shops are blocking AI shopping agents now. fair enough or daft?
by Fergus M.saw this yesterday, a bunch of retailers are shutting out third party shopping agents. the realreal one is the funny bit, they hold an item for 20 mins when you put it in your cart and reporters used meta's muse agent to keep stuff on hold for hours so nobody else could buy it. amazon blocked muse fast too, while pushing its own assistant we get the human version of this at the shop. someone rings to reserve a groupset, never turns up, we cant sell it for a week. so part of me gets it but then whats the point of an agent if every shop slams the door?? feels like it ends with every big site only allowing its own bot and the open one cant buy anything. is there a version where shops let agents in but with rules, like a deposit for holds or something