AI Shopping Agents Split Retailers Over Checkout Access

The door policy is now a strategy

AI shopping agents are changing the economics of online retail. Large retailers are no longer only asking whether the agents work. They are deciding who may enter their stores, who may press "buy," and who keeps the customer afterward. Retailers are reconsidering how they attract shoppers, authorize payments and protect customer relationships as technology platforms move between merchants and buyers.2 Their responses vary. Amazon blocks prominent outside agents. Target allows approved providers. Walmart partners with AI companies to win customers.2

This fall's coverage puts the split in sharper relief. By early October, a Wall Street Journal survey of retailer policies found a range of positions rather than a consensus.24 QVC lets agents complete purchases. Tapestry sells Coach and Kate Spade through Google's AI tools but keeps agents off its own websites' checkout. Amazon blocks outside agents while building its own.22 Gap decides case by case which agents may browse and which may buy, while Kohl's blocks agentic purchases outright.29

The question underneath all of this is who controls the transaction. Agents can bring in sales, but they also shift control over transactions and customer data toward the platforms that run them.2

Amazon's wall, and the legal ground beneath it

Amazon has taken the hardest line, and its legal position has changed during the year. In March 2026, U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney granted Amazon a preliminary injunction against Perplexity's Comet browser agent. She found "strong evidence" that Comet had accessed Amazon's site at users' direction but without Amazon's authorization.23 Several later accounts report that a unanimous Ninth Circuit panel vacated that injunction on August 4. The panel held that under federal hacking law, the shopper, not the tool's maker, is the one accessing Amazon's computers.2928 Some explainers published over the summer still describe the injunction as standing.21 The more recent reporting is clearer: the court left terms-of-service enforcement open, and Amazon is now relying on that route.2924

Amazon used that route quickly. Meta launched its Muse agent on September 8. On September 20, Amazon began showing Muse users a popup saying an unauthorized AI agent was violating its Conditions of Use.24 According to reporting, Amazon objected that Meta never told it Muse would shop the store, that the agent does not identify itself, and that it appears to capture and store customer credentials. These are Amazon's allegations, not established facts.28 Amazon has also blocked agents from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Perplexity.29 eBay acted earlier. A User Agreement change that took effect in February bars "buy-for-me agents" unless eBay grants permission.29

Follow the advertising money

Amazon cites security, but the analysis that holds up best points to advertising. In its original complaint against Perplexity, Amazon said AI-generated ad impressions must be detected and filtered out because advertisers pay only for human views.23 Perplexity's reply was blunt: agents "don't have eyeballs" for Amazon's ads and cannot be upsold.26

Amazon's own behavior supports the commercial reading. Its shopping assistant, renamed Alexa for Shopping in May 2026, carries sponsored-product prompts. Its Buy for Me feature completes checkouts on other brands' websites from inside the Amazon app, which is close to what Muse tried to do on Amazon.2928 Estimates of the ad business differ by period. Modern Retail cited a $56 billion business early this year, and later coverage puts Amazon's 2025 advertising revenue above $68 billion.28 Either way, an agent that goes straight to checkout skips the sponsored shelf where that money is earned.29

The clearest way to read the split is by where each company makes its money. Retailers that earn on the order welcome agents. Retailers that earn on the visit keep them out. Walmart's ad business, roughly $6.4 billion, is less than a tenth of Amazon's, so the reach agents provide is worth more to Walmart than the visits it might lose.29 Security concerns are still real. Tapestry has no advertising business, yet it limits agent checkout over fraud and inventory hoarding, which is when bots fill carts with scarce items.2229

Walmart's bet: welcome the agent, keep the basket

Walmart is trying to have it both ways. When a shopper picks a Walmart item inside Gemini, Walmart's Sparky assistant takes over the basket and decides which products appear and in what order.22 Asked whether this hands customers to AI platforms, Walmart executive Daniel Danker called it "intermediation."22

