Amazon Just Banned The #1 App In America. Big Mistake. Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:00 So, Amazon just blocked the number one app in America from shopping on its site, and it's easy to see why they are terrified. This isn't just another AI chatbot. It books your dinners, cancels your subscriptions, and does your shopping for you. Now, I've been using it, and it'll shop from almost any online store except Amazon. Now, Amazon's official reason for the block sounds legit until you realize that Amazon is one big hypocrite and doing the exact same thing.

00:26 And the real reason for the ban is hidden inside of Amazon's financial statements, which we'll get to in a little bit. But I've been selling online for 19 years, and this is a huge mistake. Everything Amazon has done lately has been selfish, and sellers have been paying for it. This block is going to hit your sales directly because the way people find products has already changed, and Amazon just locked itself out of what comes next.

00:52 Now, the app is called Muse, and Meta launched it on September 8th. It's an AI agent that works on your behalf. You tell it what you need done and then it goes and does it. It fills out forms, handles your email, books appointments, buys things for you, and it lives on your phone, your Mac, and inside of WhatsApp. 10 days after launch, Muse was the number one free app on the Apple App Store.

01:14 And the next day, it hit number one on Google Play as well. And in just 3 weeks, Muse has been downloaded more than 3.4 million times. During its first 10 days, downloads grew an average of 55% a day, which is more than double chatbt's growth rate when it first launched. So, how does a brand new app grow faster than Chat GBT? Well, Meta has a huge advantage when it comes down to distribution.

01:39 3.6 billion people use at least one Meta app every single day, and Meta is using every one of those apps to push Muse. That is why I think Muse is going to reach mainstream shoppers a lot faster than Chachi PT did. Now, here's the part I care about as a store owner. I've been playing around with Muse for the past week, and shopping is where it gets interesting.

02:02 You tell what you want, and it finds a product, compares your options, and checks out for you if you wanted to, or it can compile a shopping list for you. And it can already complete the purchase at a lot of stores. On September 21st, Shopify [snorts] announced that Muse can check out on every Shopify store through Shopay. And in the words of Shopify CEO Toby Luki, they are partnering deeply with Muse to enable a gentic checkout with Shopay on all Shopify stores.

02:29 On top of that, Meta signed up Walmart, Best Buy, Sephora, and Wayfair, plus PayPal for payments. So, if you sell on Shopify, a new shopper can buy from you without ever landing on your homepage. Your product just has to be the one that Muse picks. And at the end of this video, I'll tell you how to make sure your store shows up. But one big name is missing from this list.

02:53 And you guessed it, the night before Shopify announced its deal, Amazon started kicking Muse users off of its site. And the way Amazon did it tells you a lot about what's really going on here. So, on Sunday night, September 20th, Muse users who tried to buy something on Amazon started getting hit with popups saying they were violating Amazon's terms of use.

03:12 Amazon had asked Meta to pull Muse off its site, and Meta said no. So, Amazon shut it out. Now, here's the BS reason that Amazon gave. Amazon said that Muse doesn't identify itself as a bot while it's browsing and that it stores customers login credentials in a way that puts their accounts at risk. Now, to an outsider, their explanation sounds plausible.

03:36 If some outside app is logging into your customers accounts and placing orders, you'd want to know exactly how it's handling their passwords. But Meta says Muse never sees your passwords or payment info and keeps them locked in secure storage. Now, when you look at Amazon's recent actions, they blocked almost every AI company from scraping their listings.

03:54 In July of last year, Amazon blocked Google shopping agents right after blocking bots from OpenAI, Perplexity, and Enthropic. And then it sued Perplexity to stop its Comet browser from shopping on Amazon. Now, Amazon won an injunction in March, but eventually lost it on appeal in August. But here's the part that pisses me off. Amazon has its own AI shopping agent called Buy for Me that does the exact same thing as Muse.

04:20 When you can't find something on Amazon, it goes on to another brand's website, picks the product, and fills in your name, address, and payment info to check out for you. And when Amazon rolled out Buy from Me, it didn't ask those brands for permission. It signed them up automatically. And if a brand wanted to opt out, it had to email Amazon to opt out.

04:41 Buy from me at least identifies itself as a bot, but it still went onto those stores without asking for permission. Now, here's Amazon's explanation. Apps that buy on a customer's behalf should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate. What? So Meta is supposed to ask Amazon for permission while Amazon can buy from other people's stores without asking any of them.

05:06 Now, here's the real reason for the hypocrisy. Amazon made over 68 billion from advertising last year. Most of that depends on shoppers scrolling through Amazon search results and seeing sponsored listings. An AI agent doesn't scroll. It goes straight to the product, checks out, and never sees a single ad. And I know where a lot of that money comes from because I pay for it every day.

05:29 It comes from sellers and brands bidding against each other for sponsored spots. So, when Amazon blocks Muse, it is protecting the ad money sellers pay, and it's throwing away the sales those same sellers would have gotten from Muse shoppers. Now, this whole strategy only works if shoppers keep coming to Amazon to find products in the first place, and that's already starting to fall apart.

05:51 By the way, if you are interested in starting your own profitable online store and get away from Amazon, make sure you sign up for my free 6-day e-commerce miniourse below. It's 100% free and I guarantee you'll learn a ton. For years, Amazon was where people went to to figure out what to buy. But that's changing fast. Today, a lot of shoppers find the products somewhere else and only use Amazon to check out.

06:12 Just look at social media. US shoppers will spend more than a hundred billion dollars buying directly through social media this year, up 18% from last year. And about 117 million Americans now shop there. And that's roughly a third of the United States. And when US adults are asked where they're most likely to shop on social, Instagram comes out on top at 37% ahead of Tik Tok at 30%.

