Last Monday, I reported that Amazon blocked Meta’s new Muse agent from making purchases on Amazon.com. Later that same day, Shopify stepped in to fill the void. The next day, PayPal joined the party.
Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke posted on X:
“We are excited to announce we are partnering deeply with Muse to enable agentic checkout with Shop Pay on all Shopify stores, offering people an easy and delightful way to shop and check out with Muse.”
Muse locates products through Shopify Catalog and runs the order over the Universal Commerce Protocol, with payments running through Shop Pay, which already holds a buyer’s shipping and billing details. The transactions aren’t fully agentic, or even one-tap, yet. Muse simply finds the products, loads them into a cart, and then shoppers get handed to an in-app browser to finish the transaction. Similar to how Muse works with Link by Stripe, its first payments partner that Muse launched with, each purchase draws a credential good for just that transaction, so the card number never reaches Muse.
As for PayPal… pretty much the same setup as Shopify.
The big perk of PayPal though is that it reaches a much wider network of businesses. Shop Pay almost exclusively touches retail e-commerce, while PayPal works across travel, hospitality, SaaS, and other categories that Muse can assist users in.
So, all good, right? Maybe…
Heather Hershey, a Senior Research Director at IDC, outlined several big problems that Muse and other AI agents bring to commerce, including the big one — chargeback and return liability stays with the merchant. If Muse purchases a product that a user didn’t actually want, the cost of returns or disputes lands on the merchant. And as merchants, we all know how fast consumers are to jump to a chargeback before you’ve even had time to respond to their e-mail.
This is likely one reason why Muse is only “pseudo-agentic” to start. Meaning, human intervention is still required for the final purchase. Without that final approval, I can’t imagine what Muse would be buying!
