Meta’s Muse Is Taking Aim at E-Commerce, But Amazon Isn’t Playing Along

Key Points

• Meta plans to monetize its Muse AI agent by taking a small transaction fee from agentic e-commerce sales rather than relying on subscriptions.
• Meta has secured retail partnerships with Walmart, Best Buy, Wayfair, Shopify, and PayPal, while Amazon has blocked Muse from accessing its site.
• Analysts project the agentic e-commerce market could reach trillions of dollars by 2030, giving Meta a potentially significant new revenue opportunity.

The release of Meta Platforms' NASDAQ: META Muse personal AI agent has had a huge positive impact on its share price. Meta shares are up well over 10% since, adding hundreds of billions of dollars to its market capitalization.

While Muse soaring to the top of Apple’s NASDAQ: AAPL App Store is all well and good, there is only one thing that truly matters in the end: monetization. Importantly, investors recently received new information about how Meta plans to monetize Muse. As the company looks to execute this strategy, it is adding key partners but also encountering a key adversary along the way.

Meta Eyes Transaction Revenue in Agentic E-Commerce Market

At the Meta Connect conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg shed new light on how the company plans to monetize Muse. He noted that Meta is giving Muse users free access to a huge number of tokens, “with the expectation that over time we will profit by taking a small fee from transactions." This indicates that subscriptions won’t play a large role in how Meta monetizes Muse, at least for now.

Rather, the company wants to spur adoption of AI agent-driven e-commerce and then take a cut of the sales that flow through Muse. Notably, many forecasters expect agentic e-commerce to become a massive market over the coming years. This includes Bain & Company, which projects that the U.S. agentic e-commerce market could reach between $300 billion and $500 billion by 2030. Morgan Stanley sees “agentic shoppers” driving $190 billion to $385 billion in U.S. e-commerce spending by 2030.

McKinsey sees even more dramatic growth, anticipating that agentic e-commerce could orchestrate as much as $1 trillion in U.S. retail revenue by 2030. Globally, it believes this figure could be between $3 trillion and $5 trillion.

If Meta can take even a small portion of this pie through transaction fees, it could significantly impact the company’s total sales. For example, capturing 1% of a $5 trillion market would be $50 billion in revenue. That is equal to around 20% of the company’s total expected sales of over $250 billion in 2026.

Still, the range of forecasts is very wide, which is important to keep in mind when thinking about Meta’s opportunity. The company’s very large current revenue base makes it more difficult for agentic e-commerce to move the needle if less-optimistic scenarios play out. However, Meta is a global company, with approximately 61% of its sales coming from outside the U.S. and Canada last quarter. This gives the firm a strong path to participate in the larger global agentic e-commerce opportunity that McKinsey sees.

Walmart Is in on Muse, Amazon Says Keep Out

As Meta looks to attack the agentic e-commerce market, it is gaining allies and facing pushback. At Meta Connect, the company announced Muse integrations with several massive retail outlets. This includes Walmart NASDAQ: WMT, Best Buy NYSE: BBY, and Wayfair NYSE: W, among many others. Additionally, Muse can access the entire Shopify NASDAQ: SHOP catalog and can use PayPal NASDAQ: PYPL for payments.

The integration with Walmart is particularly noteworthy. In 2025, the company was the second-largest online retailer in the U.S., holding around 9.2% market share. This business is also growing strongly, with Walmart’s U.S. e-commerce sales rising 24% year-over-year (YOY) in its most recent quarter, and its global e-commerce sales rising 23% YOY. This compares to its overall constant currency growth rate of 5.1% YOY.

However, the biggest fish in the e-commerce sea, Amazon.com NASDAQ: AMZN, wants nothing to do with Muse. Amazon has blocked Muse from accessing its site, which accounted for 40.5% of U.S. retail e-commerce in 2025. While Amazon cites privacy and security concerns as the reason for blocking Muse, the business rationale behind this move is also clear.

Amazon has its own AI shopping solutions, including Alexa for Shopping, and its “Buy for Me” tool that allows users to purchase items from third-party sites using agentic AI. Additionally, AI agents should not be influenced by sponsored product advertisements that drive revenue for Amazon.

Getting consumers to use its AI tools and protecting its sponsored item revenue stream gives Amazon a clear incentive to lock other agentic platforms out of its ecosystem. With the company also investing massively in AI infrastructure, it has the capability to do this in a way that many enterprises likely do not.

However, a court recently reversed a ruling that banned Perplexity’s AI shopping tools from accessing Amazon. This raises questions as to whether a legal battle between Amazon and Meta could be on the horizon as Meta looks to allow Muse to access the platform.

What Metrics Will Meta Provide to Demonstrate Muse’s Success?

Meta’s Muse agent has elicited great excitement among investors, and the lofty expectations for agentic e-commerce adoption are a key reason. With the product still just weeks old, it is unclear what metrics the company will provide in future earnings calls to show its progression.

Considering Meta’s stated strategy of monetizing Muse through transactions, providing data on Muse's transaction volume could be particularly helpful for investors analyzing its monetization roadmap.