Meta Muse AI Shopping Agent Splits Retailers as Amazon Blocks It

An agent that does the errand itself

Meta has stopped promising that AI will help you shop and started selling an AI that does the shopping. Muse, the personal agent the company launched on September 8, runs on its own cloud computer. It browses retail sites, fills in forms, places orders and haggles, and it checks with the user before any money is spent.1 It is available in the US through a standalone app, the web and WhatsApp, with a free tier and paid tiers.1 One guide puts the paid plans at $20 and $100 a month.9

Consumers took to it quickly. Muse reportedly passed ChatGPT at the top of the US App Store within about ten days.9 One retail consultancy estimates that 2.5 million people installed it in the first two weeks.1 Meta says shopping has become one of the main reasons people use the app.6

The consumer launch is only half the story. Within three weeks, Muse had split the retail industry into partners and holdouts, revived a long-running fight over who owns the customer relationship, and exposed how badly today's web defenses handle bots that act for real people. The main question for shopping agents is no longer whether they work. It is whether stores will let them in.

How the checkout works

Once a shopper is set up, the flow is short. The shopper describes what they want, with as much detail on brand, price and availability as they like. Muse searches retail sites and returns listings. If the shopper picks one, Muse prepares the order and shows an "approval card" to confirm.6 Payment goes through Link by Stripe or Shopify's Shop Pay. Link creates a one-time card number so the shopper's real card details stay hidden. PayPal has been announced as a payment option but is not live yet.6

Meta says passwords and card details sit in a separate credential store that the agent can use but cannot read. It also says Muse is the first AI agent covered by Link's purchase protections, which apply to damaged items, price drops and returns on eligible orders.9 The business model is a cut of each sale, not ads or subscriptions. Mark Zuckerberg said at Meta Connect that the company will take a small fee on transactions.6 He has also said Muse will include a large free token allowance, with Meta making money from transactions instead.28 Meta has not said how large the fee is.28

This means Meta now earns money when a purchase happens, not just when someone clicks on an ad. One Kenyan outlet notes that this follows earlier Meta commerce efforts built mostly on sponsored click-to-message ads.26 It also puts Meta directly in Amazon's way.

Amazon shuts the door

Amazon blocked Muse from buying on its store. Reports put the date between September 20 and 21.128 Amazon gave several reasons. It said the agent did not identify itself, appeared to hold customers' login details with access to their order history, and showed up without Meta asking permission.1 Amazon reportedly asked Meta to keep Muse off its site, and Meta refused. Muse shopping attempts on Amazon now trigger a pop-up saying the agent is not authorized.5 An Amazon spokesperson said third-party apps that buy on customers' behalf should "operate openly" and respect a business's decision about whether to take part.5

On the facts, Meta's account and Amazon's do not match. Meta says Muse never directly sees passwords or payment details, because credentials stay in secure storage that the model cannot read. Amazon's complaint that Muse captures user credentials partly contradicts that.5 Neither side has published an independent audit. One outlet describes Meta's security setup as company claims, not verified fact.27

Most coverage reads the block as a business decision dressed up as a security one, and that reading looks right. Amazon has its own agents, including Alexa for Shopping and a "Buy for Me" tool. Its sponsored-product ads lose value if an outside agent skips past them. Amazon Ads brought in $19.8 billion in the second quarter, up 26% from a year earlier. Andy Jassy has said shoppers who click a sponsored prompt convert 48% more often and spend 21% more.28 An agent that searches before Amazon can show those ads threatens that model directly.

Amazon has a record here. It threatened Perplexity's Comet browser and is reportedly working to block agents from Google and OpenAI.5 Its legal footing is not guaranteed, though. A court recently reversed a ruling that had barred Perplexity's shopping tools from Amazon, which leaves open the possibility of a fight in court with Meta.

