Amazon sales may be high enough for the company to rank No. 1 in Digital Commerce 360’s Top 1000 Database. However, that database — which primarily tracks online merchants’ annual ecommerce sales, conversion, growth and vendor use — recently added a new ranking system where Amazon ranks significantly lower, and for good reason.
In the AI Commerce Rankings, which Digital Commerce 360 and ReFiBuy launched in July, online retailers in the Top 1000 are evaluated by AI-related criteria, piecing together a picture of how well merchants are connecting with shoppers through AI channels, as well as growing that reach over time.
In the latest quarterly update, assessing which online retailers AI is helping most, Amazon did not even crack the top 100. But there’s more going on beneath the surface of these numbers.
Why Amazon’s approach to AI commerce is unique
Despite its longstanding status at No. 1 in the Top 1000 when ranked by online sales, Amazon is No. 158 in the AI Commerce Rankings. In the latter, online retailers from the Top 1000 compare based on factors including how accessible their catalog data is to third-party AI agents, how much traffic they get from third-party AI sources and the diversity of those sources. The rankings also track changes in momentum over 90-day periods.
“They’ve said, ‘We don’t want bots. We’re not gonna do any of these things,’ so all four doors are closed, and therefore they’ve lost their number one spot in this,” said Scot Wingo, founder and CEO at ReFiBuy.
Still, Amazon’s resources, agentic commerce strategy and business interests beyond retail make it an outlier for AI use in the Top 1000. First, thanks to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the associated cloud computing and software services that it sells, Amazon is an active technology provider to other retailers and software vendors that are powering non-Amazon ecommerce sites. In addition, thanks to its nature as a technology company and Amazon-owned AI tools, such as Alexa for Shopping and Buy for Me, the company has an incentive to limit third-party access to its catalog data so it can steer customers toward its AI offerings instead.
By comparison, Walmart, which is No. 2 in the Top 1000, is No. 37 in the AI Commerce Rankings. Their 121-rank gap illustrates how differently Walmart and Amazon approach agentic commerce, with Walmart far more open to third-party AI platforms.
What’s shifting for other online retailers in the AI Commerce Rankings
Like Walmart, other online retailers are creating new opportunities through third-party AI channels as well. And many of them rank far lower than Amazon in the Top 1000.
Moreover, there may be category-specific growth to be unlocked as well through AI discovery. As Wingo pointed out in a recent conversation with Digital Commerce 360, Automotive Parts & Accessories (which is a merchandise category where Amazon competes as a Mass Merchant) could be one of these.
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