Fast Five Shorts | Pro Or Con: Amazon AI Shopping Agents?
In the latest edition of Omni Talk’s Retail Fast Five sponsored by the A&M Consumer and Retail Group, Mirakl, Simbe, Infios, ClearDemand, and Ocampo Capital Chris Walton and Anne Mezzenga discuss: The Pros & Cons of Amazon AI Shopping Agents
For the full episode head here: https://youtu.be/xZ2R3c0ZxsU
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Transcript
Amazon has a new AI agent that will shop third party sites for you According to TechCrunch, Amazon is starting to test a new AI shopping agent, a feature that it calls Buy With Me.
Speaker A:Buy for Me with a subset of users, the company announced in a blog post last Thursday.
Speaker A:If Amazon doesn't sell something that users are searching for, the Buy for Me feature will display products that other websites are selling.
Speaker A:Then users can select and request to purchase one of these products without ever leaving the Amazon shopping app behind the scenes.
Speaker A:Amazon's AI shopping agent will visit an external website, select a product that a user has requested, fill out the user's name, shipping address and payment details in order to purchase it, according to Amazon.
Speaker A:Amazon said in the aforementioned blog post that Buy for Me uses encryption to securely insert your billing information on third party sites such that Amazon can't see what you're ordering from outside its platform.
Speaker A:This is a unique approach compared to OpenAI and Google's agents, which require humans to still fill out credit card information for themselves, as well as Perplexity's AI agent, which has a prepaid debit card to make purchases.
Speaker A:Chris, are you pro or con letting an Amazon agent do your shopping for you?
Speaker B:Whoa.
Speaker B:Oh man.
Speaker B:There's a lot of meat on the bone to that question.
Speaker B:I'll tell you this, and I'm definitely game to try it.
Speaker B:I mean I know for a fact you and I both tried to use it yesterday, but I guess neither one of us was in the lucky subset of early users to get to talk.
Speaker A:To David Dorff about that.
Speaker A:What the heck man, how this works.
Speaker B:Yeah, David, if you're listening, get us, get us in the beta.
Speaker B:But you know, overall I think this story is massive.
Speaker B:And I say that because, you know, if you get right down to it, Amazon is essentially telling the industry that it now has the power to scrape other retailers websites and to purchase products on their shoppers behalves and the retailers are potentially powerless to stop it.
Speaker B:So that has drastic implications to me, particularly on the retail media side of things, because if people start doing this, the retailers won't get that first party data anymore.
Speaker B:You know that first party data is going through Amazon and so therefore their networks are going to become less powerful and therefore they're gonna be forced to even sell more on Amazon or to advertise through Amazon.
Speaker B:So net net, Amazon wins in this power move because A either more retailers will list directly on Amazon as a result of this because why fight it?
Speaker B:Or B they're gonna place more ads on Amazon to show up within Amazon's media network to get the buy.
Speaker B:So this is baller, baller, baller strategic stuff to me and I'm absolutely gobsmacked at the power of it and the brilliance of the power play move here from Amazon.
Speaker B:So and you know the last point I make is, you know Google's thinking the exact same way.
Speaker B:They have to be.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:So man, the retailers here, I don't know what you do, honestly I don't know what you do if to thwart either Amazon or Google for this.
Speaker B:And gets kind of scary when you think about all the money going into retail media too.
Speaker B:And they figured out an ended around on this too given the one big if here, which is will people shop and use agents in this way?
Speaker A:Yeah, and I think they will over time.
Speaker A:I do too.
Speaker A:I mean I think basically everything that we heard at Shop Talk with David Dorff was just talking about in five insightful minutes like everything's pointing to this is the direction that consumers are going to go and if, and I think convenience is a big play here.
Speaker A:Like you think about, you know, a lot of people are starting their seek and destroy shopping missions on Amazon because they know that they can get it done quickly.
Speaker A:They can, they have the return guarantee of like it's an easy thing for me to return if I don't end up liking it.
Speaker A:So I mean obviously all of the, the puts and takes of how that is all going to shake out when you're using agents on Amazon to purchase these goods outside of an Amazon platform.
Speaker A:Like that stuff is all probably still in the works but I imagine we're getting to a place there where you know, people just like with Buy with Prime, like you have the confidence when you're shopping that you know, if you order from this place, it already has all my information saved.
