<div id="readability-page-1"><div><div><p>If you still need to do some eleventh-hour Christmas shopping, one place above all others is likely to spring to mind.</p><p>More than 43 million adults in Britain – around nine in 10 – shop on Amazon at least once a month. Users spend two hours and 15 minutes a month on the site – almost an hour more than eBay, the next most popular online shopping destination.</p><p>Only WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and Google Maps are installed on more iPhones. One pound in every £4 spent online goes to Amazon, and only Tesco and Sainsbury’s take more of our hard-earned cash overall.</p><p>For many, the company has become the default place to shop by virtue of both an endless selection of items and unmatched convenience. Even disorganised shoppers who order the weekend before Christmas know their gifts will arrive at the front door with time to spare.</p><p>But the company’s position as the internet’s default shop-window could be under threat from a wave of artificial intelligence agents that promise to act as our personal shoppers, moving our shopping habits away from Amazon and driving down prices.</p><p>By next Christmas, if chatbot makers get their way, you might instead open up ChatGPT, ask it to buy a thoughtful gift for your mother-in-law that will arrive by Christmas, and give it no more thought.</p></div></div><div><div><p>In November, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, unveiled a shopping assistant that reads online reviews and recommends products, scanning the web and providing links.</p><p>The company has also introduced a “Buy it in ChatGPT” feature that lets people make purchases without having to go to a retailer’s website, signing up the likes of Etsy, Target and Walmart.</p><p>Enterprising shoppers are also using the bot’s “agent” mode, which scours the web. Users direct the bot to find the cheapest price on their target item, as well as trying out dozens of potential promotional codes to try to secure a discount.</p><p>Because doing this manually is laborious, time-consuming work, many shoppers simply default to Amazon, even when it may not be the cheapest. But when you can get a bot to do it, there is no such trade-off.</p><p>Google has also said it plans to introduce shopping features into its ChatGPT rival Gemini, while rival company Perplexity launched its own a year ago.</p><p>The AI data centre boom, which is costing companies trillions of dollars, is putting pressure on them to monetise users, with advertising a likely candidate in the coming months.</p><p>So-called “agentic commerce” could account for $1tn (£747bn) in the US by 2030, according to a report by McKinsey, and up to $5tn globally.</p><p>A study by the consultancy Bain found that 17pc of shoppers today would use AI to start shopping, although this rises to 52pc for millennials.</p><p>“There are early signs that bigger structural change is ahead,” says Barry Thomas, an analyst at Kantar. “Agents make it easy to check prices across brands and retailers. This higher level of price transparency could end up posing problems for retailers.” Thomas says agents are “hijacking the consumer relationship away from brands and retailers”.</p><p>The bots represent several threats to Amazon. Regularly sending shoppers to other websites could lead consumers to no longer consider Amazon as the default place to buy things online.</p></div></div><div><div><p>That could weaken the argument for spending £8.99 a month on the company’s Prime subscription service and using the array of services around it such as Amazon’s TV streaming service.</p><p>And even if shoppers ultimately buy from Amazon, those who arrive at the site through a chatbot are not nearly as lucrative.</p><p>Advertising within the company’s search results has become the company’s fastest-growing sources of income in recent years. While it accounts for less than around a tenth of revenues, analysts have estimated that it could make up the majority of the company’s profits, since margins are several times higher than on selling and shipping physical goods.</p><p>When shoppers buy a laptop through a chatbot recommendation, rather than searching for “laptops” in Amazon’s search bar, the company has no chance to show them ads.</p></div></div><div><div><p>After launching ChatGPT’s tie-up with Walmart, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, was asked on a podcast whether Amazon could be next. “I have no idea,” he said, adding: “If I were them, I would fight back.”</p><p>That is exactly what the company has done. In November, Amazon blocked ChatGPT from crawling its website, meaning the bot cannot check prices or keep up to date records of what the site sells.</p><p>It has gone one further when it comes to Perplexity, suing the company and claiming that the company had attempted to disguise its bots as human users in an attempt to sneak onto Amazon’s systems.</p><p>The lawsuit said Perplexity executives had been contacted on five occasions asking the company to stop, and accused the company of “unauthorised access and trespass”.</p><p>Perplexity responded by accusing Amazon of bullying, and said the company’s actions represented “a threat to all internet users”.</p><p>Underscoring the seriousness of the threat, Amazon pursued the lawsuit despite Perplexity being a customer of its cloud computing division and the fact that its founder Jeff Bezos is a major investor in the company (Bezos’s Washington Post also has a deal with Perplexity that gives users of Perplexity’s web browser access to the newspaper).</p></div></div><div><div><p>Amazon is also blocking ChatGPT at the same time as it is in talks to invest as much as $10bn in OpenAI, which has in turn pledged to spend $38bn on Amazon’s cloud computing division.</p><p>Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, has sought to downplay the threat from AI bots.</p><p>Jassy normally presents himself as an AI champion, waxing lyrical about the potential for the company to do more with less and cut white collar jobs at Amazon. But he recently told investors that bots were no good at shopping.</p><p>“Right now, I would say the customer experience is not [good]. There’s no personalisation, there’s no shopping history, the delivery estimates are frequently wrong, the prices are often wrong,” he said. Still, the company has launched its own shopping assistant, although it is based around shopping on Amazon itself, rather than the rest of the web.</p><p>Thomas, of Kantar, says Amazon’s decision to block bots “can only be a temporary strategy, in a world where agents become the new starting point for more shoppers”.</p><p>Amazon shows no sign of going away, at least this Christmas. The company has told shareholders to expect record sales at the end of the year. But next year, ChatGPT may be where you start for a last-minute gift.</p></div></div></div>

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<p>Amazon's dominance in online shopping is threatened by AI shopping agents like ChatGPT, which offer personalized shopping experiences and price transparency. These agents could shift consumer habits away from Amazon, impacting its Prime subscription appeal and advertising revenue. Amazon has responded by blocking AI bots from accessing its site and suing companies like Perplexity for unauthorized access.</p>

- Amazon remains the dominant online shopping platform in the UK, with over 43 million adults using it monthly.  
- However, AI-powered shopping assistants threaten this position by enabling consumers to search for the best deals across various retailers efficiently.  
- As these AI tools become more prevalent, they could shift consumer loyalty away from Amazon, challenging its market dominance despite anticipated record sales in the holiday season.

The signs that Amazon is losing its grip on Christmas