Analysis and commentary on the shift to agent-mediated commerce.
Nearly every major news publisher in the English-speaking world lined up behind Amazon in a case about whether AI agents can shop on platforms. The hearing is Thursday. The precedent applies to every agent and every platform.
Read article →Amazon posted a job for a 40-person team building APIs for third-party AI agents. Read it alongside Bedrock AgentCore, Visa, Coinbase, Rufus ads, and the Perplexity injunction — and a three-layer strategy comes into focus. Defend the garden. Monetize the surface. Own the plumbing.
Read article →You can see AI shopping traffic growing. You can’t prove your optimization is why your brand is in it. The measurement is partial, the case studies are vendor-funded, and the causal link doesn’t exist yet. Here’s why you should invest anyway.
Read article →Shopify published an executive guide to agentic commerce. Here’s what matters most — compressed into ten things you can do this week, not a three-phase roadmap you’ll never start.
Read article →Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe joined the UCP Tech Council. The headlines wrote themselves. But five people joining a standards committee isn’t convergence — it’s positioning. Here’s what each company is actually protecting.
Read article →Tim Cook is out. A hardware engineer is in. Apple might win agentic commerce by never building a shopping agent — just by owning the device every agent runs on.
Read article →Walmart’s ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than Walmart.com. Criteo found LLM referral traffic converts 1.5x better. Read those two numbers together and the architecture question answers itself.
Read article →Open the site. Find the product. Pick the size. Enter shipping. Enter billing. Reset password. That flow was designed for a world where the human was the only option. There is now an alternative.
Read article →Target added agentic commerce liability language to their ToS on March 22. When an AI agent buys something wrong on your behalf, that’s on you. Walmart followed. Amazon hasn’t. The legal layer is being written in real time.
Read article →Andy Jassy’s 2025 shareholder letter doesn’t mention “sellers” once. The Amazon world is panicking. But the letter is wall-to-wall retail — it’s about infrastructure, not tenants.
Read article →ChatGPT ads hit $100M in annualized revenue in seven weeks. The ad tech stack is being built in real time. But the measurement is broken, Perplexity just walked away from ads entirely, and nobody can tell you if it works yet.
Read article →Amazon’s Auto Buy lets Rufus monitor prices and purchase automatically when they hit a target. Users save 20% on average. Your promotional strategy is training agents to only buy at your lowest price.
Read article →Agentic commerce is splitting into two worlds. One where agents can access any catalog and shop freely. One where Amazon controls the door. That fork will shape the next decade of commerce.
Read article →Amazon’s Rufus, ChatGPT merchant apps, Google UCP — none of them are your agent. Every AI shopping tool in market right now works for the seller. Here’s what hasn’t been built yet.
Read article →A federal court blocked Perplexity's Comet browser from accessing Amazon accounts. The ruling splits user consent from platform authorization — and that distinction will define how every AI shopping agent operates.
Read article →OpenAI pulled native checkout from ChatGPT. Twelve Shopify merchants integrated out of millions. The technology worked fine. The problem is something nobody in AI wants to talk about: habits.
Read article →Amazon Publisher Services is exploring tools to power ads inside AI chatbots. The company that blocks AI bots from its marketplace wants to run the ad infrastructure behind those same bots. Here's the Block, Take, Sell framework.
Read article →Amazon's new Agent Policy demands transparency from every AI tool on its platform. Amazon's own agent plays by different rules. Three moves reveal a deliberate competitive strategy.
Read article →Meta, Reddit, Alibaba, Google, Microsoft — everyone's building a commerce surface. But surfaces are the easy part. The hard part is what's underneath.
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