Amazon Prime Day sales in 2025 set records and new highs across multiple metrics for online transactions and use of technology such as artificial intelligence (AI).
Not only was Prime Day 2025 the longest ever for Amazon at four days instead of the traditional two; it also led to $24.1 billion in online sales for U.S. retailers, according to analysts at Adobe Analytics. Still, one of the most striking numbers shared by Adobe was the increase in traffic that online merchants received from AI-powered tools.
While channels such as paid search and email still played larger roles than AI overall, Adobe assessed that online traffic to U.S. retail sites from generative AI sources, such as the large language model (LLM) ChatGPT, AI-powered search engine Perplexity and other virtual assistants and web browsers, was up 3,300% year over year versus the comparable days in 2024.
Historic Prime Day for AI in 2025
AI’s 3,300% year-over-year climb in web traffic that it sent to retailers on Prime Day echoes its rise as an alternative to traditional search engines. Just as shoppers use Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo to find items or compare prices as they make purchases, so too are they using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude to find what they want.
May survey results that Digital Commerce 360 will publish in an upcoming agentic commerce report showed that 40.9% of participants contacted had used ChatGPT to do research while shopping online. 44.8% had used Google’s Gemini for the same purpose.
In that context, it should come as no surprise that OpenAI may be looking to monetize its relevance to ecommerce more directly. The Financial Times reported July 16 that OpenAI plans to begin taking cuts of the online sales made when its users click on links to product listings.
The news followed an agreement between OpenAI and the ecommerce platform Shopify that made Shopify an official third-party search provider for ChatGPT alongside Microsoft’s Bing. Shopify, meanwhile, is also working with Perplexity, which is rolling out its own web browser, Comet, as a competitor to Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari. OpenAI has its own web browser in the works as well, reportedly under the codename “Aura,” and made to leverage OpenAI’s Operator agent, an agentic commerce solution that can seek out and purchase products on behalf of human shoppers.
Amazon’s own agentic AI ambitions
While OpenAI and Shopify are forging ahead with their agentic commerce work, Amazon has its own plans. The largest online retailer in North America by web sales in Digital Commerce 360’s Top 2000 Database began testing the Amazon Buy for Me tool ahead of this year’s Prime Day.
Buy for Me uses agentic AI to enable shoppers to buy products from third-party websites directly within the Amazon Shopping app experience.
As these tech companies expand the scope of their ecommerce goals to larger ecosystems, the territorial boundaries are bound to become hotter issues in the coming year. Already, Shopify has dropped notes into the code for its merchants’ ecommerce sites to dissuade unapproved AI agents from crawling content and executing automated checkouts.
“Automated scraping, ‘buy-for-me’ agents, or any end-to-end flow that completes payment without a final review step is not permitted,” the updated instructions state.
Ilya Grigorik, who is a distinguished engineer and technical advisor to the CEO at Shopify, addressed the update on his X (formerly Twitter) account, stressing that the new language “doesn’t add or remove any rules for bots or agents.” However, his message likely resembles the perspectives at other tech companies in the ecommerce space.
“We offer pre-made SDKs for popular platforms, and a low-level protocol for advanced app & agentic checkout integrations,” Grigorik stated.
In other words, Shopify knows that competitors are out to do the same things that it and its partners are trying to do — and it wants to ensure that it is in control as more agents set out to shop online.
📧 Editor’s note: Subscribe to our retail newsletter to make sure you see each weekly edition of Ecommerce Trends.
Do you rank in our databases?
Submit your data and we’ll see where you fit in our next ranking update.
Sign up
Stay on top of the latest developments in the ecommerce industry. Sign up for a complimentary subscription to Digital Commerce 360 Retail News. Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Be the first to know when Digital Commerce 360 publishes news content.
Favorite