Amazon tests AI agents that buy from other sites in Agentic Commerce push

Amazon has announced that it is testing a feature in its Amazon Shopping app that uses Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help customers buy items from other brands and companies websites while remaining within the confines and safety of Amazon’s app.

The feature, a form of Agentic Commerce, that’s in beta is called Buy for Me. It is live in the Amazon Shopping app for a subset of the company’s customers in the United States and with a limited number of brand stores and products, Amazon said in a press release.

“We’re always working to invent new ways to make shopping even more convenient, and we’ve created Buy for Me to help customers quickly and easily find and buy products from other brand stores if we don’t currently sell those items in our store,” Oliver Messenger, shopping director at Amazon, said in the release.

For the other brands from which the AI agent can buy, the feature offers “increased exposure and seamless conversion,” Messenger said.

Buy for Me is integrated into Amazon’s shopping experience so that when customers search for branded items, they may see, along with results from Amazon and its third-party sellers, additional products from other stores in search results labelled “Shop brand sites directly,” according to the release.

Customers can link to those sites directly or, if they see a link to Buy for Me, select that option, learn about the product, and then ask Amazon to use its agentic AI capabilities to buy it for them, the release said.

If they ask Buy for Me to make the purchase, customers will receive an order confirmation E-Mail from the brand store and will be able to track their orders in the Amazon Shopping app, per the release.

“Earning trust is a cornerstone for the success of AI agents, and we’ve designed this experience to operate transparently in its interactions with customers and brand stores,” the release said. “The customer is in control of the AI agent acting on their behalf, and brands have the choice if they want to participate and benefit from the increased brand visibility, customer engagement and sales.”

Amazon said in February that it was testing the “Shop brand sites directly” feature that enables users of the Amazon Shopping app to find select products from other sites and go there to purchase them.

With that feature, when customers click on the link to one of those products, they receive a notification that they are leaving Amazon, go to the brand’s website and can then make purchases directly from that brand.