Autonomous AI buying brokers are transferring shortly from novelty to actuality, with each monetary and authorized implications.
AI-first browsers reminiscent of Perplexity’s Comet and OpenAI’s Atlas can now search, evaluate, and provoke purchases with minimal human involvement.
That course of, known as agentic commerce, creates sooner searching for shoppers and fewer clicks for retailers. It additionally challenges many ecommerce conventions, together with the function marketplaces play in product discovery, transactions, and promoting.
Amazon and eBay have responded. Each are transferring to limit impartial AI brokers from finishing purchases, citing safety and consumer expertise considerations. But in actuality, the struggle is nearly actually about management.
AI buying brokers threaten marketplaces reminiscent of eBay, Amazon, AliExpress, and lots of others.
Amazon vs. Perplexity
In November 2025, Amazon sued Perplexity, alleging that the Comet net browser masquerades as a human, accesses Amazon accounts, and locations orders in violation of Amazon’s phrases of service and pc fraud legal guidelines.
Third-party bots, in accordance to Amazon, should function overtly and solely with platform permission.
Perplexity countered that Comet acts on behalf of a human, with credentials saved domestically for safety, and urged Amazon’s motion was an try to guard its ad-driven enterprise mannequin and protect management over buying flows.
Basically, Perplexity asks whether or not a platform can say no if a human authorizes an AI to buy.
eBay’s Ban
Simply this month, eBay up to date its consumer settlement to ban, with out prior approval, “buy-for-me” brokers and end-to-end LLM-driven checkout flows.
eBay positions the change as a safeguard in opposition to public sale manipulation, fraud, and mistaken orders. The corporate, nonetheless, did depart room for “formally sanctioned” buying brokers, thus opening the door for partnerships that eBay can management.
Market Considerations
Taken collectively, eBay’s replace and Amazon’s lawsuit counsel that marketplaces search to manage agentic commerce relationships.
It is sensible. Marketplaces exist to mixture and centralize buying. It’s the core service they supply and the way they earn income. Therefore agentic commerce is a menace.
Promoting. For the Amazon market particularly and different marketplaces typically, promoting income is probably going a chief concern.
In accordance with its 2025 Q3 submitting with the Securities and Alternate Fee, Amazon generated $47 billion in “promoting providers” income within the first 9 months of final yr.
The corporate is far more than a product market. It’s a writer, too, providing sponsored listings, suggestion models, and paid placements — all deeply embedded in search outcomes and class pages.
Autonomous brokers bypass the adverts. As a substitute of scrolling via sponsored merchandise and proposals, the AI buying agent skips to an merchandise and initiates checkout.
First-party knowledge. A associated concern is shopper knowledge.
Ecommerce marketplaces observe, monitor, and use shopper behavioral data. They monitor what buyers seek for, which merchandise they view, and the objects they abandon. These alerts feed rating algorithms, suggestion programs, and personalization fashions.
That knowledge disappears when an exterior AI agent performs comparisons and decision-making exterior {the marketplace}, which sees solely the ultimate buy.
Transactions. In its case in opposition to Perplexity, Amazon didn’t dispute that the AI agent accomplished the transaction through Amazon’s personal checkout. Nonetheless, an AI-driven checkout creates no less than two considerations.
First, {the marketplace} has no approach to make sure that the transaction was correct. What if the AI agent made an error? What if the worth is improper? May these errors result in customer support issues and even elevated return charges? Possibly.
Second, upselling turns into presumably not possible when the human shopper by no means sees it.
Compromise
But the builders of AI buying brokers disagree.
Agentic commerce startups argue that buyers must be free to decide on their most popular AI after they work together with providers or web sites. An AI agent, the argument goes, is extra like a browser or an accessibility assist than a competitor.
Per the builders, marketplaces that enable only some AI companions block human buyers, stifle innovation, and foster monopolies.
The approaching compromise will probably allow marketplaces to approve entry inside affordable limits.
Thus AI brokers, even perhaps Perplexity’s Comet, will ultimately entry marketplaces through official APIs, topic to charge limits, id verification, and probably industrial preparations. Assume affiliate applications for bots that pay for entry.
For small-to-medium ecommerce companies, the agent-marketplace relationship will probably be a major route for getting merchandise into Perplexity, ChatGPT, and related platforms. It could possibly be a key income channel.
