Williams Sonoma requires permission for AI shopping agents

Williams Sonoma requires its own written permission before a third party AI shopping agent can use a customer account or checkout on the shopper’s behalf. Customer approval alone does not satisfy the retailer’s terms, last updated on 9 October 2026.

KQED reported the change on 13 October, after Williams Sonoma and Pottery Barn emailed customers about updated terms. The company had not responded to KQED’s request for comment before that report was published.

What the restriction covers

The account clause includes assistants, bots, scripts and other third party tools. It covers signed-in account areas as well as checkout and purchasing functionality. Automated tools interacting with the site must identify themselves and meet the retailer’s specified requirements; the company reserves the right to block access.

These are the retailer’s stated conditions. They should not be read as a court ruling about what every merchant can enforce, or as evidence that every kind of public product browsing is prohibited by this account clause.

A practical distinction for commerce teams

Our takeaway for agent builders is to separate finding a product from being allowed to transact. A successful search, a working payment method or a customer login is not, by itself, a complete access-policy check.

Build an understandable stopping point when the merchant does not permit the proposed route. Explain that the shopper needs to finish through an allowed checkout, rather than presenting a policy restriction as a generic payment error. Do not promise that an assistant can buy from every site it can read.

For merchants, the operational questions are similarly concrete: which integrations are supported, which actions may they take, and where should a customer go when an agent cannot continue? Clear support guidance makes those boundaries easier to communicate. Any changes to contractual terms need advice appropriate to the business and jurisdiction.

This sits alongside the technical developments in our Shop MCP and Shop skill coverage. Connecting discovery, carts and payment is useful infrastructure; it does not establish permission for a particular agent to use a particular retailer’s account or checkout.