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Amazon has asked Meta to remove it from Muse, the AI shopping agent Meta launched earlier this month. Amazon says Meta didn't tell it beforehand that Muse would be buying on its site, and it never agreed to it.

Amazon has been piloting Buy for Me, which lets shoppers buy from brands that don't sell on Amazon while Amazon completes the purchase in the background. Some brands only learned about it when their products appeared in the Amazon app, and Amazon has confirmed that a seller who wants to be removed has to email the company to ask. That puts the work on the other store, which is what Amazon is objecting to now that Meta is the one doing it.

Muse places orders for users and pays through Link by Stripe. Stripe covers lost or damaged items and doesn't charge for returns, so the shopper has some protection if an order goes wrong.

Amazon's spokesperson said apps that buy from other businesses for customers should be open about it and respect each business's choice about whether to participate. Amazon compared it to food delivery apps working with restaurants and travel sites booking airline seats. Those companies usually have commercial agreements with the businesses they order from, and Meta apparently didn't have one with Amazon. I think Amazon has a fair point about how Meta went about this. I give less weight to the safety argument, mainly because of how Amazon runs its own agent.

Amazon also sued Perplexity last year after its Comet agent started buying on Amazon for users. In August a U.S. appeals court overturned the temporary ruling that had kept Perplexity's shopping tools off the site, and the case is still going.

I suspect advertising matters more to Amazon here than safety does. Sponsored listings surround almost every product page, and Amazon makes money when shoppers see them and click. An agent that goes straight to checkout never sees them. Amazon doesn't break out ad revenue by page type, so I have no way to estimate what agent traffic could cost it, and I haven't seen a credible estimate from anyone else.

Meta now has to decide whether to pull Amazon from Muse or push back the way Perplexity did. I'd also like to know how many Muse orders went through Amazon before the request came in. If this ends up in court, the question will probably be whether a store has to be asked first or only gets to opt out later, and Amazon's Buy for Me pilot currently sits on the opt-out side.

J.C. Penney launched a third-party marketplace late in Q2 and says it is outperforming expectations so far. The company hasn't said what those expectations were or shared any figures.

Net sales fell more than 8% to $1.3 billion in the quarter, while Macy's and Dillard's posted small gains and Kohl's was down less than 1%. Penney lost share in a department store market that grew.

Management expects the marketplace to add incremental eCommerce growth over the long term. Two of Penney's landlords are also its owners, so large-scale store closures are unlikely, and the company has fewer ways to fix its margins than a typical chain. It's too early to know how much of that a marketplace launched a few weeks ago can carry.