Nothing says “it’s over” quite like getting blocked. And Meta’s Muse knows the feeling.  

The new AI assistant is the kind you can send off to compare strollers, book a flight or fill a grocery cart while you get on with your day. It had a pretty good first few weeks, right up until websites started leaving it on read, and among the most prominent names were Amazon, Cars.com, Adidas, and more.

One Reddit user describes the experience as they found the doors shut overnight:  

"This morning I woke to find out that cars.com., which had been working, is now blocking it as [an AI] bot,"  

The only reason for it that the Muse users got was a popup telling them that unauthorized AI agents break the Conditions of Use every platform customer has already agreed to.

Muse didn't stay single for long though. Less than a day later, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke announced a deep partnership that lets Muse check out with Shop Pay on every Shopify store, and a week after that, Shopify opened its checkout to browser-based AI agents in general.  

As rebounds go, that was a quick one.

So, like someone who just walked into the wrong wedding, you must be thinking, what the hell is going on?  

Why did Amazon block Meta Muse while Shopify rolled out the welcome mat?

The short answer is that the two companies make money in opposite ways, and a shopping robot feeds one business model while slowly starves the other. The longer answer, whether it is good for you or not or how the Shopify Agentic Storefronts settings may already be switched on in your admin, is below.

Let’s get into it.

But first, Meet Muse, the shopper who never sees your homepage

In August 1994, a man in Philadelphia paid $12.48 plus shipping for Sting’s Ten Summoner’s Tales on CD, in what’s widely credited as one of the first secure purchases ever made on the web. He did every bit of the clicking himself. Thirty-two years later, Meta would like to take the clicking off your hands entirely.

Meta launched Muse on September 8 as a personal AI agent. If a regular chatbot is the friend who tells you which stroller to buy, an agent is that butler who borrows your card, buys the stroller and texts you the receipt. Muse does ask for your approval before it sends an email or pays for something, so at least it’s a polite butler.

Shoppers took to it fast. A week after launch, Muse became the No. 1 free app in Apple’s U.S. App Store, ahead of ChatGPT.

However, how does a robot actually get into a store?

There are two doors and a bot uses one of them.  

1. An API, which is basically a drive-through window a website builds for software, so orders come in clean and the store knows exactly that it’s a bot who’s ordering. Shopify has an API specifically for this and it’s called the Shopify Agentic Storefronts.

2. The front door, i.e., when a site has no API, Meta says Muse can use it through a browser the way you would - logging in with your details and clicking around like a very fast human.  

That second door is where all the drama started.

Why did Amazon block Meta Muse?  

Amazon’s official explanation is about manners and safety. According to GeekWire, Amazon says Meta never told the company Muse would be shopping there, the agent doesn’t identify itself while browsing, and it appears to store customer login details. Meta disputes that last part and says Muse can’t see passwords or payment methods. Still, an unannounced visitor wandering through customer accounts is a fair thing for any retailer to worry about.

Now let’s forget about all of that and follow the money. Amazon pulled in about $68 billion in ad revenue last year, roughly 10% of its total revenue. Most of that comes from those “Sponsored” listings you scroll past on every search page, and they only pay off when a human is doing the scrolling.

An agent skips the scenery and reads the product data, then goes straight for the best match. For an advertiser, that’s like paying for a billboard on a highway full of self-driving cars with the windows blacked out.

If you sell on Amazon, it would be a bit awkward to know that a slice of that $68 billion is your ad budget. Amazon protecting its ad shelf is, in a roundabout way, Amazon protecting the thing you pay for.

And regulators think you may have been paying more for it than you were told. On August 31, the FTC and 22 states sued Amazon, alleging that since 2019 it silently slipped a hidden surcharge, internally called a “soft reserve price,” into those auctions.  

So, Amazon has also tried the courtroom route before. And it also sued Perplexity over a similar shopping agent then lost it in August when the Ninth Circuit ruled that the shopper, not the AI company, was the one accessing Amazon’s site.  

And now the plot twist - three days after blocking Muse, Amazon opened its seller tools to outside AI agents, starting with Anthropic’s Claude, so sellers can manage listings, prices and inventory without opening Seller Central. (Worth noting: Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.) Amazon even runs its own shopping agent, Buy for Me, which buys from other brands’ websites. Amazon’s thin defense is that Buy for Me announces itself and lets brands opt out.

Now you see the red flag? Amazon is perfectly comfortable with robots, as long as it’s the one calling the shots.

Why Shopify handed Muse the keys to checkout

Now think of Amazon as the world’s biggest mall, where brands pay for prime storefronts and Amazon makes money keeping shoppers inside the mall.

