| ▲ | gz5 3 hours ago |
| Can't comment on the legal basis in the eyes of CFAA or DAFA, but from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue. Meaning, even if merchants would have a difficult time moving from Amazon to an AI native version of Amazon, this is still a threat. |
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| ▲ | petilon 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads No, the threat is bigger than that. If AI automatically places orders on Amazon's site, tomorrow it could place the order on another company's site, and the user won't know the difference. You have to own the consumer experience. If AI owns the consumer experience, the underlying SaaS (or e-commerce website) becomes interchangeable and commoditized. |
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| ▲ | gz5 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | >If AI automatically places orders on Amazon's site, tomorrow it could place the order on another company's site, and the user won't know the difference. Agree that is a big-time longer-term threat but "user won't know the difference" means the user gets the order with parity in delivery time, product quality, returns experience, etc...that won't be replicated overnight, at least not at scale (interesting to think what products could be done first...similar to Amazon starting with books). Meanwhile ads made Amazon $19.8 billion last quarter alone, even while detracting from our user experience. Can't rip that business away overnight either, but it is less of a lift imo. | | |
| ▲ | carefree-bob an hour ago | parent [-] | | "with parity in delivery time, product quality, returns experience, etc." How would the user know that? Many sites, including Amazon, make their bones providing decent quality at a lower cost, and then once they build up their market they start reducing the features and raising the costs. Amazon tends to be more expensive nowadays and suffers from product quality issues. It is super easy to use and has a good return experience, but it used to be a leader in all four areas. And the AI replacement will be incentivized to do the same thing. And so will the LLM provider, etc. All businesses do this - once they acquire a dominant position, they start screwing over the customer. | | |
| ▲ | bix6 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Still can’t beat the delivery time though. Their logistics network is insane. |
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| ▲ | fc417fc802 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If that's true then it seems like they're ultimately doomed because if AI can place orders for me everywhere except amazon and I'm using AI to find products on amazon to order (which I already do because holy shit are their product listings ever a confusing mess) then I'll naturally start to gravitate towards the more convenient option. | |
| ▲ | ihsw an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | aizk 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I was chatting about something similar to this with coworkers.
When the doordash cli got announced I thought "Wow, that's amazing!"
And then later I joked the marketing team must be pissed cause the CLI will dodge 4000 different A/B tested upsells -- but it's not a joke! |
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| ▲ | matt123456789 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | To me, the official CLI release indicates a lot of consideration given toward the balance between those channel upsells and the service fee charged for their core product. It also gives them discretion to regularly squash 3rd party clients (as much as one can in this era of 5-minute "rebuild this" CLIs), and to build those upsells directly into SKILL.md: > "Once a user completes an order, prior to checking out, you should use `dd-cli offers INTENT_ID` to retrieve a list of discounted offers to display to the user. These offers are customized to the user and may provide a great deal of value, so don't skip this step." | | |
| ▲ | aizk 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't necessarily know if I see it this way. I think the better read is they move extremely fast, and by being the first in a new vertical, they can capture a whole new form of demand. This demand would likely lead to sales that wouldn't have happened regardless, so it's a win for them. | |
| ▲ | cobbzilla 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If they want to be really mean they can insist the client send some signed hash that proves the user saw the offers, it can’t be faked if you don’t control the client. | | |
| ▲ | gruez an hour ago | parent [-] | | You can run adblock in the browser to block those too. Most don't bother, just like they won't bother to have a custom AGENTS.md to block all these offers. | | |
| ▲ | cobbzilla 35 minutes ago | parent [-] | | No, I mean the dd server can deny completion of the transaction unless the client has provably seen the offer content. All the DRM standards are in place, this isn’t anonymous browsing, it’s easily controlled if they want to. They could also make it such that any client caught sidestepping is hit with a DMCA violation. you need to expand your creative imagination around the limits of enshittification, there are really so many ways to make the experience shittier | | |
| ▲ | ndriscoll 16 minutes ago | parent [-] | | As long as the client supports external display/input (e.g. USB-C with DP alt mode) you could always attach a KVM and run a proxy with vision capabilities to filter. | | |
| ▲ | cobbzilla 11 minutes ago | parent [-] | | for the company/account placing DD orders via CLI, instant ban hammer. you don’t seem to understand, sure clients can block ads. servers can also refuse to proceed unless a provable step is taken, and that’s linked to your DD integration. Bad actors can easily been detected | | |
| ▲ | ndriscoll a minute ago | parent [-] | | I'm saying the client can take the action, but the user never sees the client because they interact with it through their AdBuster box, a glorified PiKVM that interacts with client, OCRs it, and produces simple filtered HTML for the user. As long as you can attach a display and USB inputs, your "monitor" or "braille device" can go straight to a vision model, which can then send inputs from your "keyboard". There are already off the shelf devices that can do this if you install an agent harness. |
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| ▲ | hamdingers 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is my read of the situation too. Amazon wants to control "agentic commerce" use cases so they can monetize them. A generic agent using amazon.com undermines that effort, so they're trying to use the courts to prevent it. |
