AI Agents Bring New Headaches to Online Sellers

AI agents are inserting themselves into relationships between businesses and customers. That could be a win for consumers and the tech companies behind the agents, but it poses challenges for many e-commerce players caught in the middle.

Agents like Meta’s META -0.11%decrease; down pointing triangle Muse and OpenAI’s Dots are helping millions of people decide on purchases and make bids on online auctions. They’re booking travel and dinner reservations. They’re coming up with diets for people to follow and ordering the groceries.

One of the most tantalizing possibilities is that they could remove a lot of the time-eating hassles of everyday life. That might reverse a paradigm where advances in technology have often led companies to offload so-called “shadow work” onto consumers: Having people book their own travel online, do their own troubleshooting when products don’t work, do their own bank transactions digitally instead of going to a teller.

But for many e-commerce companies on the receiving end of agent traffic, the shift could be as much a problem as an opportunity, and indeed create new work for them. While those companies have become adept at gaming search-engine traffic and social-media conversations to bring in customers, how to adapt to a flood of agent-driven traffic is less obvious.

Unlike consumers whose mouse clicks and searches can be easily tracked, it’s often unclear whom outside agents are acting on behalf of. As a consequence, it is less easy to divine what they want—or what they’re likely to want in the future.

Marketers also have to consider that different AI models evaluate potential purchases differently, said Jim Yu, the chief executive of BrightEdge, a search-engine and AI search optimization company. “That makes it more complicated for marketers, but that also makes it very interesting,” he said.

The adaptation is only beginning. BrightEdge estimates that purchases made via agents are growing 43% month-on-month, and have about quadrupled since April. But only about 3% of e-commerce companies BrightEdge works with are allowing agents to execute transactions on behalf of consumers.

Online merchants face a difficult decision, though: Do they embrace outside agents in hopes of a sales boost, or do they resist them?

There are costs in taking the first approach. Apart from an erosion of market power and more distant customer relationships, purchase mistakes could lead to higher merchandise returns or credit-card chargebacks. Authenticating transactions becomes significantly more complex with agents, Fed governor Christopher Waller pointed out in a recent speech.

“The question shifts from proving that a buyer is an authorized payer to proving that an agent has the authority to pay on the buyer’s behalf,” he said.

Amazon AMZN 0.27%increase; up pointing triangle, with its world-leading e-commerce platform, has so far taken a stance against agentic AI, banning Muse and Dots from shopping. And at least for now, that appears to be a wise decision.

Others that have less to lose have been more accommodating. Target is allowing agents from a list of approved outside companies. Walmart WMT 1.47%increase; up pointing triangle has actively worked with OpenAI and Google to try to boost traffic via AI tools, which the retailer’s U.S. CEO David Guggina said last month was bringing in new customers and resulting in “fantastic” conversion rates.

Agents that e-commerce players create themselves could gain traction, too. While customers may trust recommendations from outside agents more than captive ones, in-house agents have far better visibility on inventory and promotions, and can more easily troubleshoot customer problems.

For DoorDash, which has its own agent called Ask, chief executive Tony Xu said in August that only his company knew what was in stock and could handle the logistics of picking up orders from merchants and delivering them to customers. Consumers “honestly just care about getting their burrito or their pair of Nike or their stock of weekly groceries,” he said.

Agents that can get those things done will make life easier for consumers while lining the pockets of tech companies behind them. But the benefits for e-commerce players in the middle are decidedly less clear.