Autonomous AI purchasing brokers are transferring shortly from novelty to actuality, with each monetary and authorized implications.
AI-first browsers resembling Perplexity’s Comet and OpenAI’s Atlas can now search, examine, and provoke purchases with minimal human involvement.
That course of, referred to as agentic commerce, creates sooner looking for customers 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 issues. But in actuality, the combat is sort of definitely about management.
AI purchasing brokers threaten marketplaces resembling eBay, Amazon, AliExpress, and plenty of others.
Amazon vs. Perplexity
In November 2025, Amazon sued Perplexity, alleging that the Comet internet browser masquerades as a human, accesses Amazon accounts, and locations orders in violation of Amazon’s phrases of service and laptop fraud legal guidelines.
Third-party bots, in response to Amazon, should function overtly and solely with platform permission.
Perplexity countered that Comet acts on behalf of a human, with credentials saved regionally for safety, and advised Amazon’s motion was an try to guard its ad-driven enterprise mannequin and protect management over purchasing flows.
Primarily, 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, nevertheless, did depart room for “formally sanctioned” purchasing brokers, thus opening the door for partnerships that eBay can management.
Market Considerations
Taken collectively, eBay’s replace and Amazon’s lawsuit recommend that marketplaces search to regulate agentic commerce relationships.
It is sensible. Marketplaces exist to combination and centralize purchasing. It’s the core service they supply and the way they earn income. Therefore agentic commerce is a risk.
Promoting. For the Amazon market particularly and different marketplaces usually, promoting income is probably going a chief concern.
In accordance with its 2025 Q3 submitting with the Securities and Trade Fee, Amazon generated $47 billion in “promoting companies” 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 items, and paid placements — all deeply embedded in search outcomes and class pages.
Autonomous brokers bypass the advertisements. As a substitute of scrolling via sponsored merchandise and proposals, the AI purchasing 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 gadgets they abandon. These alerts feed rating algorithms, suggestion techniques, and personalization fashions.
That knowledge disappears when an exterior AI agent performs comparisons and decision-making outdoors {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 a minimum of two issues.
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 mistaken? 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 purchasing brokers disagree.
Agentic commerce startups argue that buyers needs to be free to decide on their most well-liked AI once they work together with companies or web sites. An AI agent, the argument goes, is extra like a browser or an accessibility help 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 possible allow marketplaces to approve entry inside cheap limits.
Thus AI brokers, maybe even Perplexity’s Comet, will finally entry marketplaces through official APIs, topic to price limits, id verification, and presumably industrial preparations. Suppose affiliate applications for bots that pay for entry.
For small-to-medium ecommerce companies, the agent-marketplace relationship will possible be a major route for getting merchandise into Perplexity, ChatGPT, and comparable platforms. It might be a key income channel.
