Amazon's new AI shopping agent wants to help you buy products it doesn't even sell. The e-commerce giant announced Thursday it's testing "Buy for Me," a feature that enables customers to purchase items from other brand websites without ever leaving the Amazon Shopping app.
Key Points
- Amazon is using agentic AI to complete purchases from other retailers on behalf of customers
- The feature appears when Amazon doesn't sell a specific item users are searching for
- Currently limited to iOS and Android apps for select U.S. customers and brand partners
- Powered by Amazon Bedrock using Amazon Nova and Anthropic's Claude models
Despite Amazon's vast inventory of "hundreds of millions of products," the company still doesn't stock everything consumers want. Rather than losing those customers to competitor websites, Amazon's solution is an AI-powered shopping assistant that handles the entire purchase process on external sites.
"We're always working to invent new ways to make shopping even more convenient," said Oliver Messenger, shopping director at Amazon, in the company's announcement. "We've created Buy For Me to help customers quickly and easily find and buy products from other brand stores if we don't currently sell those items in our store."
The feature works by displaying products from external retailers under a "Shop brand sites directly" section when users search for items unavailable on Amazon. Users can tap on these listings to view product details, and if they decide to purchase, they simply hit the "Buy for Me" button. Amazon's AI then securely provides the customer's encrypted name, address, and payment details to complete the checkout process on the brand's website.
Amazon is positioning this as a win-win: customers gain access to a broader selection without managing multiple shopping accounts, while participating brands receive "increased exposure and seamless conversion." However, the approach raises questions about Amazon's growing role as a gateway to online commerce and the data insights it could gather about transactions happening outside its own marketplace.
The technology behind Buy for Me runs on Amazon Bedrock and leverages both Amazon Nova and Anthropic's Claude AI models to execute the purchases. This is a notable real-world implementation of what the industry calls "agentic AI" — artificial intelligence capable of performing specific tasks with minimal human intervention.
For now, Buy for Me is available to a "subset of U.S. customers" on both iOS and Android versions of the Amazon Shopping app. The company plans to expand to more customers and brand partners based on initial feedback.
There are some limitations to the current implementation. The service doesn't support promotional codes, can only process single-item orders, and purchases are subject to the brand's own terms and policies rather than Amazon's customer-friendly return policy or A-to-Z guarantee.
While Amazon has built its empire on being the "everything store," this suggests the company's ambitions extend beyond selling products directly. By inserting itself into transactions occurring on other websites, Amazon is experimenting with a new role: becoming the universal interface for all online shopping, regardless of where the products are actually sold.