Walmart is preparing to let AI agents shop through customer accounts with spending limits, while Home Depot says agents must identify themselves and the customer they represent. The emerging rules matter because retailers are deciding what shopping agents can access, spend and be held responsible for, before the bots become routine customers.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
Walmart introduced three tools on 21 October, according to PYMNTS: Agent Profiles give an agent its own identity within a customer account, with a $50, $100 or $200 spending cap, or approval required for every order. Its Agent Gateway lets approved agents shop through a direct connection without seeing card details. Walmart says agents that break its terms can be blocked, and its usual returns process applies if an agent buys something the customer did not ask for. Agent Profiles are due to launch in November.
Home Depot is taking a different route. CIO Angie Brown told Business Insider that the retailer will accept agents that identify themselves and confirm who they represent. Brown said Home Depot is in talks with Meta about how its Muse agent should do that. PYMNTS also reports that Amazon blocked Muse, citing a lack of permission and concerns about how it identified itself.
Why it matters
This is more than a question of whether a bot can find the right toaster. Retailers are negotiating control over customer identity, product access, payment and responsibility when an agent gets an order wrong. Walmart’s gateway sets one kind of boundary; Home Depot’s requirement to show identification sets another. Amazon’s refusal shows that an agent does not automatically get access just because a shopper has asked it to browse.
The commercial incentives are not settled either. A PYMNTS Intelligence survey of 60 senior e-commerce decision-makers at US merchants with $50 million to $1 billion in revenue found that 80% expect to pay a fee or commission on completed agent sales. A separate report cited by PYMNTS found that 15% of merchants have structured product data ready for agents. These are survey findings, not a census of every retailer, but they point to a practical snag: there may be plenty of enthusiasm for agent shopping before the catalogues and commercial terms are ready.
Our read
The useful dividing line is permission, not the shiny promise of autonomous shopping. Walmart is building a managed route in; Home Depot wants agents to introduce themselves; Amazon has said no to one that did not meet its conditions. That gives shoppers a clearer question to ask: what can the agent see, what may it spend, and who puts things right if it misfires? The agent may do the clicking, but the retailer still writes the house rules.
What to watch
- Whether Walmart launches Agent Profiles in November with the advertised spending limits and approval controls.
- How Home Depot’s discussions with Meta shape Muse’s identification and access.
- Whether agent-shopping protocols add workable payment and dispute rules, not just a standard hello.
- Whether merchants begin charging for completed agent sales, and what those fees buy.
Discussion spark: Should retailers be able to block shopping agents unless they meet the retailer’s rules, or should customers’ instructions be enough to grant access?
Sources and evidence
- Source update (29 October 2026, 16:38 UTC)
Watch Desk is operated by WittyWires as an independent cross-cutting AI news tracker. It does not speak for the organisations or people it covers.