A tectonic shift in e-commerce is underway, driven not by a new website or app, but by the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence that threatens to fundamentally rewrite the rules of online retail. Sophisticated AI shopping agents, powered by advanced large language models from tech giants like OpenAI and Google, are emerging as autonomous entities capable of managing the entire purchasing process from research to checkout. This technological leap presents a profound, potentially existential threat to the established dominance of marketplaces like Amazon and eBay. The core of their business model, meticulously built over decades to attract and retain human shoppers, is now at risk of being bypassed entirely. In this new paradigm, consumers may no longer browse digital aisles but will instead delegate their shopping to an AI assistant, which could interact directly with the supply chain, relegating today’s retail behemoths to the less glamorous and less profitable role of back-end logistics and fulfillment providers, stripped of their most valuable asset: direct consumer engagement.
The Fundamental Challenge to the Marketplace Model
The business models of today’s premier online marketplaces are predicated on a simple but powerful value proposition: they offer merchants access to a vast, concentrated pool of human shoppers. In exchange for this access, along with a suite of integrated services like marketing, payment processing, and logistics, merchants pay substantial fees. However, the rise of autonomous AI agents threatens to sever this crucial link. When an AI becomes the primary “shopper,” conducting research, comparing prices, and executing purchases on behalf of a human user, the consumer no longer needs to visit Amazon or eBay directly. This disintermediation fundamentally erodes the marketplace’s core offering. If the traffic is no longer human but a series of automated requests, the justification for the hefty fees merchants pay for prime digital real estate and consumer visibility begins to crumble, shaking the financial foundations of these e-commerce empires.
This shift does more than just challenge the fee structure; it threatens to devalue the entire marketplace ecosystem that has been so carefully constructed for human interaction. Amazon and eBay have invested billions in creating intuitive user interfaces, personalized recommendation engines, and community features like reviews and ratings, all designed to capture and hold a user’s attention. If AI agents become the primary interface for commerce, these features become largely irrelevant. The meticulously curated shopping environment is replaced by machine-to-machine communication, and the marketplaces risk being commoditized into mere fulfillment networks. Their powerful brand identities, built on being the go-to destination for shoppers, would fade as they are relegated to an invisible layer in a new AI-driven supply chain, losing the customer relationship and the valuable data that comes with it.
Strategic Responses from the Incumbents
In the face of this disruptive technology, eBay has adopted a calculated and proactive strategy that combines both defensive and offensive maneuvers. Recognizing the immediate risks, the company updated its user agreement in early 2024 to explicitly prohibit the use of unauthorized “buy-for-me agents” and other LLM-driven bots. This policy was framed as a necessary step to maintain a safe, predictable, and reliable platform for both its buyers and sellers. Concurrently, eBay is not simply building a wall against the future but is actively developing its own proprietary agentic capabilities. CEO Jamie Iannone has outlined a vision to integrate in-house AI directly into the platform’s core search experience. This approach aims to create a controlled environment where eBay’s own agents can coexist with approved third-party agents, ensuring that any external AI accessing its inventory must also recognize and incorporate eBay’s unique value-added services, such as managed shipping and its money-back guarantee, thereby preserving its value proposition in an agent-to-agent world.
In stark contrast to eBay’s more collaborative approach, Amazon has responded with an aggressive and litigious counterattack. The retail giant filed a federal lawsuit against the AI firm Perplexity AI, aiming to secure an injunction to block its agentic shopping tool, Comet, from accessing its retail store and customer data. Amazon’s legal complaint did not merely allege data scraping but went further, framing Perplexity AI’s actions as a form of “digital trespass” that violated the secure and curated shopping environment it provides. While leveraging the legal system to fend off external threats, Amazon is simultaneously doubling down on its own AI ecosystem. The company is heavily promoting its proprietary AI shopping assistant, Rufus, in a clear effort to control the AI-driven commerce narrative and keep users locked within its own platform. This dual strategy of legal action and in-house innovation demonstrates Amazon’s intent to both define the rules of engagement and dominate the new AI-powered retail landscape.
Collateral Damage and Unforeseen Risks
Beyond the direct threat of disintermediation, industry experts are highlighting significant collateral risks for all merchants operating in this new landscape. Jeff Otto, Chief Marketing Officer at the fraud prevention firm Riskified, points to a “double-edged threat” that begins with the erosion of the customer relationship. When a consumer’s entire shopping journey, from initial query to final purchase, is contained within an AI interface like ChatGPT, the merchant or marketplace becomes virtually invisible. This loss of direct interaction eliminates crucial opportunities for brand exposure, a key component in building customer loyalty and encouraging repeat business. The long-term customer lifetime value, a critical metric for any retailer, is severely diminished when the brand itself is abstracted away by a mediating AI. Merchants risk becoming faceless suppliers to a machine, losing the ability to tell their story and connect with their customers on a human level.
The second edge of this threat involves a substantial increase in transactional risk. By allowing external, third-party AI agents to manage purchases, merchants are “effectively outsourcing” critical functions that are central to a secure and trustworthy transaction. Crucial decisions related to payment-trust and fraud-detection are delegated to systems that are outside the merchant’s control and visibility. This creates a significant vulnerability. These external AI systems may not have the sophisticated, battle-tested fraud prevention mechanisms that established retailers have spent years developing. Consequently, merchants could face a sharp increase in fraudulent transactions and costly chargebacks, introducing a new level of financial instability and operational complexity into their business. The convenience of agentic commerce for the consumer could come at a steep price for the seller in the form of heightened security risks.
Navigating the New Agentic Commerce Landscape
The emergence of AI-driven commerce had ultimately forced a fundamental reevaluation of e-commerce strategy for every participant in the market, from global giants to individual entrepreneurs. The central challenge was no longer simply about optimizing a website for human visitors or winning a top spot in a search ranking. As Adam Behrens of New Generation concluded, the critical question for every merchant became how to strategically expose their brand, products, and data to this new AI ecosystem. They had to find a way to engage with these powerful new intermediaries while maintaining a degree of control, ensuring they could benefit financially from these machine-driven transactions. This pivotal moment required a new playbook, one that translated this novel form of engagement into tangible revenue and secured a merchant’s place in a radically transformed digital marketplace.
