With this Buy for Me feature, while you’re inside the Amazon app you can buy products that are not in the Amazon store at all, products that live somewhere else entirely, on another site that isn’t necessarily part of the platform and isn’t registered as an Amazon seller. Think about how Google works: it goes around, crawls and indexes the content of the web, and then serves it back to you as results. Amazon wants to do the same thing with products, and buy them for you too.
Amazon becomes your buyer, not your store
It’s not that it just shows you the result and says “look, this shop sells this product, I don’t officially carry it.” No. When you click Buy for Me, Amazon unleashes a little AI agent that goes to the external e-commerce site, which, again, is not an Amazon seller, and this agent pays under Amazon’s name but on your behalf, has the product shipped, and creates an intermediary email address just to handle the flow of that purchase, so that you and the external seller can still communicate.
Basically you buy from an external store without ever having visited it. Zero friction, pure intermediation. And Amazon is doing this in order not to let you leave the app, to stay the point of entry and the place where you buy. To pull it off, Amazon is willing to loosen its own borders. Until now Amazon has been surrounded by very high walls: either you’re inside or you’re outside. Now they not only let you buy things that live outside, they let you buy them without leaving the app.
And what about the seller sitting outside? If I run an e-commerce store and I don’t want people buying through Amazon, what do I do? Apparently there’s an opt-out. But the point stands: rather than just being your store, Amazon is becoming your buyer. It goes around and buys stuff in your place.
Why this matters
This change is big, and I find it interesting because it’s one of the first real signals of AI impact on something other than the usual nerdy stuff, code, automations, and so on. This is commercial intermediation like we’ve never seen before. They released the feature in the United States first, so now let’s see what happens.
Why does this suit Amazon? Because you stay in the app and they collect data. The same principle that already applied to Amazon’s own selections holds here too: if they notice everyone starting to buy batteries from a certain group of sellers, they make batteries made by Amazon and go right on doing it. And the moment the seller doesn’t even need to be registered on the platform, that really is a blow.
