Meta's Muse splits commerce platforms between Shopify's open checkout and Amazon's block

The board-deck version of this week says agents are a new storefront, so the move is to sign with the agent. Expedia did. It announced an integration with Muse, and its stock still sank with other travel booking companies on fears that agents would cut them out of the sale ^[8]. Shopify's deal, the other headline partnership, likely will not stay exclusive, according to a source familiar with the matter who told Newcomer that Shopify aims to work with all parties ^[5].

Amazon took the opposite posture ^[6]. The trade-off between the two is about who holds the moment of choice. An open checkout lets the agent decide which store fills the order. A block bets that customers value the store more than the assistant they have handed the errand to. Newcomer argues it is hard to imagine Amazon holding a no-outside-agents line if its customers want agents ^[12]. It also calls it reasonable to treat human and agent shoppers differently for technical reasons, and expects the company to fight to keep its customer relationships ^[12].

Those technical reasons are already showing up. Early Instinct users complain that the agent keeps asking them to fill out CAPTCHAs to prove it is human ^[7]. Popular restaurants are seeing agents swarm their reservation systems, partly because agent makers pitch painless booking as a feature ^[10]. Newcomer's judgment is that neither the plumbing of online commerce nor its business norms can yet handle bots standing in for people ^[13]. The practical question for an operator this quarter is whether agent traffic gets its own lane, with its own limits and checkout rules, or gets refused.

A skeptic would point to the SaaS-pocalypse. Newcomer makes that case directly, calling the selloff in the group dubbed the "consumer inertia" sector likely an overreaction, since software and services can be stickier than they look ^[11]. The selloff reached banks, brokerages, phone carriers, OpenTable and DoorDash, and New York Times Co. shares are down 15% since late last week ^[9]. I think both sides are betting on the same unknown: how many customers will actually hand purchases to an agent. The reporting does not include Muse user counts or transaction volumes, so we do not know yet whether agents are a sales channel at scale or a well-advertised launch.

Investors have already placed their bets. Instinct, barely finished with a round at a $2.5 billion valuation, is reportedly seeking new money at $10 billion ^[2], four times its last price ^[15]. Meta is also taking Muse past the phone. Mark Zuckerberg showed plans on Wednesday for a small Muse device called Muse Charm, and Meta is aiming to ship it for the holidays ^[3].

This quarter's decision is an access policy. Next quarter's consequence is who picks the supplier once the agent is the customer's first stop. A merchant that integrates now is betting the agent keeps sending orders through it after the agent has other options. Newcomer raises that question for travel. It asks whether Muse will need booking sites at all if it can reach the underlying data through Amadeus and Sabre, and whether Meta will decide which booking service a Muse user gets ^[14].