Shopify is more like the company supplying the card machines to millions of independent stores. It doesn’t care who visits your store, or whether someone walked in your store or sent their AI assistant. It just cares about whether someone swiped the card or not.

That’s the whole logic. When Muse buys from a Shopify store, the order runs through Shop Pay and gets processed at the merchant’s existing Shopify Payments rates. A robot shopper is still a paying shopper as far as Shopify is concerned.

There was a defensive reason too. Investors had been nervous that AI agents would route around Shopify entirely. But after the Shopify-Muse deal, Deutsche Bank analysts suggested the opposite: AI companies may end up leaning on Shopify’s merchants, product listings and payment tools to close sales. Shopify’s stock rose 7.1% that day, so Wall Street seemed to agree.

Then, on September 28, Shopify went a step further and opened its checkout to browser-based AI agents using a proposed standard called WebMCP. In plain English, that means any AI agent can read the checkout page, change the delivery address or shipping option, and place the order once the buyer approves it, without squinting at screenshots or scraping a page designed for human eyes.  

Shopify’s bet is simple: if robots are going to shop, it’s better to build them a door than to keep changing the locks.

What changes for your store, and who takes a cut

If you sell on Amazon, Muse can’t reach your listings there for now, so your sponsored ads keep doing their job on human shoppers.  

But if you sell on Shopify, you’re probably already in, whether you meant to be or not. Products from eligible stores were shared with Meta by default, and for eligible stores selling to U.S. customers, Meta’s direct checkout was switched on by default too.  

The good news is that it’s free right now. As of September, Shopify’s help pages say none of the AI channels charge a selling fee beyond normal payment processing. The “right now” is held by a string, though. Mark Zuckerberg confessed on the Sources podcast that Muse would “take a very small cut of whatever the transaction is,” likely to be paid by the businesses users are buying from.  

Anyone who built a brand on free Facebook reach in 2014 and paid to reach the same followers by 2018 knows how this relationship ends.  

So my advice to you would be to start planning your margins for an agent fee the same way you plan for marketplace fees.

What vanishes in Shopify agentic checkout (and how to turn it off)

When Muse buys from your Shopify store, it doesn't walk the customer over to your checkout page. It pays at Meta's own checkout instead, a compressed, speed-run version that Shopify switches on through Agentic Storefronts. Fast is lovely for the bots.  But a few things you rely on just don’t make it to the list like:

1. Your tracking: Google Analytics and custom browser pixels won’t fire in Meta’s direct checkout. The orders still land in your Shopify admin, attributed to Meta, but your ad dashboards will under-count, and your ROAS will look worse than it is.

2. Some of your products: Subscriptions, bundles, customizable products and B2B-only items can’t be sold through Meta’s direct checkout at all. If your best margins stay afloat due to bundles, then it’s time to rethink your strategy.

3. Your checkout extras: For Shopify’s built-in AI checkouts, only essential checkout blocks are eligible to load, and upsell blocks, trust badges, protection plans, and similar add-ons may not display.  

4. The customer relationship: A merchant on the Shopify Community forum summed up the worry in one thread title: “post-purchase upsell apps [...] never fire, personalization tools have zero browsing data on this customer, no consent to marketing emails [...] and they bought the product but may not even know the store name to come back.

What’s in your control

More than you’d think. If you’re wondering how to turn off agentic checkout on Shopify, go to Sales channels > Agentic in your admin and click Meta. You’ll find two separate toggles, one for Shopify Catalog access and one for Direct checkout. Switch off “Allow Shopify to manage for me” and you’ll also see an option to stop auto-enrolling in new AI channels.

But if your website is not built on Shopify, here’s what you need to do for each platform:

Keep catalog access on, because being findable by AI shoppers is free visibility and opting out of discovery is a hard way to grow.

Turn off auto-enroll either way, so every new AI channel is a choice you make instead of a surprise you discover. Then check Shopify’s Agentic performance reports and tidy up your product data. Agents read titles, specs and return policies the way a lawyer reads a contract.

When a robot does the buying, who picks up the phone after?

Let’s say Muse buys a blender from your store in October. It arrives, it works, and everyone’s happy. Then after 14 months, the motor gives out halfway through a smoothie.

Muse isn’t taking that call. The customer will go looking for the name on the box, and that name is yours. The moments after the sale (the return, the repair, the warranty claim) become some of the last places you still talk to your customer directly.  

That’s the part of the relationship SureBright helps merchants own. Whichever way you set your agentic checkout toggles, make sure your protection plans reach customers however the order came in, and that the claims experience feels like your brand, even when the purchase didn’t.

See how that looks like by scheduling a demo with our experts.