I buy most of my stuff on Amazon because of the convenience, but there’s still a few scenarios where I still want to buy direct from a brand’s store—whether it’s deals or simply availability. Now, Amazon also wants to buy off those shops for you.
Amazon is currently testing a new, AI-driven feature within its mobile application called “Buy for Me,” designed to facilitate purchases for users directly from external brand websites. The way it works is when a user searches for an item associated with a specific brand, they may find themselves looking at a distinct section labeled “Shop brand sites directly.” This section appears separately from the standard listings offered by Amazon and its third-party sellers.
Within this new section, certain products might display a “Buy for Me” button, which does exactly what you think it does—it’ll bring you to a product listing within Amazon, and when you hit buy there, Amazon will use agentic AI (AI that can perform tasks autonomously without requiring direct human intervention at each step) to go to that store’s website, enter your payment details, your address, and purchase the product for you.
This, of course, raises huge privacy concerns, but Amazon says that the user’s personal and payment details are encrypted during this process. In theory, your payment details shouldn’t mysteriously show up in someone else’s purchase by doing this, but we’d have to wait and see. Furthermore, the company asserts that it will not have visibility into the customer’s past or future order history directly with the brand’s website accessed via this feature.
Related
While Amazon handles the purchase execution on the external site, the official order confirmation email will be sent directly from the brand whose website the purchase was made on. So functionally, it shouldn’t be much different from buying something off that website yourself—the whole schtick of this is that you can order products on those websites with a similar degree of convenience as doing it with Amazon’s pre-saved details. However, users will retain the ability to monitor the shipment’s progress within Amazon nonetheless. A new “Buy for Me Orders” tab is being added to the “Your Orders” section of the Amazon app specifically for tracking these external purchases.
Amazon has not officially disclosed whether it receives a commission or fee from brands for sales facilitated through the “Buy for Me” feature. But honestly, I don’t think Amazon is only doing this for the sake of being nice to people—the company is probably getting something back from this. The feature probably involves partnerships with the actual websites the company is buying from, to curate the selections in search results and also to ensure the agentic AI knows its way around the website—I can imagine it could get confused with customers that, for example, might have a billing address that’s different from the shipping address. As we’ve seen with ChatGPT Pro’s agentic feature, it’s still an experimental feature that sometimes messes up, so it could very well mistype something while buying.
Currently, “Buy for Me” is in a beta testing phase with very restricted availability. The feature is accessible only to a limited subset of Amazon customers located in the United States who are using the Amazon mobile app on iOS or Android devices. The initial test also involves a curated selection of participating brands and products. There is no definitive timeline for a wider rollout just yet, but if this goes well, we might see it arrive for everyone within a few months.
