI agents actually place orders on behalf of customers, expanding from 65,000 products at launch to over 500,000 by November.
Unwilling partners
The backlash exploded when business owners started receiving mysterious orders from “buyforme.amazon” email addresses for products they didn’t even sell. Bobo Design Studio CEO Angie Chua became a lightning rod for the controversy after receiving Buy for Me orders last week, despite never agreeing to participate. Her Instagram post about the experience went viral, and now more than 180 businesses using platforms like Shopify, Squarespace, and WooCommerce have reached out with similar experiences.
The situation gets worse when you realize the scope of Amazon’s data collection. The company pulls product information from publicly available data on brands’ websites, but businesses are discovering AI-generated images and descriptions that don’t match their actual products.
One Virginia-based company, Hitchcock Paper, only learned about the program when they started getting orders for a stress ball product they don’t even sell. The opt-out process requires businesses to email Amazon and wait for removal, but many argue this should be opt-in from the start.
Amazon’s AI strategy exposed
By the way, Amazon filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI, accusing the startup of using AI agents to scrape Amazon’s website and make purchases without authorization. Amazon called it a “bully tactic” when Perplexity pushed back, but now Amazon faces the same accusations from hundreds of small businesses.
The timing couldn’t be worse for Amazon’s reputation. The company has blocked dozens of external AI agents from accessing its own site, including recent moves to restrict OpenAI’s ChatGPT web crawlers. Amazon has been aggressively investing in agentic AI, including its shopping chatbot Rufus, which gained expanded capabilities throughout 2024.
It appears to be a glaring double standard: Amazon demands others respect its decisions about AI access, while ignoring the same principles for smaller competitors.
The future of AI commerce
This controversy represents more than just Amazon’s latest misstep—it’s a preview of the AI commerce wars ahead. Companies like OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity are racing to build AI tools that let consumers shop across the internet without visiting individual websites. The agentic commerce sector is projected to reach $1 trillion in U.S. retail revenue by 2030, making this fight about much more than just Amazon’s current experiment.
For small businesses, the stakes couldn’t be higher. As one affected retailer put it, they were “forced to be dropshippers on a platform we made a conscious decision not to be part of.” Amazon defends its actions by claiming the programs help businesses “reach new customers and drive incremental sales” and have received “positive feedback.” But with over 60% of Amazon’s retail sales coming from independent merchants, the company risks alienating the very partners it depends on for growth.
The Amazon AI scraping controversy is raising fundamental questions about consent, data ownership, and the future of e-commerce. As the backlash grows, Amazon faces a critical choice: continue with its aggressive AI expansion and risk further damaging relationships with small businesses, or find a way to balance innovation with respect for merchant autonomy.
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