AI Agents Are Already Shopping Your Store
Arjun Bhargava
Co-founder and CEO @ Rye
8 minutes read
AI agents are browsing merchant websites, comparing products, and attempting to purchase — whether merchants know it or not. Here's what's happening, what merchants stand to lose, and what the options look like.
TL;DR / Key Takeaways
AI agents are already browsing merchant websites, comparing products, and attempting to purchase — whether merchants know it or not.
Some retailers are actively blocking automated traffic. The merchants who learn to distinguish between malicious bots and legitimate AI shopping agents will have a structural advantage.
Morgan Stanley projects $115 billion to $385 billion in incremental US e-commerce from agentic commerce by 2030.
Not all agentic commerce is created equal. Amazon's Buy for Me strips your customer relationship entirely. But with the right infrastructure, you stay merchant-of-record and own the customer data.
The open question for merchants isn't whether this is happening — it's whether to engage proactively or let the infrastructure decisions be made for them.
How AI Agents Are Already Shopping Merchant Websites
Over the past twelve months, AI agents — not humans — have started browsing product pages, comparing prices, reading reviews, and attempting to complete purchases on live merchant websites. These aren't demos or proofs of concept. They're production systems operating with real payment methods, on behalf of real customers.
Amazon noticed. They built Buy for Me — an AI agent inside their app that purchases products from 400,000+ third-party merchant sites on behalf of customers. ChatGPT tried to build native checkout inside its interface (it didn't scale, but the intent was clear). Perplexity built shopping features. Google launched an entire commerce protocol to standardize how agents transact.
According to Morgan Stanley, roughly 23% of Americans have already made a purchase via AI in the past month — and adoption is accelerating across demographics. Most merchants have no idea they're part of it.
Your Store Is Already Part of Agentic Commerce
Here's what surprises most merchants: you didn't have to opt in for this to start happening.
AI agents don't need a merchant integration to browse your site. They read your product pages the same way a human would — except faster, at scale, and with a specific purchase intent from a real customer. When someone asks ChatGPT "find me a lightweight rain jacket under $150," the agent doesn't check which merchants have signed up for an agentic commerce program. It searches the open web.
If your products show up — great. An agent evaluates your pricing, availability, reviews, shipping terms, and product details. If everything checks out, it tries to buy.
The emphasis on tries matters. Because this is where most merchants are unknowingly losing orders.
Why Fraud Detection Systems Are Blocking AI Shopping Agents
Merchant fraud detection systems were built to stop bots. CAPTCHAs, device fingerprinting, velocity checks, behavioral analysis — all designed to identify non-human traffic and block it. A decade ago, this made perfect sense. Automated traffic meant scrapers, credential stuffers, and card testers.
But AI shopping agents aren't bad actors. They're carrying a real customer's payment method, a real shipping address, and a genuine intent to purchase. They're the digital equivalent of a personal shopper walking into your store on behalf of a client.
Some retailers are tightening their defenses intentionally. They see automated traffic spiking and turn up the blocking. The instinct makes sense — and to be fair, not all automated traffic is benign. Merchants have legitimate reasons to scrutinize bot-like behavior.
But there's a difference between blocking credential stuffers and blocking a customer's AI assistant trying to buy a jacket. The challenge for merchants isn't "block everything automated" or "allow everything automated" — it's developing the ability to distinguish between malicious bots and legitimate AI shopping agents. The merchants who figure this out first will capture orders that their competitors' blanket blocking rules are deflecting.
Amazon illustrates the tension. Amazon sued Perplexity for sending AI agents to shop on Amazon's site. Then Amazon built Buy for Me, which sends AI agents to shop on 400,000+ third-party merchant sites. Amazon's position is clear: they want to be the agent, not the store being shopped by one. For most merchants, the calculus is different — being accessible to agents is a net new channel, not a competitive threat.
What SEO Taught Merchants About New Channels
In the early 2000s, merchants had the same debate about search engines. Google's crawlers were visiting their sites, indexing their products, and surfacing them in search results. Some merchants blocked crawlers. They didn't want their pricing scraped. They didn't trust a third party deciding how to display their products.
The merchants who leaned in — who structured their product data for Google, optimized their pages, and made themselves crawlable — captured a generation of customers. The merchants who blocked Google's crawlers became invisible.
We're at the same inflection point. AI agents are the new crawlers. The merchants who make their stores agent-accessible — clean product data, consistent pricing, completable checkout flows — will capture the next wave of commerce. The merchants who block agent traffic will wonder where their orders went.
The difference this time? It's moving faster. SEO took a decade to become table stakes. The window between early awareness and widespread adoption is where merchants have the most leverage to shape how they participate.
What Merchants Lose (and Keep) in Agentic Commerce
This is the question every merchant asks. And it's the right question.
The honest answer: it depends on who's building the infrastructure between you and the agent.
Not all agentic commerce is created equal. How the transaction is architected determines whether you keep control or hand it away. And right now, the three major approaches couldn't be more different.
