Amazon Vs Perplexity: e-commerce giant Amazon And AI search engine startup Perplexity Now a new war has broken out between. This dispute is about Perplexity’s shopping bot Comet, which is used Amazon Was being done on the website of. Amazon alleges that Comet does not disclose that it is a bot when making purchases, which is a violation of company policies.
Comet is an AI-based shopping assistant bot that makes online shopping easier for users. If a customer wants information about a product, Comet instantly compares the price from different e-commerce platforms like Flipkart, Amazon and Myntra. This bot also shows a summary of coupons, discounts, product reviews, specifications and key points all in one place. Not only this, it also has the ability to complete purchases on behalf of the user. Comet also provides the facility of tracking and re-ordering of old orders.
Amazon has clearly told Perplexity to immediately stop using Comet on its site, as it is violating the terms of the platform. The company says that if an app or agent works on behalf of the user, it should reveal its identity. Amazon argues that just as food delivery or travel booking apps describe themselves as agents, Comet should also disclose that it is a bot. Amazon has also indicated that if Perplexity does not comply, it will block Comet completely.
Perplexity quickly responded to Amazon’s allegations. The company wrote in its blog “Bullying is not innovation”. Perplexity says that this step of Amazon is against the rights of the users. According to the company, “If a bot is working on behalf of the user, it should have the same permissions as a human. We are only helping the user.”
An interesting thing in the matter is that Amazon has launched its own AI bot ‘Rufus’. In such a situation, experts believe that this dispute may not only be an issue of policies but also of competition. Perplexity says that Amazon is actually trying to protect its earnings, because bots do not get trapped in ads and impulsive buying like humans do. This gives Amazon less opportunity to sell those expensive and random products.
This is not the first time Perplexity has come into controversy. Earlier, Cloudflare had also accused the company of scraping data from sites that block bots. At that time the company had defended itself, but questions were raised over its methods.
