Meta’s Muse agent will monetize by clipping transactions, Mark Zuckerberg confirmed from the Connect stage Wednesday, resolving the pricing question that had shadowed the product since its September 8 launch. “We’re standing behind this by making Muse free for a huge number of tokens, with the expectation that over time we will profit by taking a small fee from transactions,” he said, per TechCrunch’s coverage of the keynote.

The framing matters because the payment rail was announced the same week. Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke posted on X on September 21 that Shop Pay will enable “agentic checkout” on all Shopify stores, and Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang told the Connect audience Muse “can access the entire Shopify product catalog agentically and use Lync and now Shop Pay to buy almost anything on the internet.” Shop Pay stores payment and shipping information so a purchase completes without the shopper touching a retailer site, International Business Times reported. The merchant keeps the customer relationship and their existing processing rail; Meta’s fee sits on top.

That’s the structural read. Small merchants on Shopify are now reachable inside Muse at their existing payment cost, while brands off that rail either negotiate access or face the alternative Amazon just chose. Amazon began blocking Muse on September 20, citing its Conditions of Use after Meta declined to remove it from the experience, according to GeekWire; Bloomberg reported the block took effect Sunday night.

The named partners announced at Connect, Meta’s Connect 2026 shopping expansion covering Walmart, Best Buy, Sephora, Wayfair, and Gap, make the concentration visible. Wang said Meta wants Muse to connect with small businesses and has received more than 1,500 developer connector applications.

The retail internet is being redrawn as a permissions map. Catalogs a machine can read become inventory; catalogs it can’t become invisible.

Sources