Angie Chua has avoided selling on Amazon since she founded her Palm Springs, California-based stationery brand Bobo Design Studio in 2016. So, she was shocked when, in late December, she discovered that her product catalog was available for sale on Amazon’s marketplace.
The issue first came to Chua’s attention when she noticed a slew of unusual orders from an email address titled @buyforme.amazon. Many of the orders were for products that the brand no longer sold or were out of stock. This was how Chua learned about “Buy For Me,” an AI-powered tool that Amazon unveiled last year. But Chua says she never opted into Amazon’s “Buy For Me” program.
“They just opted us into this program that we had no idea existed and essentially turned us into drop shippers for them, against our will,” Chua said.
Amazon’s “Buy For Me” feature allows users to purchase products from third-party websites without leaving Amazon’s app or site. (Amazon also has a “Shop Direct” button that links out to brands’ third-party websites for customers to complete a purchase.) When products appear on Amazon through “Buy for Me,” they are shown alongside standard Amazon search results but are clearly labeled as coming from “other brands,” with a prominent button that says “Buy for Me.”
“Buy For Me” uses “agentic AI capabilities” to provide third-party websites with shoppers’ encrypted payment and shipping information, according to Amazon. Still, several merchants said that, to shoppers accustomed to scrolling Amazon’s marketplace, the listings can resemble a typical Amazon product page, potentially giving the impression that a brand is selling directly on Amazon, even if the transaction ultimately happens elsewhere.
Through “Buy For Me,” customers were placing orders for Chua’s products on Amazon.com to be fulfilled through Chua’s Shopify account. Chua’s products have since been removed — she contacted Amazon at [email protected] to opt out, per the company’s FAQ page for sellers — but Chua said other small online merchants like herself could be unknowingly opted into Amazon’s “Buy For Me” program.
Chua isn’t alone. Four other merchants who spoke to Modern Retail for this story were also upset that their products were featured on Amazon.com without their permission.
“’Shop Direct’ and ‘Buy For Me’ are programs we’re testing that help customers discover brands and products not currently sold in Amazon’s store, while helping businesses reach new customers and drive incremental sales. We have received positive feedback on these programs,” an Amazon spokesperson told Modern Retail in a statement. “Businesses can opt out at any time by emailing [email protected], and we remove them from these programs promptly. Amazon is a longstanding supporter of small and independent businesses, and today more than 60% of sales in our store are from independent sellers who leverage our innovative tools and services to run their businesses and serve customers.”
Another business owner who reported having issues is Amanda Stewart, the founder of Mochi Kids, a Salt Lake City, Utah-based apparel brand for children. Stewart hadn’t heard of “Buy For Me” until she watched a viral video Chua posted on Instagram about the issue; the video has garnered nearly 16,000 likes since it was posted on Dec. 28. The video prompted Stewart to search for her brand on Amazon, which is when she realized that her product catalog of 4,000 products was available for sale on the e-commerce company’s marketplace. Like Chua, Stewart avoided selling on Amazon because of concerns related to resellers, counterfeits and brand reputation.
“We’ve not wanted to sell on Amazon on purpose, and so seeing our stuff on there was surprising and very frustrating,” Stewart said.
Stewart has received around 16 orders through “Buy For Me” since November, fulfilling some of those orders before realizing the purchases were coming from Amazon. Since then, Stewart has been canceling all “Buy For Me” orders and plans to email Amazon to opt out.
Emi Moon, the Cleveland, Ohio-based founder of the digital art brand Peachie Kei, said her entire Shopify catalog — including listings for gift cards — appeared on Amazon after she searched for her brand following Chua’s viral video. “The big issue is that it’s a reputational thing,” Moon said. “I don’t want to be associated with Amazon.”
Moon said she emailed Amazon to opt out after discovering the listings, but was troubled that sellers were required to take action at all. “I would really like to see these things be opt-in versus opt-out,” she said. “There’s a level of autonomy and consent that’s being violated.”
Even though brands have the option to opt out by emailing Amazon, merchants who spoke to Modern Retail say Amazon shouldn’t automatically opt sellers in in the first place. Merchants say Amazon’s opt-out policy risks damaging brands’ reputations and hurting the customer experience. For example, one of Mochi Kids’s wholesale partners — an independent brand that explicitly does not allow its products to be sold on Amazon — contacted the retailer after discovering its products listed on the marketplace. Mochi Kids had to reassure the brand that it had not intentionally listed the items on Amazon, since many independent labels include contractual clauses barring wholesale partners from selling on Amazon or other third-party sites. Merchants say those situations can strain brand relationships and undermine trust with both partners and customers.
