“I typed in YamzWorld into the Amazon app and lo and behold there were all my products there with my pictures from my website as well,” Montes-Tarazas said.
While he receives payment for sales, Montes-Tarazas said the arrangement strips away his ability to build direct customer relationships.
“I do get the sale and I do get the money, but customers never get to interact with my website, they have no ability to sign up for my mailing list. They have no idea who I am as an artist or what I stand for,” Montes-Tarazas said.
Besides all the obvious problems with this, the biggest one I see coming that I don’t see many people talking about is how Amazon will inevitably use this to put others out of business if they don’t cooperate with Amazon. They’ve already done this hardball game with sellers voer the last decade that if you don’t sell on Amazon for an unsustainable low price + pay Amazon fees you’ll find yourself losing business to Amazon’s stolen copies of your products under the “Amazon Basics” brands. Well proven they do this, and I can see that if you find yourself scraped by this new AI program and you fight it, you’re going to be getting a visit from the Amazon Mafia.
Could he not put terms of use on his website prohibiting the use by AI agents, and sue Amazon if they don’t comply?
Filing a suit against Amazon… which attorney is going to take that case, and how much money would you need to pay them? 😕
Some lawyers would be very happy to go up against big tech since they have so much money that it’s often cheaper for them to just buy the problem away
Exactly. A bunch of lawyers work on contingency.
It’s not like every lawyer in the world is quaking in their boots at the mere thought of going up against Amazon.
That’s not necessarily how it works. If Amazon is guilty, they’ll settle for an easy win
Depends though. If they think they’re guilty but that it’ll be impractical to prove it if they delay the case in court for one to two business centuries, they’ll do it
Weird clauses in terms of use are frequently just toilet paper when it actually comes down to enforcing them in court. You can “sue” but you might just win $1 because the judge would find that you have not suffered any monetary damages. You got paid for the item, after all, and “building a relationship with your customers” has no quantifiable and measurable value which can be proven in court, so judges default to one dollar.
There is also the aspect of whether an AI agent has the legal capacity to contract on behalf of Amazon or the buyer, and on whose behalf they contract if they do. I’m not aware of any American cases which have held that AI agents are “agents” (an entity with the legal power to act on behalf of another) within the meaning given to that word under the law of agency. The Civil Resolution Tribunal in British Columbia, Canada, ruled in Moffat v. Air Canada that AI chatbots can bind the organisation who uses them and makes them available to customers. This opinion is not binding precedent, but I think courts worldwide should use it as a template for AI agency powers. If the AI has no power to contract, then the sale is void in its entirety.
I believe Amazon would argue three points:
- That the AI agent has power to contract, but that the “user” of the AI is the shopper, and Amazon is merely providing the agent for the shopper to use.
- That if the clause banning AI agents from buying is enforceable, it voids the transaction in its entirety, and thus the seller owes Amazon a refund.
- That even if the AI had the power to bind Amazon, that the ability to build direct customer relationships has no proven dollar value and thus damages should be limited to nominal amounts (i.e. one dollar).
“building a relationship with your customers” has no quantifiable and measurable value which can be proven in court
With utm tags in weekly news letters etc. you can pretty easily calculate traffic coming to your site and conversion rates of how many people make purchases after clicking links.
And even without utm tags you can show spikes in purchases and traffic after sending emails.
It would be easy to show data: This many people go to my site This % of those people subscribe to my mailing list. This many % of people buy after receiving the email. Average purchase is xx$.
This many people never went to my site because amazon.
Isn’t this just like Doordash though?
