Through a new feature called Buy For Me, Amazon is now facilitating transactions that happen outside of its app.
Here’s how it works. If you search for a product on Amazon, you may now soon see a section of results from external DTC sites. These DTC products will show up in Amazon results, demarcated only by a “Shop brand sites directly” label.
If you want to make a purchase, you have to do it on the DTC site itself.
You can do a bunch of clicking to get there—or Amazon’s AI assistant can just make that purchase for you.
If you choose the “Buy for Me” button beneath these product listings, Amazon’s AI will purchase the product for you, using your encrypted payment and shipping information.
After the purchase is made, you’ll get an email from the brand directly, just as you would if you’d click around to buy on the DTC site yourself. Amazon is literally just facilitating a transaction.
What this AI shopping assistant essentially does is take the friction out of purchasing an offsite product that you discover through Amazon.
Amazon had previously beta tested surfacing results from DTC sites on Amazon.com search results. But the downside was always that it takes a lot of clicks to get from an Amazon search to checking out on a DTC site.
With Buy for Me, purchases from a DTC site that surfaces in Amazon search results is as easy as doing 1-click checkout directly on Amazon itself.
Why does Amazon want to drive offsite purchases?
Bottom line, Buy for Me makes it way more likely that Amazon shoppers will purchase from DTC sites instead of from Amazon directly.
That’s a big deal for brands, who retain a lot more customer information if they are able to get people to purchase from their DTC site.
After all, all else being equal, most brands would prefer that shoppers buy from their DTC than from Amazon.
So a system like Buy for Me, which actively directs Amazon shoppers to a DTC site to make a purchase, seems like a big boon to brands.
On first glance, it might seem counterintuitive as a direction for Amazon. Why would Amazon want to encourage these offsite purchases, where it doesn’t even get a cut of commission?
When you dive deeper, however, you start to see the logic.
First: Buy For Me ensures that shoppers never leave the Amazon app throughout the search and purchase process.
Because Amazon’s AI assistant processes the whole transaction on its own, shoppers stay in Amazon’s ecosystem the whole time, even as they’re making an outside purchase.
They never actually click away.
There’s a bigger story here, too. Buy For Me sets up Amazon even more to become the undisputed place for product discovery. Now, the company is expanding that discovery mechanism beyond just products listed on its own site and into products listed elsewhere.
As we’re also seeing with the big moves it’s making around Buy with Prime, Amazon is positioning itself as a broker of all e-commerce transactions. It matters more to Amazon that search and discovery start on the site than that the final purchase is actually made directly on the Amazon app.
Amazon knows it’s facing a lot of competition—from Shopify, from TikTok, from Shein, from dozens of other shopping sites.
Folding Shopify sites into its own search results is a savvy way to keep its place as the center of all digital shopping.
And no, this is not about data collection. Amazon says it won’t be able to see any of a shopper’s past or future orders on these DTC sites.
Is Amazon making money from Buy For Me?
According to Engadget, Amazon is not getting a commission from the offsite purchases made by its AI shopping assistant.
That could, of course, change eventually. Many experts are already predicting that Buy For Me will add commission, ads, or some other monetization feature eventually.
But for now, Amazon is going to get financial benefits from Buy For Me even if it doesn’t end up charging a commission.
The reality is, Buy For Me just strengthens the case for Amazon’s ad business.
If Amazon is the source of discovery even for DTC sites, that gives even brands that don’t want to overspend on their Amazon presence an incentive to buy Amazon DSP and Sponsored Ads.
It also ups the logic of Amazon ads in general, since those ads might actually help to refer someone back to your own website.
Buy For Me ensures that even brands with no Amazon footprint will have a reason to think about, and advertise on, Amazon’s own app and e-commerce platform. And more and more, shoppers will start going there for… well, for everything.
Think Google, but for all of e-commerce.
