Walmart Opened a Gateway for Shopping Agents While Amazon Keeps Blocking Them. If You Sell Online, You Get to Pick Your Side First.
On October 21, Walmart announced Agent Profiles and the Walmart Agent Gateway, a way for AI shopping agents to buy for customers with spending limits the customer sets, such as $50, $100 or $200. A month earlier, Amazon stopped Meta's Muse agent from buying on Amazon.com. Two of the largest retailers on earth now have opposite policies on the same question, and if you run even a tiny store, you are going to face that question next.
What Walmart announced
All of this comes from PPC Land's reading of Walmart's newsroom post and a beta page, since I did not find the primary text in a form I could verify. Agent Profiles are expected to launch "in the next month." Each authorized agent gets its own profile inside the customer's account, so its purchases appear separately from the customer's own. The customer either approves every purchase or allows buying within a limit. Walmart compares a profile to adding a cardholder to a credit card.
The gateway itself starts as an invitation-only beta for companies and developers. Per PPC Land, it uses MCP, connects agents through Walmart's assistant Sparky, and promises no website scraping, verified agent identities and rate limits. Walmart does not say what the restricted categories are, what the rate limits are or how identity gets verified. The terms for agents say purchases need customer approval by default, agents do not receive card details and cannot add payment methods, and agents that break the terms will be blocked.
What Amazon is doing instead
PPC Land reports that on September 20, Amazon stopped Meta's Muse agent from buying on Amazon.com, saying it never agreed to Muse operating on its store and that the agent did not identify itself. That sits against a court ruling on August 4, when the Ninth Circuit vacated an injunction against Perplexity's Comet shopping agent on the reasoning that the user, not the developer, does the accessing. Retailers still have contract tools: terms of service, rate limits and blocking.
So the legal position is unsettled and the commercial positions are opposite. One retailer is building a lane for agents. The other is closing the door.
The numbers that tell you how early this is
Arkose Labs reported on October 20 that only 2.3% of legitimate agent sessions carried verified Web Bot Auth signatures, per the same PPC Land coverage. HUMAN Security said in September that Muse made up 72% of the AI agent requests it observed. Put together: most agent traffic is unverified, and a large share comes from one agent.
And the demand side is not proven. PPC Land also cites Walmart saying in March that purchases inside ChatGPT converted three times worse than click-outs to its own site, after which OpenAI shut down Instant Checkout. A gateway does not create shoppers who want to delegate purchases. It only removes friction for the ones who do.
What this means for a small store
You will see agent traffic before you see agent revenue. If you run a store on Shopify, WooCommerce or your own code, some of your visitors this month are agents acting for a person, and you almost certainly have no idea how many. They look like scrapers because, technically, many are.
You have three choices, and I think two of them are mistakes. Block everything: you protect nothing in particular and you lose any customer who delegates shopping. Allow everything: you subsidize bots that scrape your catalog and hammer your checkout. The third is to measure first, then decide: tag likely agent traffic in your logs, check whether it converts and add rate limits on the endpoints that cost you money.
What to make agent-friendly now
Cheap work that helps with humans, too. Give every product a stable URL, structured data for price and availability, and a plain-text description. Make the return policy easy to find and short. Make price and stock correct in the page the agent reads, because an agent will quote what it sees and the customer will hold you to it.
Hold off on anything that requires a new integration. Walmart's gateway is invitation-only, and the open questions are large: whether limits apply per order or per period, when the agent terms take effect and whether browser-based agents will be forced onto the gateway.
Where I could be wrong
Agent commerce might stay a rounding error for the next year. The ChatGPT checkout result is a warning that people like asking an assistant about products and then clicking through to buy. If that holds, the winning move is to be easy to recommend, not easy to buy from by machine.
It is also possible that Amazon's approach wins for sellers, since controlling the checkout protects its ad business. For a marketplace seller, Amazon's policy is the only one that matters, and you cannot change it.
What I'd actually do
If you sell on your own site, I would spend one afternoon on three things: add a line to your access logs that flags requests from known agent user agents, add structured product data if it is missing, and set a rate limit on search and cart endpoints. Then look at the numbers in a month. If agent sessions convert, build a proper path for them. If they do not, you spent an afternoon on better SEO.
I would not apply to anyone's invite-only beta this month unless you already sell inside Walmart's ecosystem. The right time to build for agents is when the buyer and the rules are both visible, and right now neither one is.
Author
Lukas
@lukcombinator