Shopee just did the opposite of what Amazon did. While Amazon blocked AI shopping agents, Shopee opened the door.

Shopee just did the opposite of what Amazon did.

While Amazon spent the past year blocking AI shopping agents from reading its product pages, Shopee opened the door. It deepened its partnership with OpenAI to bring itself inside ChatGPT, across Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam and Brazil. Shoppers can now discover Shopee products through natural language, then jump straight back to Shopee to buy.

Strategically, this means that Shopee gets to be the default retail answer inside the world's biggest AI chat interface before TikTok Shop or anyone else claims that ground, and Sea is already calling Shopee the first e-commerce platform of its kind live across Southeast Asia and Latin America inside ChatGPT. That's a first-mover claim competitors can't easily undo.

Commercially, the deal cuts both ways. Shopee's sellers get access to ChatGPT for Business, for listings, translation, marketing and customer service, which keeps SMEs building deeper inside Shopee's ecosystem instead of drifting off to build a presence somewhere else.

Australia doesn't have a Shopee. There's no single dominant marketplace holding both discovery and the transaction. But that hasn't slowed things down, it's just meant the pieces are being assembled by different players, all at once.

On payments, Mastercard has completed the country's first fully authenticated agentic transactions, a CBA debit card buying cinema tickets, a Westpac credit card booking a Thredbo stay. Visa has followed with its own Agentic Ready program, bringing local banks and fintechs in to test agent-initiated payments. Mastercard's own modelling suggests agentic commerce could influence up to 55% of Australian consumer transactions by 2030, worth as much as A$670 billion.

On discovery, Google has just made Australia the first APAC market to go live with its Universal Commerce Protocol, plugging checkout, inventory and loyalty straight into its seven key environments including Search, Gemini and YouTube. Bunnings, Adore Beauty, Kogan, THE ICONIC and Petbarn are the first retailers connected. Bunnings has gone further again, launching Buddy, its own Gemini-powered shopping assistant, with a shoppable range now live inside Google AI Mode.

So the infrastructure is turning up fast, on both sides. And consumers are already there waiting for it. IAB Australia's latest Commerce & Discovery Report found six in ten Australian online shoppers already use AI tools at least sometimes when shopping, rising to 75% among 18 to 39 year olds.

Infrastructure ready. Consumers ready. Most retailers are still watching from the sidelines.

A handful of retailers are inside Google's UCP launch. A handful more are testing agentic payments with the banks. Everyone else selling in Australia is one AI-mediated search away from being invisible to a shopper who's already comfortable letting AI do the discovering, with no idea whether they even showed up in the answer.

The brands moving now are the ones who get to shape how they're represented, before the rest of the category catches up and the AI systems have already learned who to recommend without them.

That's exactly why I built MARK: to show brands how they show up in AI models, who gets recommended over them and why.