The RealReal, a secondhand luxury fashion consignment retailer, said it’s updating its bot defense system, effectively making it harder for AI agents to shop on its site. The change comes days after The Verge reported that an AI agent could be used to take advantage of The RealReal’s item reserve system. On the retailer’s website, […]
Etsy is announcing stricter rules about how AI can be used in listings to reduce the volume of AI slop on the platform. In a post, the company says that “many active buyers say they can’t tell which items involve AI-generated content” and that sellers are “concerned about your work appearing alongside items that use […]
Using an AI agent to shop for you is a strange experience. Tech companies have marketed them as personal assistants – the democratizing of labor that ordinarily would only be available to the rich and powerful. In practice, at least for buying things, it’s more like sending an anxious and apologetic teenager out to the […]
Walmart will soon let AI agents shop on its website for you. Next month, the retail giant will allow you to use an AI agent on the site, with systems in place to let you approve and review purchases and set spending limits. The embrace of AI agents stands in stark contrast to Amazon, which […]
The new shopping tool is available in the U.S. across Google Search and the Gemini app.
More AI agents will soon be able to browse and purchase from Shopify listings, marking an expansion of the company’s agentic commerce ambitions. Shopify announced Tuesday it will let shoppers configure their AI agents to purchase products on their behalf, giving more agents access to over a billion listings in Shopify’s catalog. (The catalog consists […]
Most people know that Amazon collects data about your shopping history to serve up personalized product recommendations. But what some of us didn’t realize is that you can check exactly what Amazon knows – or thinks it knows – about you in your settings menu. One user’s findings went viral on Threads after she discovered […]
DoorDash, the leading food delivery app, processed 970 million orders in its second quarter this year and generated $4.5 billion in revenue. A 10-person startup called Bites is a blip in comparison: It has just around 300 restaurants signed up in the Bay Area, where it’s operating as a pre-seed startup. But this summer, Bites […]
Earlier this summer, Amazon customers began noticing that emails related to their online orders looked sparse: Order confirmation emails didn’t name specific items anymore, and instead listed only item categories. “Your Beauty item is confirmed!” an email about my retainer cleaning tablets read. Shoppers have posted other iterations of the redacted emails as well: “Ordered: […]
AliExpress has been hit with a €550 million (about $629 million) fine for violating Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA) rules by failing to prevent illegal, unsafe, or counterfeit products from being sold on the e-commerce platform. The European Commission ruled that AliExpress didn’t take effective measures to reduce the dissemination of illegal products, noting the […]