Twin Cities small business owners say Amazon’s AI lists their products without consent

Emily Johnson sells most of her fine jewelry out of her studio in the Northrup King Building in Northeast Minneapolis. She deliberately keeps her wares off Amazon.

So it surprised her earlier this month when she discovered her rings, necklaces and bracelets were advertised on the Seattle-based mega-retailer’s website.

“I thought it was a scam, at first,” Johnson said.

A growing number of small business owners around the country are learning their products are for sale through Amazon’s Buy for Me and Shop Direct programs, part of the retailer’s push into agentic AI. Amazon inserts itself as a middleman in the sale, seeming to sell the product via its own website and then sending the order to the local merchant.

Such AI features are seen as a powerful draw for consumers and sellers with the promise to expand in popularity. The issue with Amazon’s: These small business owners never signed up.

Amazon is adding merchants that maintain some level of online presence to its platform by default, creating problems for and causing anxiety among many like Johnson. It uses information from a merchant’s website, through a controversial process known as “web scraping,” to effectively build a mirrored catalog on Amazon.

Many small business owners are discovering their own products are sold by Amazon through word of mouth or on social media. Others figure it out when orders come in under strange-looking email addresses that lead back to Amazon.

“That’s really bad,” said Johnson, who had Amazon remove her products before she ever received an order. “And I can’t control that.”

Johnson said the first problem is that she never opted in. The sale arrangement through Amazon raises questions about liability and whose merchant policies customers expect will be followed. “The biggest thing is that I don’t want to be associated with Amazon. I find that cheapening of my work,” she said.

Amazon declined an interview request for this story. A company spokesperson said its Shop Direct and Buy for Me programs, which are in testing, help small businesses and consumers, and Amazon promptly removes business owners who do not wish to participate.

Susan Crow, a designer goldsmith with a shop in Northfield, Minn., also sells fine jewelry online. She tipped off Johnson about Amazon’s latest AI tools after Crow’s gift cards suddenly appeared on its platform.

“To be put on their site without my permission was pretty invasive,” Crow said.

“They’re presenting it like they’re helping us, but they really aren’t,” she said.

Small Minnesota jewelry shop owners are not the only ones who feel violated.

Angie Chua sells stationary, journals and accessories in her retail shop, Bobo Design Studio, in Palm Springs, Calif. She has her own online store, too.

Over the holidays, when businesses typically see a rise in fraudulent purchase attempts, Chua noticed strange order patterns coming in with an Amazon domain name. The orders came in low quantities, such as a single eraser or pen.

It was a red flag. Scammers often will test a stolen credit card by first purchasing an individual item from a website, Chua said.

And that’s when I discovered that my catalog, a majority if not its entirety, was listed on Amazon.”

Since then, Chua recorded and shared videos on social media describing Amazon’s behavior that generated a wide response. She said thousands of brands have been exposed. People reaching out to her are upset, she said, and “all of us have collectively made a choice to not put our products on Amazon.”

Chua said she is speaking with fellow small business owners and an attorney about bringing a class action lawsuit against Amazon.

Other major companies are developing similar agentic assistants in what looks like a tech arms race. Agentic artificial intelligence is different from the now-familiar chatbots and image generators powered by AI because it can carry out complex tasks. Open AI’s ChatGPT now does shopping research for its users. Google’s new bot can order a Papa Johns pizzas.

In the case of Amazon, the methods to build its AI programs pose serious ethical concerns and fall into a legal gray area, said De Liu, a professor of information and decision sciences at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management.

In other online marketplaces, like Google Shopping, users still navigate to small business websites, Liu said. That provides small retailers with a window into consumers’ behavior and informs their processes.

With the Amazon Buy for Me tool, retailers know less about an order’s origin and are put in an awkward position when the AI makes mistakes.

“There are a lot of downsides for the merchants because they basically lose their digital storefront,” Liu said.. “They become a warehouse.”

Like other merchants who have found themselves on Amazon, Johnson has requested the online giant remove her products from its website.

She is not sure yet about next steps. She is considering joining a class action lawsuit if that materializes. She said she does not want to spend the time or money finding a lawyer herself.