That approach comes from experience. OpenAI is ending Instant Checkout, its native ChatGPT checkout, and moving to retailer apps that send buyers to merchants' own sites.26 Walmart said conversion rates for products sold directly inside ChatGPT were three times lower than for purchases routed to its own site.26 OpenAI said the first version "did not offer the level of flexibility" it wanted.10 The economics also matter. One industry breakdown reports a platform fee of about 4% per transaction for ACP checkout and no reported platform fee under Google's Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP).17

Shopify has moved furthest the other way. On September 28 it extended the WebMCP browser-agent standard to checkout. Agents running in a buyer's browser can now inspect a checkout, change delivery details and place an order once the buyer authorizes it.28 Shopify also sends merchant catalogs to ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity and other platforms.22

The real bottleneck is permission to pay

Retailer policies get the headlines, but the bigger structural shift is in payments. Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller described it this way: the task is no longer proving a buyer is an authorized payer, but proving an agent has authority to pay for that buyer.2 That has practical costs. Purchase errors could mean more returns and more chargebacks.2

Consumers already treat these permissions differently. A PYMNTS Intelligence and Visa Acceptance Solutions study found 56% of consumers would let an agent search and compare products, but only 35% would give it access to saved payment credentials.8 For a $300 purchase, 52% wanted to choose the payment method themselves.8 In effect, shoppers are asking for permission that is narrow, revocable and tied to each transaction.8

The card networks are building for that. Mastercard has expanded Agent Pay, which already provided verified credentials, tokenized payments, spending controls and proof of consent. It now adds a probability score that helps issuers judge whether a legitimate agent initiated a transaction.7 Agent-identity firm Skyfire supplies "know your agent" tokens that verify who an agent is and who it represents.7 Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol uses cryptographic HTTP message signatures to separate verified agents from scrapers.17 Its June partnership with OpenAI brings tokenized credentials, real-time authorization and user-set limits on spending, merchant categories and approvals into OpenAI's products.12 Google's AP2 adds signed mandates that record what the user intended.17

The protocols can look like a standards war. In practice they cover different layers. Commerce protocols such as ACP and UCP coordinate discovery and checkout. AP2 handles consumer authorization. Visa's protocol and Mastercard's Agent Pay answer whether the buyer is a legitimate agent at all.18 That has a cost for merchants. A retailer can comply fully with a checkout protocol and still see legitimate agent purchases declined if the card never carries the networks' trust signals.18

Readiness lags the hype

Adoption is growing faster than merchants are preparing. BrightEdge estimates agent purchases are rising 43% a month and have roughly quadrupled since April, yet only about 3% of the e-commerce companies it works with let agents complete transactions.2 Adobe Analytics reported that AI-referred retail traffic grew 393% year over year in the first quarter and converted better than other traffic by July.17 Even so, the sale often goes to the incumbent. In one survey, 57.9% of AI-assisted shoppers said they usually still buy on Amazon.22

The infrastructure providers are hedging as well. Anthropic's recent retail blueprints let merchants build their own shopping agents, but they deliberately stop before payment, leaving checkout to existing rails.417 Commentators expect agents to be a test for the holiday season, with Amazon and eBay still holding out.27

The likely outcome

The likely result is neither open access nor walled gardens. It is a negotiated middle in which merchants decide access agent by agent and payment networks act as the referee. PYMNTS argues that whoever sets interoperable rules for agent identity, consent and liability could write the operating rules for agent transactions, much as card networks once standardized acceptance.8 Under that model, merchants would not need a separate contract with every agent.8

That is the most plausible path. Amazon's block looks less like a permanent ban than a negotiating position. Analysts note it could turn into paid or licensed access for agents that display its sponsored results.29 Once agents can be verified cheaply, deciding which ones to let in becomes a pricing question rather than a security question. Retailers that settle their payment controls before the holidays will be the ones setting those terms.