Speaker A:It's still a one click to buy situation.
Speaker A:And I think that you still have a lot of work that needs to be done on some of the other platforms in order to do that.
Speaker A:Now I think you bring up a good point with Google and I, I do think that Google does have a unique position here as well.
Speaker A:Because when you think about how well Google can personalize some of this shopping experience, maybe you don't need, you don't need the, the consumer sending out the agent with the directive.
Speaker A:I think Google's going to come at it a different way and be able to take everything that they know about you from your activities in the Google sphere from, you know, what you're shopping on, what you're searching and shopping and watching on YouTube what you're, you know, what you're getting in your Gmail inbox, what's on your Google calendar, like everything that you're doing in all your Google Docs, like they can start to pull that information to really personalize the experience.
Speaker A:So it's more of a, of a like push experience than a pull or an outward experience that I'm doing on an Amazon.
Speaker A:So I, I think Net Net Agentix shopper.
Speaker A:You know, consumers using Agentic shoppers is one of the biggest takeaways for me from Shop Talk.
Speaker A:I think that's something we really have to focus on.
Speaker A:And to your point, there's a lot of money to be made here in retail media in how we're advertising and promoting products both to the agents and both to me as a consumer who's still shopping for product.
Speaker A:And it's, this is just a huge move for Amazon to kind of go in that direction.
Speaker A:Start pressure testing it in a place that I'm already comfortable shopping as a consumer.
Speaker B:Yeah, that's the part for me.
Speaker B:I mean I think, you know, Amazon's click to buy is just so powerful and the confidence that they already have my credit card information, my shipping address, all that kind of stuff, relatively speaking, it's so easy.
Speaker B:It makes this, you know, makes this just kind of a no brainer for me.
Speaker B:But you know, the other point I make as I step back from this is like Google and Amazon have dominated search for a long time.
Speaker B:Like what are they, 80% of the search market already if not more.
Speaker B:And that's still going to be the case even more so like just more of the end commerce is going to be pushed through this.
Speaker B:And so, you know, and I mean it sounds like Amazon's basically just going to subsidize this through Prime.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:I don't even know how they make money on this necessarily other than getting people to list on them over time in the long run or getting the retail media dollars to have their products show up so that people are buying, you know, from the companies that are, that are going this way with them.
Speaker B:So, so yeah, I mean it's just so scary for the retailers in my mind in terms of how these two big behemoths actually become more and more, more and more powerful in a game they already dominate.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:And it just makes the case for how are your products ready to show up?
Speaker A:Because in the interim you have to still be showing up on these, on, in all of these places, you know, because it's just like you're saying, going more and more away from.
Speaker A:I'm going to lululemon.com to find product like that that might completely go away.
Speaker A:And now these agentic or these agents that will put on the task of find me a sports bra in this size and ship it to me in two days.
Speaker A:Like, that's how I think the future of search and shopping is going to go forward.
Speaker B:Well, it would.
Speaker B:I think it.
Speaker B:I think it will.
Speaker B:Because, like, that was.
Speaker B:We should tell the audience that when you and I were looking yesterday to try to use this, we both were like, what should we search?
Speaker B:We're like Lululemon because we're like, okay, it's springtime, you know, it's not cold in Minneapolis anymore.
Speaker B:I know.
Speaker B:Kind of what I want.
Speaker B:I want to see what they've got.
Speaker B:I have been delaying looking at it to see if, you know, I want to plunk down some money for it because I know it's expensive.
Speaker B:But, like, that was what I looked for.
Speaker B:And had they had it, I probably would have bought it, you know?
Speaker A:Yeah, I probably.
Speaker A:They don't have a store on Amazon as of right now.
Speaker A:Like.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker A:We knew that some.
Speaker A:Yeah, we knew that was something that they'd have to go outside of search.
Speaker A:Yeah, it's.
Speaker A:It's fascinating.
Speaker A:Well, David, get your people together and get Chris and I on the beta test so we can start test sending our agents to do our bidding.
Speaker B:Take out our personal information, David, and get us on.
Speaker B:Get us on the.
Speaker B:Get us on the beta.
Speaker B:All right.