In May 2021, DoorDash was criticized for unauthorized listings of restaurants who had not given permission to appear on the app.[72] The company was sued by Lona’s Lil Eats in St. Louis, with the lawsuit claiming that DoorDash had listed them without permission, then prevented any orders to the restaurant from going through and redirecting customers to other restaurants instead, because Lona’s was “too far away,” when in reality it had not paid DoorDash a fee for listing.[73] This aspect of DoorDash’s business practice is illegal in California.[73]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoorDash#Litigation_for_illegal_unauthorized_restaurant_listing
That’s a different thing. In that case, Doordash actually blocked people from ordering from the restaurant in question and redirected them elsewhere. Had the restaurant been listed without its permission and all it did was cause a Doordash employee to appear at the restaurant, place an order on the users behalf, then go deliver it, it would be a similar case to this one.
I doubt many restaurants would have a problem with Doordash listing them without their permission if all that happened when someone placed an order, is that they get a call from Doordash (automated or not) to place a to-go order, and then someone picks it up later and pays for it.
Restaurants absolutely did and do have a problem with that, and I question the authority with which you state that there are no appreciable monetary damages from amazon denying a small business additional sales opportunities.
If you think you can find a way to quantify damages in a legally sufficient way then go ahead.
Interesting! I can’t imagine Amazon would want to argue #2, though, since it seems like that would completely undercut their ability to use AI agents in this way.
I hadn’t really thought about the implications of the ability of an AI agent to contract, though. That seems like really murky (and intriguing) territory; whether they can or cant, either way would have a lot of interesting implications.
It is a conditional argument. It is vacuous if the court rules that the AI is an agent that can bind a principal. If and only if the court rules that the AI agent can’t contract on behalf of a principal (for the purchase of goods or otherwise), then Amazon should get a refund.
I have been trying to break my Amzon Addiction for years. This did it. Walmart is lesser evil now.
workers pissing in bottles wasn’t enough for you?
Are we talking about Amazon or Walmart?
That high horse you live on is going to buck you off onto your face one day and I will enjoy it.
Try eBay. You’re much more likely to find a small business selling whatever widget you need.
Ebay is owned by paypal and do the same shenanigans. I highly recommend to avoid ebay as well. Use these places so you can go direct to the artist or product provider if you can.
Ebay is a tricky one for me. I’m an electrician that services a lot of very old equipment, and sometimes eBay is the only place I can find oddball parts for a piece of switchgear that’s 100 years old.
Yeah, sometimes it can’t be helped. I should have said avoid as much as possible.
eBay owned PayPal at one point, but both companies today are independent and separate from one another.
It looks like you’re right, they’re both public companies now. Still, both are completely evil and use the same practices.
Yeah, eBay as a seller is just terrible. They have totally capitulated towards the large volume Chinese crapola sellers and require that you pay them for permission to list on their site or else they’ll bury your listing.
It makes it very difficult to buy from another human being instead of some company that’s using eBay as a storefront.
And because they are using AI to, okay, not LLM AI, but machine learning AI, to tell the sellers what the prices of their products should be listed at, they are inflating the cost of every single item you can find on eBay.
They are doing this on the one hand so the sellers get more money, but on the other hand so that they get more money for their listing fees and percentage of the final sales price.
They’re basically realpage, but for person-to-person sales.
Most of that stuff is just drop shipped from alibaba anyways. Etsy is lousy with it too.
This is a non-issue and is likely a reseller using his site through Amazon as a drop shipping thing. Amazon likely has nothing to do with this.If you are going to hate Amazon, hate the way they treat their warehouse people. (Okay, well, I have been informed that it is a new “feature”. I guess you can hate on that too. Unverified scraping of websites and attaching orders to that is pretty aggressive…)Incorrect. They have a new “ai feature” that scrapes the internet for independent stores and copies their products, pastes them on Amazon and then sells them to Amazon customers. Their AI then goes and places the order with the original store. Read the article and the news - it’s widely reported in the last couple weeks. It seems like a “good thing for sellers and consumers” There are dozens of problems with this which are well covered elsewhere.
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Nope, Amazon announced the feature, Shop Direct, that is exactly what the article is talking about. They now list things from other sites and complete the order from the other site for the customer, without the other site knowing at all.
