On November 4, Mercado Libre CEO Ariel Szarfsztejn told analysts that the company will not, for now, supply its inventory to outside AI shopping agents. "But for now we have decided not to provide our inventory to any external platform," he said, according to a Benzinga transcript of the third-quarter call. Two days later, Amazon began inviting a small group of US customers to buy through Alexa for Shopping by text message. This followed Amazon's September cutoff of Meta's Muse agent from Amazon.com. In the same period, Walmart set out rules for outside agents shopping its site, and Shopify reported that its catalog and wallet now sit inside several third-party assistants.
These are different answers to one question: whether a large platform lets general-purpose AI agents reach its catalog and checkout, or keeps agentic shopping on surfaces it controls. The answer shapes where brands get discovered, who holds order and payment data, and how much merchants spend on product feeds and connectors. With Black Friday on November 27 and Amazon's text option due to reach millions more customers in the coming weeks, the positions are worth comparing. We are following them in our retailer agent access story.
Keeping agents on home ground
Szarfsztejn called agentic shopping "an opportunity to accelerate the structural shift from offline retail into online retail," but said that shift would come "not necessarily by integrating ourselves to third parties," as quoted by FourWeekMBA. Mercado Libre's own agent is live for a small share of users in its three largest markets, and he called early results promising without sharing numbers. CFO Martín de los Santos said AI spending rose about $30 million from the prior quarter. The company did not spell out its reasons beyond building the experience itself, though the effect is to keep customer data and search advertising inside the marketplace.
Amazon has been more explicit. CEO Andy Jassy said on October 29: "Though we anticipate working with horizontal agents, we believe Alexa for Shopping is going to be the primary shopping agent customers use to shop Amazon," according to Modern Retail. When it blocked Muse, Amazon said Meta had not told it the agent would access the store, that Muse does not identify itself while browsing and that it appears to capture and store customer credentials, GeekWire reported. Meta has said Muse has no visibility into users' passwords or payment methods, per The Paypers. Cybernews reported that ChatGPT and Claude agents are also on Amazon's block list.
Amazon's own agent is a commercial surface. Digiday reported that Sponsored Products will appear inside Alexa for Shopping text conversations and are free to advertisers for now, a point our November 8 post said Amazon had not addressed. The Next Web, citing Digiday, reported that purchases the agent completes on its own carry no ads.
Closed to outside agents does not mean closed to outside merchants. On November 4, Amazon launched the Shop Direct Merchant Workspace, a free portal where eligible stores that do not sell on Amazon submit product feeds and appear in US Amazon search and in Alexa for Shopping, PPC Land reported. MediaPost reported that the portal gives merchants no access to Amazon's shopper data, and PPC Land notes Amazon has not said how these listings rank against paying sellers.
Opening the door, with conditions
Walmart took the other route. On October 21, TechCrunch reported, it introduced Agent Profiles, terms for AI agents and an Agent Gateway, an MCP server that lets approved agents search inventory and buy. Customers set each agent's permissions and spending limits. Our November 8 post summarized this as buying within customer-set limits, but Walmart's announcement is stricter: "Customers must approve agent purchases by default, and Walmart may require additional approvals even for purchases within an agent's spending limits." Agents that ignore the terms will be blocked. Seeking Alpha, via TradingView, reported that agents cannot see card details or change payment methods. The Shelby Report said profiles were "launching in the next month"; we could not confirm they are live.
Shopify acts as a supplier to many agents. President Harley Finkelstein said orders from AI channels grew 3.3x and that Shopify Catalog powers discovery in ChatGPT, Microsoft's assistants and Meta's Muse, with Shop Pay serving as the wallet in agents including Anthropic's Claude Duet. He acknowledged the volume is still small, and Shopify has not disclosed the base. The Muse agent Amazon blocked draws on Shopify's catalog.
Protocols, middleware and reliability
Merchants selling through outside agents face several standards. Google announced the Universal Commerce Protocol on January 11, 2026, co-developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, according to Tacnode. OpenAI and Stripe released the Agentic Commerce Protocol in September 2025, and Paz.ai reports OpenAI retired its Instant Checkout feature in March 2026. MetaRouter reports Amazon has adopted neither. We found no independent count of merchants live on any of them.
That fragmentation is the case for middleware. Firmly raised a $15 million Series A, led by Squarepoint Capital with J.P. Morgan Payments, Mastercard and Samsung Next, to connect merchants to agents without separate integrations. It disclosed no revenue or merchant counts.
Reliability remains open. When Visa tested 22 AI agents on buying everyday products, they succeeded about 57% of the time, with the best at 82%. Rubail Birwadker, Visa's global head of growth, told Fortune that neither the technology nor consumer trust is ready.
Every figure on agent-driven orders so far comes from the companies themselves. Holiday results in merchants' own analytics, Walmart naming the agents live on its profiles and Amazon reporting text-channel orders would show which model is drawing real demand.