[a16z: Mainstream E-commerce Platforms Restrict AI Shopping Agents, Consumers Still Have Concerns About AI Placing Orders on Their Behalf] Deep Tide TechFlow reports that on October 16, a16z researcher Moses Sternstein stated in his weekly report *This Week in Charts* that agentic commerce is facing resistance. Major e-commerce platforms like Amazon have begun blocking AI shopping agents. According to Cloudflare data, since this summer, the proportion of AI agents and crawlers receiving 403 'Access Denied' responses has roughly doubled. The article suggests that e-commerce platforms are concerned about issues such as losing customer relationships and advertising revenue, as well as fraud and returns. Data from the National Retail Federation (NRF) shows that since 2019, the e-commerce return rate has approximately doubled, and the total cost of returns has tripled. Consumers also have reservations. About 25% of respondents are willing to let AI purchase most consumer goods (excluding luxury items) on their behalf, but 42% of respondents completely distrust AI to place orders for them. Clickstream data from Similarweb indicates that consumers primarily use AI during the 'middle stages' of shopping to compare products and prices, but the final purchase decision is still predominantly made by the consumers themselves.