And what you can do to opt out.

What is Amazon “Buy for Me” and why it is terrible for small businesses

Amazon’s Buy for Me is a system hosted on the Amazon site, and appears to be like normal shopping on Amazon, but really it is scraped listings from independent small business sites. It’s the scraping without permission that’s really bad for small businesses. The scraping was done without these businesses consenting to sell on Amazon. That is bad in and of itself, but there are more reasons why this will hurt small businesses.

How does Buy for Me work and why should you opt out

Amazon uses an AI agent to scrape sites and pull data like images, pricing and some descriptions to show indie designer products on their site, and they make it look like these indie designers are selling on Amazon.

Thing is, Amazon is a monopoly and is wholly unconcerned with the success of your business. They aren’t invested, they don’t care. We can guess, based on past behavior by this company, that they will likely scrape the shopping data – what’s popular, what sells and where, who is shopping and what they like. They will most likely use this to steal and dupe your products to sell without you benefitting. We can make this assumption because Amazon has done this before. Even if we didn’t want to make assumptions, we can at least question WHY Amazon would do this without permission in the first place – they haven’t answered yet.

Why are you still harping on Amazon and their Buy For Me scraping?

Prefer to listen instead of read? I posted this video explainer on my YouTube Channel

News cycles tend to move on, which is why I am keeping this news afloat – at the time that I am writing this, very few news outlets (Business Insider has written about it) this. So I’ll keep talking about it alongside the folks whose work was scraped.

When did the Amazon Buy For Me program start? 

Some months ago Amazon announced a Buy For Me program that would link to external sites, while appearing to be hosted on Amazon.

At the time it was initially announced, they pitched it as a service that sellers on other platforms like Squarespace or Shopify could opt into.

But this is Amazon, and they are a monopoly, so of course what they did instead was scrape an untold number of independent artist and designer sites to list on their platform. They then used AI agents to make it look like these artists are selling through Amazon.

I don’t understand, wouldn’t this Amazon Buy for Me program be good for small businesses?

Because I have already heard from people who don’t understand why this scraping might be a problem, here’s a short list of why this will be a huge hit to small businesses. There are ways that you can opt-out** and I highly recommend that you do. Here is the short list of reasons why the Amazon Buy for Me Program is bad for small businesses:

• This is all being done without consent – this is the main point, and almost everything after is irrelevant. It breaks trust, it gives you no information, no direction, it takes your business out of your hands and puts it into the hands of a monopoly.

• It takes your brand out of consideration – there will be no brand recognition for you, no loyalty to build on for the future, no ability to build relationships – all of which are – and have always been – cornerstones of building your business for the long haul.

  • If you’ve ever talked to people about where they shop, or where they got that cute coat/purse/ring/sticker, etc. pay attention to what they say.

    • About 10 years ago, the beginning-of-the-end for me with Etsy was noting how many people would show me something super cute and say “I got it on Etsy!” with no credit to the person who made it. Etsy’s branding supplanted the branding of the maker or artist and the person behind the work itself was forgotten. Amazon will do the same.

• People will tell you that this Amazon scraping will be good for exposure, but how can it be exposure if it only exposes the product out of context and not the brand? Answer – it won’t be good for exposure at all.

• The Amazon AI is not particularly intelligent and we know this because it has already scraped sites for products that are no longer available, are discontinued, or are limited edition. This AI scraping isn’t telling consumers the difference between an available product or an unavailable one, and is allowing products to be oversold. So now you, as the individual artist, will need to be a professional customer support worker as you manage angry people who thought that they were shopping on Amazon. You also aren’t going to get the information that you normally get with any sale – the keyword they used to find you, the website that sent them your way – Amazon will keep that data.

• This process breaks consumer trust. A person thinks that they are buying on Amazon, and FROM Amazon, but is actually buying from an independent artist. This kind of breach of trust can only build cynicism amongst consumers.

• Lastly, we don’t know exactly where Amazon is going with their plan to scrape sites, and thanks to their non-consensual approach, there isn’t a lot of trust. 

  • We know that Amazon is collecting consumer data from this and we know that they aren’t passing it along to the indie businesses who are responsible for making and shipping the products.

  • Will they eventually charge a fee for referral traffic whether you want them to or not? Maybe. 

  • Will they throttle traffic to other websites thereby making it harder for you to sell online in any other way besides their platform? Maybe. 

  • Will they measure the traffic and sales to individual products so that they can dupe your products and sell them without you? Maybe. After all, they’ve done it before.

Amazon is monopolistic – that’s not new or news, but because we already know this about them, we can make assumptions about WHY they want to do this, and it won’t be to benefit you or me.

**If find your scraped work on Amazon and you’d like to opt your brand out of the scraping, send an email to [email protected] to opt out

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