But how can they serve product suggestions this way?
Nobody will blindly trust Amazon to buy products when they know Amazon cannot and will not truly suggest the best product for the consumer.
Alexa was supposed to be the voice gateway to purchasing. But nobody trusts the result Alexa picks because it will not default to the best value to the user - only the best value to Amazon.
It is my personally optimistic perspective on AI that it will mediate all interactions with 3P who are acting in their own interest and not mine. Ie, “my” agent.
Recently it was estimated that Amazon makes $30-80 billion(!) per year off not showing you the economically best results by deliberately disallowing sorting on $ per unit [1] to force sellers into ads. Amongst other tactics (ex. filter by country of origin).
AI agents can sort on $ / unit to easily find you the best deal, rendering Amazon's various forms of paid placement irrelevant.
Extend this to filtering Chinese slop brands (also not able to be filtered) and the significant portion of revenue starts looking like knocking back margins to the 3-5% range. Basically an existential threat.
Amazon cannot allow AI agents and maintain current margins.
It's not the consumers of the AI, or the consumers of the real businesses? It just seems like everyone things "if they build it" it'll come.
But it's clear Amazon cares about how it's costomers have to view all the items as both upsells and advertising, and a bot is going to either be _really_ into it or act much like ublockorigin does.
But either way, no company making money on costumer direct sales sees a real benefit to allowing a bot to easily bypass all the necessary details.
Whether it's advertisement, liabilities, manufacturer's recommendations; a bot will ignore these things and generate a costumer expectation that suddenly the producer has to live up to.
Then you'll tell me: YEAH, that's why you need a MCP friendly website.
And I'll tell you: that's how the mafia works.