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a16z Podcast · 3 min · Oct 15, 2026

Retailers have different incentives to accept shopping agents

Terry Angelos contrasts Amazon's advertising incentives with Walmart's delivery advantage and smaller Shopify merchants' need for new channels. Those differences suggest merchants will respond to agents in different ways.

Terry Angelos

Terry Angelos is chief strategy officer and board member of VGS.

Co-founded TrialPay, ran DriveWealth, and led Visa's fintech and crypto teams; now VGS chief strategy officer.

  • Erik Torenberg, Host · General partner, Andreessen Horowitz

    Helped build Product Hunt; founded On Deck, Village Global and Turpentine.

About this segment

Terry Angelos contrasts Amazon's advertising incentives with Walmart's delivery advantage and smaller Shopify merchants' need for new channels. Those differences suggest merchants will respond to agents in different ways.

From “Agentic Commerce: Why Your Wallet Is About to Change”, Oct 15, 2026. Watch the full episode

“if you are one of the largest retailers on earth with the best last-mile delivery, that this is all good for you.”
Terry Angelosat 37:43 · a16z Podcast37:43

Takeaways

  1. Amazon has an incentive to keep shoppers on its advertising-driven site.
  2. Walmart may benefit from pairing agents with its delivery network.
  3. Smaller Shopify merchants may see agents as a new sales channel.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 19:49Agentic tokens can preserve card-network protections7:10
  2. 32:34Agent transactions need authorization and liability rules3:36
  3. 39:47Agents may expand purchases without triggering bank runs4:07

  4. 37:20Retailers have different incentives to accept shopping agents2:49

  5. 6:27Large merchants use several processors to route payments3:49Up next
  6. 43:38Agents may expose price thresholds and weaken card rewards3:35
  7. 12:15Agent usefulness depends on wallet reach6:56

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 37:33

    sort of fronts to watch in agent in commerce. And I think we're going to get multiple different versions of this. We have Amazon, which I think has many reasons to block agents, as you said. They're effectively, you know, in the advertising business. You have Walmart, which is very sort of similar. Right now hasn't, you know, hasn't taken that step. And in fact, you might argue that if you are one of the largest retailers on earth with the best last-mile delivery, that this is all good for you.

  2. 38:01

    And then you have this series of merchants that are sort of under the Shopify umbrella, which are a lot of small businesses, that really, this is probably a new, like, vital channel. So maybe there's, like, fear on the Amazon side, maybe there's greed on the Walmart side, and maybe there's, like, you know, no choice on the S&B side. And each of these actors or each of these merchants are going to experiment with how they deal with agents.

  3. 38:26

    I think this reminds me a little bit, I know we sort of have a different view on this, of how open banking was rolled out, which is, do I have the right as an Amazon customer to delegate my login to an agent? And does Amazon have the right to say no? This is what happened with Plaid and Chase and the banks. And in the end, what tended to happen was there was this long negotiated settlement where the likes of Chase said, hey, you can access, you do have the right to this information, but only on my APIs.

  4. 38:57

    And my APIs limit what information I give you. They tokenize the bank accounts. And I might charge a lot of money. And I might charge you some money for it. So actually, I think the interesting question is, I think we may have plenty of opportunities or plenty of merchants who just welcome agents. We may also have merchants who have their own agents. In fact, this is what happens if I go to a Best Buy and I want to buy a flat-screen TV, I assume there'll be a salesperson there with an agenda and he or she will say, well, let me show you some flat screen TVs.

  5. 39:27

    Now, their job is to help me, but their job is also to get a commission. So we might have, in the case of Chase and open banking, it was much more a case of like security and control. In the case of Amazon, it might be, I am an opinionated API. I have an opinion on what you should buy, Alex, based on many, many different sort of data points about you. And then my agent may have an opinion about what I want.

  6. 39:51

    And so that's going to be a fascinating battle or communication. And in the end, I think consumers probably win.