“It builds distrust,” Stewart said.
All product information, such as description, images, pricing and ratings, comes from merchant sites, according to Amazon’s FAQ page. “This information is refreshed regularly to reflect changes merchants make on their sites.” But Amazon also says it “may modify these for display on the Amazon Shopping app.”
That might explain why one of Chua’s products listed on Amazon through “Buy For Me” — a vinyl sticker — erroneously displayed a photo of a pair of pants, a product that Chua has never sold. It’s unclear where the image came from, but Amazon says it doesn’t generate AI images of a brand’s products.
“It was a totally random stock image,” Chua said. “I don’t sell pants.”
Chua also received at least several orders for products that were either out of stock or no longer existed on her website. She said she canceled several of those purchases and issued refunds after realizing Amazon had enabled customers to order items that had been fully removed from her online store.
Even after Amazon told her the listings had been taken down, Chua said remnants of her products remained on Amazon in the form of incomplete “shell” listings. Chua said those shell listings included jumbled product titles and descriptions made up of SEO keywords pulled from her original listings, which she worries could divert search traffic away from her own website.
Chua has since consulted with an intellectual property attorney to explore potential legal options and launched a self-reporting survey to gauge how widespread the issue is. Chua said the survey has received 145 responses from brands that believe their products were listed on Amazon without consent.
For Sammy Gorin, a New York–based artist who sells paper goods, Amazon’s “Buy for Me” feature raised concerns beyond brand control. Gorin sells wholesale through a password-protected section of her website, where retailers must submit resale or exemption certificates so orders are properly exempted from sales tax. She said she was still able to complete a “Buy for Me” purchase of a product pulled from her wholesale site despite never opting into the program — a scenario that could expose her business to tax liability if individual shoppers were able to place tax-exempt orders. Gorin also worries that surfacing wholesale pricing could undermine profit margins, allow competitors to undercut her prices or bypass minimum order requirements designed to keep wholesale sales viable.
“I keep my wholesale pricing hidden from those without approved accounts to protect my profit margins and the profit margins of my wholesale clients,” she said. “If my direct customers and my retailers’ consumers are able to see my wholesale pricing, they might refuse to pay the higher retail cost or demand a discount.”
Amazon’s AI strategy
The timing of Amazon’s “Buy For Me” move is notable given that the company has taken an increasingly hard line against other companies using AI to access and scrape its marketplace. Amazon took multiple steps in 2025 to prevent third-party crawlers from scraping its website, including those tied to Meta, Google, Perplexity and more, Modern Retail previously reported. In November, Amazon sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity over its new Comet browser, which lets users ask an AI agent to find and buy items on Amazon. In a statement, Amazon said third-party shopping agents should “operate openly and respect service provider decisions” on whether or not to participate.
At the same time, Amazon is investing in its own AI tools. In addition to “Buy For Me,” Amazon has rolled out features like “Auto Buy,” which automatically purchases items for customers when prices drop. Amazon says shoppers who use its customer-facing shopping assistant Rufus are 60% more likely to finish a purchase, and it expects the tool to generate more than $10 billion in yearly sales.
Retailers and tech giants are racing to reimagine the online shopping experience through artificial intelligence. Companies like Amazon are betting that artificial intelligence will upend traditional online shopping by letting shoppers describe what they want in natural language, refine results through conversation and even hand off parts of the decision-making process to an automated assistant.
According to Chua’s survey, impacted brands include those that use software from Shopify, WooCommerce and Squarespace to run their e-commerce sites. Shopify, for its part, has added a default “Robots & Agent policy” to its merchants’ sites to ward off unauthorized scraping of its merchants’ sites, Modern Retail previously reported.
To Juozas Kaziukėnas, an independent e-commerce analyst, Amazon’s approach to “Buy For Me” appears inconsistent with how the company typically builds brand-facing tools. Normally, Amazon requires brands to apply, get invited or set up listings themselves. “The whole approach is very unlike Amazon,” he said. “It’s not built on partnerships. It’s not built on integrations. It seems to be just coming out of nowhere, and they’re not telling anyone.”
For brands that don’t sell on Amazon, that approach means they now have to eat up valuable time monitoring Amazon’s marketplace and, in some cases, undoing listings they never authorized — all while trying to run their businesses during an already challenging retail environment.
“It’s just another level of stress that none of us small businesses need,” said Chelsea Ward, founder of the Los Angeles-based stationery brand Sketchy Notions. Like other brands, Ward realized her products were for sale on Amazon without her permission after she saw Chua’s viral Instagram video about the issue. “Amazon knows we have such little room to punch back on this.”