06:35 Meanwhile, Amazon's grip on product search is slipping. Back in 2022, 61% of shoppers said they started their product searches on Amazon, but by 2024, that was down to 56%. And with younger shoppers, it's dropping a lot faster. among 16 to 24 year olds who already know what they want to buy. The share who go to Amazon first fell from 40% to 34% in just 6 months.

07:04 Now, I'm seeing this in my mastermind groups, too. Sellers keep telling me that their branded searches on Amazon are going up, and more and more shoppers are typing the exact brand name into the search bar. And that tells you the shopper already discovered the product somewhere else. They saw it on Instagram or Tik Tok. They decided they wanted it and they came to Amazon because they have Prime and their credit card is already saved.

07:26 So, Amazon has basically become a glorified checkout counter. Now, for Amazon, that's still a sale and they still get their cut, but Muse skips the checkout counter, too. Muse can act on posts you saved on Instagram. So, a shopper sees your product in their feed, saves it, and then later tells Muse to buy it. Muse goes straight to the Shopify store and checks out with Shop Pay.

07:50 The shopper found the product on Meta, bought it through Meta, and Amazon never sees that shopper at all. Now, that last step is the one thing Amazon is desperately trying to hold on to. Right now, Amazon gets the sale, even when Instagram did all the selling. But once shoppers get used to letting an assistant finish the purchase, the assistant has no reason to send them to Amazon.

08:11 And after this month, it can't. Now, if Meta were the only company building one of these assistants, Amazon can maybe wait this out, but every major tech company is building one. And one of the biggest just launched its own version, and that company is Microsoft. On September 25th, it launched a new version of Copilot with an always agent called Autopilot that works through long tasks for you in the background.

08:36 Now, it's aimed at business users first, but Copilot can already shop for you, too. A feature called C-Pilot Checkout lets you buy things right inside of Copilot Chat. And Microsoft has partnered with PayPal, Shopify, Stripe, and Etsy to make it all work. And Microsoft isn't alone. Ever since a free open- source agent called OpenClaw blew up earlier this year, every big tech company has been building its own version.

09:01 OpenAI hired the guy who created OpenClaw, and Google is building one called Remy. So, think about where e-commerce is heading. Meta's assistant lives inside of WhatsApp and Instagram. Microsoft's lives inside of Windows. And Chat GPT is already on hundreds of millions of phones. People are going to shop with whichever assistant is ready in front of them.

09:23 And that assistant is going to buy from the stores that let it in. Amazon's answer is its own assistant. In May, it rolled Rufus into Alexa and launched Alexa for shopping. And Amazon wants you to do all of your AI shopping there. And I understand why. If Amazon owns the assistant, it decides which products you see, and it keeps all the ad money. The problem is is that Amazon is asking shoppers to leave the assistant they already use every day and switch over to Amazon's.

09:51 And I just don't see that happening. And if Amazon's bet is wrong, the sellers are the ones who are going to suffer, which is how it always goes down with Amazon. Blocking the Metamuse app is just one more example of the exact same pattern. Every move Amazon has made in the last couple years has been at the expense of sellers. Just look at this year alone.

10:10 Fees went up in January. Then in March, Amazon started holding your money until 7 days after the customer receives the order, which means FBA sellers now wait anywhere from 14 to 27 days to get paid after a sale. And then in April, Amazon added a 3.5% fuel and logistics search charge on top of everything else. Marketplace Pulse surveyed sellers for its 2026 seller index and nearly half said fees are their biggest margin problem.

10:38 Only 23% of sellers are what Marketplace Pulse calls thriving and 38% are distressed. Meanwhile, the number of sellers on Amazon is shrinking. Active sellers dropped from 584,000 in January of 2025 to 500,000 by March of this year. Only 165,000 new sellers joined Amazon in 2025, which is down 44% and the lowest number since Marketplace Pulse started tracking this in 2015.

11:06 Now, the sellers I personally talked to are tired as well. At the seller summit and in my mastermind groups, it is the same conversation over and over again. Every year, Amazon takes a little more and gives back a little less. But here's the crazy part. A lot of them are so dependent on Amazon that they keep focusing their efforts there. Anyway, in that same survey, among the sellers who are the most frustrated with fees, 42% are still growing their Amazon share and only 24% are pulling back.

11:36 And they stay for one reason. Amazon has the shoppers and it doesn't matter how much Amazon squeezes you if that's where the buyers are. But think about what Muse and Agentic Shopping does to that. If shoppers start letting an assistant do their buying and that assistant cannot shop on Amazon, then Amazon stops being where the buyers are. The one reason sellers put up with the squeeze goes away and that is when the entire dam breaks.

12:02 I'm already seeing the start of this in my own store. Sales from ChachiPT and other AI tools are up over 10x this year. Now, Muse is too new for me to have numbers on it yet, but I'm not waiting around to find out. So, here's what I would do right now. First, make sure these assistants can actually buy from your own store. If you're on Shopify, use can already buy from you.

12:25 If you're on another platform like I am, make sure your product data is clean and your checkout takes the payment options these assistants use, like PayPal. Second, make sure you're not blocking them by accident. Cloudflare started blocking AI crawlers by default in 2025. So, if your site runs on Cloudflare, go into your settings and decide which bots you want to let in.

12:45 Third, keep selling on Amazon if it makes sense for your customers, but stop building your entire business around it. The more of your sales that come from your own site, the less it matters what Amazon decides to block next. Now, if it's not obvious by now, Amazon does not care about any of you. It could have let the number one app in America send it customers, but it chose to protect its ad business at the expense of sellers.

13:10 And at some point, you got to just stop putting up with it. And now that you know where AI shopping is heading, make sure you watch this video next on exactly what I would do if I were to start over in e-commerce