Amazon Blocks Shopping Agents. Walmart Opens a Controlled Door
Retailers are deciding whether AI agents that can search and complete purchases will reach their inventory through a controlled interface or be blocked at the site. Walmart has launched Agent Gateway, an MCP server that lets approved agents search inventory at Walmart and Sam’s Club and place orders on behalf of a customer. CEO John Furner presented the move in San Francisco days after Amazon began blocking agents from completing purchases on its site. The operational difference is access. An agent that can finish the transaction does not need to navigate the site as a human would. It connects to a structured interface, retrieves product and availability data, and completes the order.
Walmart says the gateway also allows an agent to buy a customer’s preferred brands without receiving the full purchase history or personal details. Next month the company plans to add separate agent profiles inside the customer account. Each agent can be set to require approval for every transaction or to operate within a spending cap. The arrangement is described as similar to adding an authorized user to a credit card, with visibility and a limit. A profile can be deleted at any time. The service is available to all account holders, not only Walmart+ members.
Special terms of use limit agents to the actions the customer intended. They do not receive payment details and receive only the information required for the task. An agent that violates the rules is blocked. The ordinary returns policy still applies when an agent buys something the customer did not want. For buyers concerned about software purchasing on their behalf, that clause keeps the financial risk on the retailer rather than on the agent operator.
Amazon has taken the opposite position. It blocked Meta’s Muse agent and earlier threatened legal action against Perplexity over its shopping agent. Amazon’s position is that an external company seeking to buy on behalf of customers needs explicit platform consent. The commercial tension is clear. A large share of Amazon’s advantage rests on search, recommendations and on-site advertising. An agent that selects the product from outside the site bypasses those layers.
Walmart has already signed a partnership with OpenAI for purchases from inside ChatGPT, announced a partnership with Meta’s Muse, and offers connections to Gemini and other AI applications. When the largest competitor closes the door, agents looking for a place to complete an order may turn to the retailer that keeps one open. If agent-mediated buying takes a meaningful share of transactions, the willingness to connect could become a competitive factor for both retailers and the suppliers that sell on both platforms. An agent comparing price and availability is more likely to finish the transaction where the interface allows it.
The risk for Walmart is reduced control over the shopping experience. An agent that arrives through the gateway sees fewer sponsored placements, and Walmart’s advertising business has been growing. The new mechanism tries to balance that: Walmart sets the rules, decides which agents are approved, and keeps the customer data. The agent receives controlled access. The separation of agent purchases from customer purchases may also give Walmart new information on which agents bring buyers, what they buy, and at what value. That data can later inform negotiations with the AI companies themselves.
Analysts at Rosenblatt have said the concern for Amazon is overstated because of the data it already holds on customers, inventory and shipping, and that a decline in clicks may be offset by a higher conversion rate. The same question of whether an agent improves execution or simply moves the decision outside the controlled environment has appeared in other procurement settings.
In prior Supply Chainer coverage of grocery buying, Matthew Keddy, chief executive of GreenCore Solutions Corp., said: “The buyer still buys. The agent just gets them there faster.” In a separate piece on data and execution, Kristian O’Meara, chief commercial officer at Pairsoft, said: “Visibility does not automatically translate into action. The biggest disconnect between insight and execution occurs when organizations treat data as something to analyze rather than something that can actively drive business processes.”
An agent that can complete a Walmart order still depends on the inventory, pricing and fulfillment systems behind the gateway. The operational question is whether the controlled interface improves the rate at which an intended purchase becomes a completed order, or whether it mainly shifts the selection decision outside the site while the retailer retains the returns risk and the customer data.
