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.

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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?

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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?

	▲	theturtletalks 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It’s exactly what it is: https://github.com/openshiporg/marketplace We have people using it for B2B distribution as well, opportunities are endless. You can reach me at junaid[at]openship.org

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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.

	▲	tt24 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Why would they need the consent of either?

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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.

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2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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