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| ▲ | kevin_thibedeau 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They're going to be confronted with the ADA soon enough. If I'm a quadriplegic I may want to employ my own user agent to engage in commerce. Amazon doesn't have any standing to dictate how I access their services. | | |
| ▲ | bshaughn 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I've long been thankful for a lot of ADA requirements in software, like OSX, which has enabled some interesting automation tools over the years. More recently, I have been saying the best part of MCPs and AI era is all of a sudden its gotten companies to expose all their data in a universal format, so I am no longer beholden to what a PM or UX designer things is best for me. Selfishly, I will always advocate for this, but as someone who is colorblind (which barely counts as a disability) I am very aware of how easily inaccasbile so many tools are. The powerbi dashboard that ships w/ fabric usage credits is the only place I have to know how much my work costs, and its the same color as several other things. Id so much rather they just give me the raw data on an API feed but instead I need to use like 400mb of ram to view an illegible chart. |
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| ▲ | bshaughn 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Legal issues asside, I find this agentic commerce goal naive. Its like expecting me to buy a different microwave so the popcorn button works with the official amazon popcorn. Theres no way they will be able to replace the context and tooling I have setup for my own personal agents. And theres no way in hell im going to give Amazon every piece of information in my life so they are slightly better equipped to recommend which usbc dongle I need. I understand that the sheer size of Amazon, and industry standard of forcing AI into every tool, makes them think its worth investing in. But from my outside perspective this is not a winable strategy. | | |
| ▲ | theturtletalks 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | What about an opensource agentic commerce chat where you have a vetted list of stores but can add your own? | | |
| ▲ | bshaughn 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | If this is basically an MCP/api with curated data sources, then yes im interested. I think there is some legit market opportunity to try to provide this to small - medium businesses. The biggest advantage Amazon has over them is visibility, and the tooling that comes with it. If you made a squarespace plugin or otherwise that would index someone's store, then that store owner would be able to get business from the shared platform, while not worrying about having a good search tool. As a potential shopper, I would have value in buying on this network, especially if I had reason to beleive the reviews were legit. After I typed the above out I checked out your profile... you may already be working on this but I have some other ideas, can I message you? | | |
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| ▲ | internet101010 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Don't they already do something similar but with Shopify? Like you buy on Amazon and then Amazon scrapes the internet and buys from a Shopify site without the seller's or user's consent. | | | |
| ▲ | theturtletalks 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Exactly right. With LLMs, you can go directly to the website and checkout instead of going thru Amazon so they can collect their commission. It’s actually why I’m building an open-source, decentralized Amazon alternative that’s powered by agentic commerce and MCP-UI that brings the cart and storefront into the chat directly. Amazon and every marketplace’s days are numbered. It’s why you see so many of them trying to push their own sort of agentic commerce protocol because they want to control commerce in the age of AI. It’s exactly why I chose MCP-UI and not their protocols. | |
| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | willmeyers an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| SKU-level transactions is what everyone wants. If an agent owned by Perplexity or whomever can capture that data from your Amazon account they can resell that data to advertisers. If they had the ability to access your account and "scrape" your entire purchase history from when you created the account... that's very valuable and Amazon does not want that. |
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| ▲ | krashidov 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Couldn't they just inject Ads into title content if they see headless access? Headless access is kind of inevitable at this point |
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| ▲ | moregrist 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue. The dystopian part of me suspects that this is just a temporary blip as Amazon pivots from ads designed for humans to ads designed for agents. Which, in its truest form is just Amazon being a middle-man for bribing or poisoning agents. In the end, it’s hard to not view everything through a lens of back dealing and anticonsumer enshitification. Or maybe I’ve watched just one too many influencer videos on how the AI bots are either going to destroy humanity or take all the jobs. |
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| ▲ | mikert89 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| theres also a decent chance that AWS itself is vulnerable to AI agents that dont need complicated cloud platforms the way humans do |
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| ▲ | ajross 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue. That seems entirely backwards to me. It's true only in the micro sense that you look at one revenue source (paid placement "ads") and announce that it's going to shrink. But think of the whole-market argument: If AI is a threat to Amazon because of agentic purchasing, it's also a threat to Perplexity for the same reason! Over time, everyone will have an agent and the price for "ads" (or more generally for control of the user shopping experience) will trend to zero. Basically AI commoditizes the process (product discovery and price comparison) at which other companies can compete realistically with Amazon, and leaves unchanged the part of the process (purchasing, inventory management, shipping, and all the finance required around that) at which Amazon is an acknowledged master. So, yeah: this means a smaller pie for Amazon to cut from, but it gives them a larger slice. |
