This week, we look at how some fashion retailers and consumers are responding to the rise of AI shopping agents. As the technology grows in acceptance, marketers and consumers have concerns about security, fraud, reliability and loss of advertising revenue.
While AI-driven retail assistants are increasingly becoming a part of modern e-commerce, not everyone is happy about their growth.
Amazon is in the middle of a legal battle against AI company Perplexity over Perplexity’s use of AI agents that can read and delete content from Amazon’s website. Earlier this month, Amazon won a court order barring Perplexity from accessing Amazon, citing user privacy concerns and negative effects on Amazon’s advertising business.
Elsewhere, Target issued a warning this week to consumers about its upcoming partnership with Google’s Gemini, specifically noting that any product purchased by Gemini on behalf of a user will be “subject to transactions authorized by you.” In other words, customers will still be on the hook for any transactions, even if Gemini made a mistake in their decisions.
Both of these incidents show two sides of the concern about AI retailers. For marketers, having another company’s AI workers digging into your site to uncover content can be very expensive. For consumers, the experience of using a purchasing agent is still fraught with opportunities for costly mistakes and incorrect orders.
Upasna Singh, founder and CEO of online fashion store U-Glam, told Glossy that she has seen both sides firsthand. As a consumer, he said buying fashion is “personal and easy” and that AI agents can miss the emotional connection a customer might have before making a purchase.
“As an e-commerce business owner, the anxiety is immediate,” Singh said. “I deal with bot traffic regularly, whether it’s hacking designs I’ve spent months working on or trying to access sensitive areas like payments and customer information. These are ongoing realities, not imaginary risks.”
Marketers rely on the information they receive from customers who shop their online stores. That information, including what catches people’s eye, helps guide decisions. But AI agents complicate that picture and require marketers to spend more time filtering their traffic to determine whether it’s coming from a real person.
Amazon’s actions make sense when you understand what is actually at stake, “said Sayali Patil, Cisco’s AI product leader. When a customer buys through an external agent, sellers lose behavioral data: what was searched, what was viewed, how long they spent. That is the real asset that is being protected, and I would expect more sellers to follow suit as they realize that agents do not undermine the business only, but they destroy relationships.”
On the consumer side, many of the headaches that come with sales reps, including incorrect product information and pricing, come down to how reps enter the website. According to Burkan Bur, chief executive and head of SEO at digital agency The Ad Firm, these agents access cached web pages instead of the latest version that a customer can see in a browser.
“Retailers don’t update product information, and they get cached versions that are sometimes hours old, sometimes deleted from a page that’s changed twice since it was last published,” said Bur. “In some fast-moving stocks, the price can change 40-60 times a day.” When a customer takes action on that and receives a wrong price or defective product, no fingers are pointed at the agent, and the customer complains to the seller.
With the release of many AI agents that can spend money and buy, such as OpenClaw, there is an increased need for security and protection. But these currentrails are slow to reach the adoption of AI shop assistants. In early March, Mastercard’s vp of government affairs and policy and its evp of cybersecurity released an open letter calling for international security standards around AI agents to protect against fraud.
Until clear security standards are in place, AI agents will remain as dangerous as they are exciting.
“Ultimately, the biggest barrier to adoption is trust,” Singh said. “Consumers need confidence that AI will work for them, and businesses need assurance that these systems will not compromise security, ownership or compliance.”
AI agents, in numbers
- According to a survey of 2,500 consumers who do not use AI in their purchases by the expert Simon-Kucher, their No. 1 was impersonal in giving gifts. The second most common reason was a lack of trust in AI capabilities. This information was provided to Glossy by Simon-Kucher.
- 70% of fashion-related questions asked of AI marketers are related to fit and size, according to Boston-based AI company True Fit.
- 53% of consumers who use AI to generate research also use it to help them buy, according to the 2026 BoF-McKinsey State of Fashion report.
- Ipsos released a report earlier this month with a lot of interesting data points about consumer attitudes towards AI retail agents. For one, most consumers want to authorize every purchase every time and are uncomfortable with the idea of an agent making a purchase without authorization.
More information to know
- LVMH’s share price fell 28% in the first quarter of the year, marking the company’s biggest decline to date. The company blamed the war on Iran for its collapse.
- US Customs and Border Protection is continuing its process of refunding tariffs. The announcement on Tuesday said that refunds may take up to 45 days after the application is completed.
- Allbirds is being acquired by American Exchange Group for $39 million. The company was once valued at $4 billion.
Glossy fashion overview
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