Amazon AI lists products without merchant consent

SOMETIME AROUND CHRISTMAS, Sarah Burzio noticed that the holiday sales bump for her stationery business included some mysterious new customers: a flurry of orders from anonymous email addresses associated with Amazon.com.

- MATT DAY

Burzio, who doesn’t sell her products on the retail site, soon discovered that Amazon had duplicated her product listings and made purchases on behalf of Amazon customers under email addresses that read like gibberish followed by buyforme.amazon.

“I didn’t worry about it, to be honest,” she said. “We were getting customers.” Then people started complaining. Amazon’s listings, automatically generated by an experimental AI tool, didn’t always correspond to the correct product in Burzio’s inventory. In one case, a shopper who thought they were receiving a softball-sized stress ball, which Burzio’s Hitchcock Paper doesn’t sell, received smaller version of the product that her northern Virginia store does carry.