As Amazon moves to become a shopping search engine, as well as a retailer, the company is introducing an AI-powered “Buy for Me” feature to help customers find and buy products from brand sites off the Amazon platform.
In beta test for now, “Buy for Me” allows Amazon Shopping app users to complete purchases from other brand retailer websites if the company doesn’t sell the item directly on amazon.com. “Buy for Me” already is live for a subset of customers in the United States, Amazon noted, and it begins its beta test with a limited number of brand stores and products. Once the test is complete, Amazon plans to roll out “Buy for Me” to more customers and incorporate more brand stores and products based on user feedback.
When customers search for branded items in the Amazon Shopping app, agentic AI, which enables AI to act independently and without human oversight, helps “Buy for Me” find relevant results from Amazon and third-party sellers on its platform. In some cases, its looks for additional relevant products from other stores in a separate section of search results labeled “Shop Brand Sites Directly.”
Customers then can link directly to the outside sites. When the sites are incorporated into “Buy For Me, customers will get a link that allows them to tap an item and check out a description in the Amazon Shopping app. If satisfied, they can request Amazon make a purchase, which then brings them to the checkout page where they confirm order details, including preferred delivery address, applicable taxes and shipping fee and payment method.
Amazon makes the purchase by securely providing the customer’s encrypted name, address and payment details to complete the checkout process on the other brand website. With that done, the customer receives an order confirmation email from the other brand store and can track an order via “Your Orders” in the “Buy for Me Orders” tab in the Amazon Shopping app. Brand stores handle delivery, returns, exchanges and customer service.
“We’re always working to invent new ways to make shopping even more convenient, and we’ve created Buy For Me to help customers quickly and easily find and buy products from other brand stores if we don’t currently sell those items in our store,” said Oliver Messenger, shopping director, Amazon. “This new feature uses agentic AI to help customers seamlessly purchase from other brands within the familiar Amazon Shopping app, while also giving brands increased exposure and seamless conversion.”