Amazon's approach takes the most from merchants. Buy for Me shares encrypted customer details — name, address, phone, payment — so the merchant can fulfill the order. But Amazon generates a unique relay email per transaction, meaning the merchant can't remarket to the customer, can't enroll them in a loyalty program, and can't capture their real email address. Amazon retains the shopping behavior data, the direct customer relationship, and the cross-sell opportunity. The merchant becomes a fulfillment center with a brand name attached. The dynamic is structurally similar to the marketplace model that many DTC brands have spent years trying to reduce their dependence on.
Protocol-based approaches preserve control, but require investment. Google's UCP and OpenAI's ACP both keep the merchant in the loop — you opt in, you provide a product feed, you retain the customer relationship. The tradeoff is that you need engineering resources to integrate, and adoption is still early. Only ~30 merchants ever went live on ACP before ChatGPT killed its native checkout. UCP is growing, but it's not turnkey.
Universal checkout infrastructure offers a middle path. When an agent completes a purchase through your existing checkout flow — the same flow a human customer would use — the order looks like any other order. You process the payment. You're the merchant-of-record. You own the customer data. Your pricing, your fulfillment, your returns, your support — all unchanged. The agent is a channel, not an intermediary.
The difference isn't whether agents shop your store. It's whether the infrastructure preserves what matters to you:
What Merchants Care About | Amazon Buy for Me | Open Protocols (ACP/UCP) | Universal Checkout |
|---|---|---|---|
Merchant-of-record | No — Amazon intermediates | Yes | Yes |
Customer relationship | Amazon owns it | Merchant retains | Merchant retains |
Customer data ownership | Shared — merchant gets fulfillment data, Amazon keeps relationship data | Merchant keeps it | Merchant keeps it |
Integration required | None (scraped without consent) | Yes — feeds + API endpoints | None — existing checkout works |
Remarketing / loyalty | Blocked — unique email per order | Full access | Full access |
The takeaway isn't that agentic commerce is inherently good or bad for merchants. It's that the architecture matters enormously — and merchants should be asking hard questions about which model they're participating in before it's chosen for them.
Agentic Commerce Market Data: The Trajectory Is Clear
The data supports the trajectory.
Morgan Stanley projects $115 billion to $385 billion in incremental US e-commerce from agentic commerce by 2030. Roughly half of American online shoppers are projected to use AI agents for purchasing by that same year.
Amazon's Buy for Me expanded from 65,000 products at launch to over 500,000 — and Amazon keeps investing. Google has Walmart, Target, Wayfair, and 20+ global partners endorsing their commerce protocol. Every major tech company is betting that the future of commerce runs through AI agents.
And nearly 80% of acquirers — the platforms, wallets, and payment processors on the other side of the transaction — say they're at least somewhat prepared to support the infrastructure agentic commerce requires, according to a PYMNTS Intelligence report commissioned by Visa Acceptance Solutions. The infrastructure is being built. Merchants who understand the architecture early will have more agency over how they participate.
What Merchants Should Do Now
You don't need to build anything new. You don't need to adopt a protocol, integrate an API, or hire an AI team.
The merchants who will win in agentic commerce are the ones who:
Review your fraud detection rules. Not all automated traffic is malicious. Work with your security team to distinguish between credential stuffers and legitimate AI shopping agents. Blanket-blocking automated traffic is increasingly likely to mean blocking real customers.
Understand the landscape. Know what Amazon, Google, and OpenAI are building — and recognize that your store is already part of it whether you've opted in or not.
Protect what matters. Demand infrastructure that keeps you as merchant-of-record with full control over pricing, data, and customer relationships. Not every approach to agentic commerce offers this — know the differences.
AI agents are already browsing merchant sites and attempting to purchase. The merchants who recognize this shift early — and choose the right infrastructure to support it — will capture orders that others are deflecting.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is agentic commerce?
Agentic commerce is when AI agents — not humans — browse, evaluate, and purchase products on behalf of consumers. Instead of a person visiting your website, an AI agent does it for them, completing the entire shopping journey from discovery to checkout. For a deeper overview, see What Is Agentic Commerce?
Are AI agents actually shopping on my store right now?
Very likely, yes. AI agents from platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Mode are browsing product pages across the open web. Amazon's Buy for Me feature actively purchases from 400,000+ third-party merchant sites. If your products are publicly listed online, AI agents have almost certainly visited your store.
Do I need to integrate with something to participate in agentic commerce?
It depends on the approach. Protocol-based systems like OpenAI's ACP and Google's UCP require merchants to build integrations and provide structured product feeds. Universal checkout infrastructure — like Rye's Universal Checkout API — works with your existing website and checkout flow without any changes on your end. The merchant doesn't need to integrate anything; agents complete purchases through the same checkout a human customer would use.
Will AI agents undercut my pricing or hurt my brand?
With the right infrastructure, no. Agents purchase at the prices you've published on your site. You stay merchant-of-record, meaning you process the payment, own the customer data, and control the fulfillment experience. Your brand is represented as-is from your own product pages.
What should I do right now?
Start by understanding what's happening — you've already done that by reading this. Next, audit whether your fraud detection systems are inadvertently blocking legitimate agent traffic. And evaluate how your products appear when AI systems interpret them. We'll be covering more on what merchants can do in upcoming posts.
Learn More
Agentic commerce is reshaping how merchants participate in online transactions — and the infrastructure decisions being made today will determine who keeps control of their customer relationships tomorrow.