Prime Day shows how AI is changing shopping, tests Amazon’s bet against ChatGPT and others
American shoppers spent a record $26.4 billion across all retail sites during the four-day Prime Day event, and for the first time, the people most likely to complete a purchase are those arriving from AI chatbots.
The latest twist is the high stakes made by Amazon. The AI assistants now sending sellers whose customers convert the best are the ones Amazon has worked to distance from its store, hoping to keep shoppers coming directly to Amazon.com and using its AI assistant on the site instead.
Adobe reported this weekend that visitors who clicked on shopping sites from AI assistants were 40% more likely to make a purchase during the four-day event than those who clicked through search, email or social media.
AI still accounts for a small portion of shopping traffic, but the trend is starting to emerge. In the past, buyers sent by AI were less likely to buy, according to Adobe data. This change suggests that ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others are more successful in providing consumers with the information they need to buy with confidence.
Those figures include all US stores – the “Big Day” is more than a day away, and it’s bigger than just Amazon. The difference is important, because Amazon has taken a different approach than many of its competitors. While Walmart, Target and others have opened their catalogs to external AI assistants, Amazon has kept them out.
Agent AI drives less than 1% of traffic in all major online stores, but Amazon’s share is the lowest in the group, at around 0.4%, according to JP Morgan data.
That’s by design: Amazon sued Perplexity, for example, over its browser that it bought on behalf of customers, and won a preliminary injunction banning the tool from logged-in parts of its site, arguing that unauthorized shopping agents undermine a trusted experience. Confusion is attractive.
Amazon has separately blocked ChatGPT crawlers from reading its listings – as it has started buying ads within ChatGPT to bring back shoppers, a move spotted by Marketplace Pulse founder Juozas Kaziukėnas and reported by Business Insider and Modern Retail.
In Amazon’s most recent earnings call, in April, CEO Andy Jassy said the company was in talks with AI companies to get better communication between Amazon and third-party agents to “find something that works for customers and all companies.”
For now, Amazon is focusing on its AI assistant.
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The tool — introduced as Rufus and folded in May into a service called Alexa for Shopping — has attracted more than 250 million users, with monthly users up more than 115% from last year, the company said. Customers who use it while shopping are 60% more likely to make a purchase, and Amazon Web Services said the tool drove nearly $12 billion in incremental sales last year.
Jassy said on the earnings call that third-party agents weren’t ready yet — he said they don’t have a buyer’s history and often can’t get prices right — and that people will accept any agent who knows better. That’s what Amazon is following up on with its own discussion of AI and related tools on Amazon.com.
“We aim for it to be the best shopping assistant anywhere,” said Jassy.
The strategy shows one of the ways Amazon is increasing revenue. Advertising is now among your most profitable businesses. JP Morgan expects to bring in about $83 billion this year and, because margins are high, will account for about a third of the company’s operating income.
That advertising revenue depends on Amazon getting shoppers to browse its site rather than handing the decision over to an external chatbot it doesn’t control.
The big long-term question is whether Amazon can maintain its role as the primary destination for consumers and avoid being otherwise on the chat shelf.
