Meta introduced (Practical Ecommerce) Muse this month as a personal AI agent capable of browsing websites, filling out forms, and completing purchases with user consent. Shopify added Muse as an AI commerce channel on September 8, while Amazon has blocked Muse from its marketplace, stating that Meta had not obtained authorization before allowing the agent to access the site (Practical Ecommerce).
The opposing responses reflect fundamentally different business models. Shopify, as an ecommerce platform, earns revenue whenever its merchants sell regardless of the sales channel—whether through traditional storefronts, social platforms, search engines, or AI agents (Practical Ecommerce). Amazon, as a marketplace, must maintain control over the shopping interface, advertising environment, and customer relationship; an outside AI agent could bypass product discovery mechanisms and retail media placements, inserting a bot between the marketplace and shopper (Practical Ecommerce).
For commerce practitioners, this divergence signals a critical shift in how customer relationships and product discovery operate. An AI agent's persistent knowledge of customer preferences, budgets, and purchase history could become a new layer of the customer relationship, potentially shifting power from individual retailers to the company controlling the agent (Practical Ecommerce). The competing approaches suggest that agentic commerce remains unsettled, with high stakes for who controls the shopping interface and customer intent.