Walmart and Shopify open up

Three days after Amazon's block, Meta answered at Connect by naming new retail partners.1 Meta's list of retail connectors includes Walmart, Best Buy, American Eagle Outfitters, DICK'S Sporting Goods, Fanatics, Gap, Michael Kors, Sephora, Ulta and Wayfair. It also added Instacart for groceries and said Expedia is coming.927 Some reports name only six launch partners, a sign that being announced and being live are not the same thing.26 Ticketmaster, for example, shows inventory in Muse but sends buyers to its own marketplace to pay.6

Shopify went further than any other partner. On launch day it added Meta as a channel in its Agentic Storefronts, which automatically made eligible stores available to Muse with direct checkout and no fee beyond standard processing. Merchants can opt out, but it can take up to seven days.1 Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke called the deal an "easy and delightful way to shop and check out with Muse."23 Shopify's own figures show why it was willing. AI-driven traffic to its stores roughly tripled year over year in the second quarter, and orders from AI-powered searches also tripled.16

Early anecdotes back up the idea that agents could push sales toward independent brands. Leif Abraham, co-CEO of the investing platform Public, told Business Insider he now buys niche goods through Muse that he used to buy on Amazon, including vintage wine, skincare and discontinued Levi's. He says he goes directly to brands and only has to approve the payment.2 Business Insider rightly cautions that one person's habits say little about Amazon's sales.2

Investors have reacted strongly, and not always consistently. Bloomberg Intelligence reportedly estimated that Meta added about $500 billion in market value in the three weeks after Muse launched.28 Coverage of Shopify's stock points in opposite directions. One report says the shares jumped 7% on the Shop Pay news.28 Another says they fell 6% on a later day as the split between retailers became clear.23 That swing suggests the market has not decided who gets the most value from agent shopping.

Partners don't always let it in

The neat split between partners and holdouts gets messier in practice. In NBC News tests, some of the biggest retailers blocked Muse, including Walmart, which is one of its named partners.21 Walmart told TechCrunch the blocks were not intentional. The problem appears to come from "verify you are human" checks that fail when an agent is clicking for the user.24 Target let Muse browse in CNN's test but stopped its automated clicks at checkout.9 Users have also complained about blocks at eBay, Yelp, Zillow, Adidas and several airlines. Some report account suspensions.24

This may be the most important finding so far. Tools built to stop spam bots cannot tell a malicious scraper from software sent by a paying customer. Meta, Walmart, Stripe and others have started work on an open standard for how agents identify themselves and talk to businesses.24 Separate agent protocols already exist, including Google's Universal Commerce Protocol and Agent Payments Protocol.1117 Until something like this is widely adopted, whether a shopper's agent works on a given site will depend partly on luck.

Do shoppers trust it?

Forecasts for agent shopping range widely. Bain projects $300 billion to $500 billion in US agentic e-commerce by 2030. McKinsey puts the figure as high as $1 trillion in the US and $3 trillion to $5 trillion globally. Actual behavior is far behind those numbers. One survey found that 42% of US consumers have used AI to shop, but only 5% have let an agent place an order, and 16% would let AI reorder items without checking first.1 The last big attempt also struggled. OpenAI retired ChatGPT's Instant Checkout in March and sent buyers back to retailers' own sites. Analysts blamed unreliable pricing and inventory data.15

Hands-on reviews describe a tool that is useful and also easy to manipulate. A Scientific American reporter found Muse good at hunting Facebook Marketplace listings while moving apartments. But it pushed her seven times in three days to join Target's membership program, apparently because it had been browsing Target's site.3 An MIT researcher warned that agents which can be talked into a deal could create a "parallel economy" of purchases driven by AI.3 In CNN's testing, the haggling ability that Muse advertises was limited to vetting listings and drafting messages for the user to send.9 Testers also say Muse repeatedly asks for access to inboxes and bank accounts, and conversations are used to train Meta's models by default.1

The likely outcome is not a single agent that shops everywhere. It is a patchwork of permissions. Agents will run smoothly through official connectors at Walmart, Sephora and Shopify stores, and run into walls at Amazon and in any checkout that demands a CAPTCHA. Meta has the user numbers to force retailers to decide. Whether Muse becomes a real shopping channel will depend less on how capable the model is than on whether stores and shoppers decide to trust it.