This is 100% Amazon data grift to try to justify their AI expenditure
On the one hand, I’d like to support independent stores, and I hate the shoehorning of AI into every part of the online experience. On the other hand, I like the reduced risk exposure of not providing my payment details or email address to yet another vendor. I hate that every online transaction seems to be interpreted as consent to receive more junk newsletters. Yes, I want to buy your product. No, I don’t want to be signed up for your newsletter or have my email address sold to a third party. I buy thing, you send thing, end of transaction.
Anyone still giving money to these antihuman organizations are complicit.
There was a time when all my shopping would be on Amazon with Prime. I was spending £200+ a month on Amazon. Over a year ago I decided I didn’t want to give Bezos my money anymore. It wasn’t difficult at all to switch. It’s not difficult to buy direct from seller’s websites. Amazon has made this easier by flooding their site with nonsense brands+sellers+nonsense reviews. Ditch Amazon today. You may be surprised with how easy it is.
DONT Worry! Our Government CARES about the Little Guys and SOON they’ll bring CONSEQUENCES to. . . Nevermind they DONATED Millions to Trump! SUCKS TO SUCK LOSER SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS!
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I fully support this artist/business owners desire not to be sold on Amazon without permission. However, citing the reason of not getting to market to his customers is pretty weak imo, paints him as just another capitalist, and I lose whatever sympathy I had.
“Mailing list” is not “marketing.” It’s all opt-in. Montes-Tarazas wants his customers to be able to interact with him directly, without going through a big tech monopoly that can pull the rug from underneath him or demand a ransom at any time.
just another capitalist
He’s working within the system that he lives in, and doing it ethically.
Mailing lists are most certainly not all opt-in. Take one look in your junk email box.
they have no ability to sign up for my mailing list
How is Amazon preventing customers from signing up? How even could they?
What he is saying is that he doesn’t get the customers email from the sale, to which he’d start to send marketing emails. You know, what pretty much every company does when you buy something.
“Not being exposed to me, the ‘artist’” is a perfectly valid reason, and one I would agree with. But the mailing list excuse rings hollow to me.
How is Amazon preventing customers from signing up? How even could they?
When Amazon scrapes the seller’s website for listing information and then circumvents the seller’s own storefront, they’re not giving the customer the information that (1) the seller has a website at all, or (2) the seller has a mailing list. This means that the customer will just never find out that information without looking for it, despite clearly being interested in the seller’s work (as they’re purchasing from the seller). It’s Amazon inserting themselves into the process so that they can skim some money off the top at best, or extort the seller for access to their customers at worst. And all of this while the seller has created the mailing list specifically to prevent such corporate malfeasance.
What he is saying is that he doesn’t get the customers email from the sale, to which he’d start to send marketing emails.
“customers never get to interact with my website, they have no ability to sign up for my mailing list. They have no idea who I am as an artist or what I stand for,” Montes-Tarazas said."
That’s not what he said.
You know, what pretty much every company does when you buy something.
Pretty much every big company, yes. Small businesses are pretty careful with that sort of thing, though, because unless they want to be dependent upon Facebook or Instagram or whatever for their entire lives, they have to not make their customers upset.
“Not being exposed to me, the ‘artist’” is a perfectly valid reason, and one I would agree with. But the mailing list excuse rings hollow to me.
“customers never get to interact with my website, they have no ability to sign up for my mailing list. They have no idea who I am as an artist or what I stand for,” Montes-Tarazas said."
For a solid portion of the population, if the opportunity is not placed directly in front of them to sign up for something, they will never sign up for it.
Excuse me while I cry for the email marketers.
This isn’t about the email marketers. I think you’ve got it in your head that this one guy is a scummy email marketer when he’s really just trying to let people who have opted in to getting email from him know when he has more stuff for sale.
Believe it or not, there are other uses for email lists that aren’t spam.
I don’t really understand virtue anticapitalisim at all. Moralisim vs materialism should be pretty settled but here we are.
