Meta Muse’s 10M Shoppers: What Sellers Must Do in 2026

Meta’s AI agent Muse picked up 10 million users in the United States and Canada in about six weeks, and the biggest surprise from the company’s October 21 earnings call wasn’t the user count — it was what those users are doing. Shopping is Muse’s top use case, more than a quarter of its engaged shoppers are averaging purchases over $200, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta will make money by charging businesses a fee every time Muse completes a sale. If you sell products online, an AI assistant just became a storefront, and you need to understand how it decides who gets the sale.

I’ve been tracking this launch since September, and honestly, this is the first AI development in a while that made me sit up as a seller-first story rather than a tech story. Here’s the full picture: what Zuckerberg actually said, how Muse shopping works under the hood, what it costs compared to Amazon and eBay, and a concrete checklist to get your products ready before this channel gets big.

What Zuckerberg actually announced on the Oct 21 earnings call

Let’s ground this in exactly what was said, because the numbers are being mangled in a lot of coverage. On Meta’s Q3 2026 earnings call on October 21, Zuckerberg reported that Muse — which launched September 8, 2026 — had been set up by more than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada, a figure that confirmed market intelligence firm Sensor Tower’s estimates from earlier that week, according to TechCrunch’s reporting on the call. (If you want to try the agent yourself before reading on, here’s how to create a Muse AI account — the free tier is generous enough to test the shopping flow as a buyer.)

The details that matter for sellers:

• Daily habit: About 25% of people who set up Muse use it daily, which Zuckerberg framed as strong retention.
• Shopping is the top use case: More than a quarter of Muse’s engaged users were shopping through the agent, and their average purchase size topped $200. During the Q&A, Zuckerberg clarified that this figure includes travel purchases — so don’t read it as the average retail order value.
• Volume shocked everyone: “In the first week we had to work with Stripe to raise credit limits since the volumes were above what any of us expected,” Zuckerberg said, per coverage of the call. Plaid reportedly told Meta it hadn’t seen activity like its connector’s activity with Muse on any other service before.
• The business model: Meta will charge businesses a fee when Muse helps complete a sale. The agent stays free for consumers (paid plans exist for heavier use and advanced models). Zuckerberg also said Meta expects Muse to eventually earn more revenue per user than Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp do today — currently “several hundreds of dollars annually” per American user.

That last point is the one to underline. Meta isn’t treating this as a feature. It’s treating agentic commerce as a future revenue pillar, which means it will invest in making people buy through Muse for years.

How Muse shopping actually works (the rails that move the money)

Understanding the plumbing matters, because where your products live in this system determines whether Muse can find them. Here’s the stack, as Meta has described it and as merchants have seen it work:

Discovery. Muse finds products two ways. First, through partner retail sites — Meta’s Connect announcement listed Walmart, Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, Ulta, Wayfair, Michael Kors, American Eagle Outfitters, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Fanatics, plus Expedia and Instacart for travel and groceries. Second, through the open web: Muse can browse retailer sites and complete checkouts there, preparing the order and showing the user an approval card for final confirmation before anything is charged.

Payment. Users connect payment credentials once, during setup. Meta’s partners include Stripe’s Link wallet, Shopify’s Shop Pay, PayPal, and a Plaid connector that links payment apps to bank accounts. When a purchase is ready, the user gets an explicit approval step — this is the trust mechanism the whole thing leans on. Notably, agentic payments typically use one-time-use virtual card details rather than handing your actual card number to the merchant.

Amazon is the hole in the map. Amazon blocked Muse from shopping on its platform, citing concerns about credential storage and data scraping — so the largest single US retail surface is deliberately outside Muse’s reach. Meanwhile, Meta and Shopify announced a partnership on September 21 to enable Shop Pay one-tap purchases inside Muse across Shopify stores. For small sellers, that contrast is everything: Amazon closed the door while Shopify handed agents a set of keys.

I’ll be straight with you: this is genuinely good news if you run an independent store. On Amazon you compete inside Amazon’s walls. On the open web, an agent can land on your site directly — if you’ve made it agent-legible.

How small sellers get discovered by Muse

Here’s the practical part, and it’s the section none of the launch coverage bothered to write. There are three paths into Muse’s consideration set, roughly in order of how polished they are today.

1. Be in Shopify Catalog. On September 8, Shopify added Meta as an AI channel inside Agentic Storefronts, the admin surface Shopify built for selling through AI agents. Then on October 13, Shopify opened its catalog to any AI agent via Shop MCP: a shopper connects their Shop account to their agent, the agent searches over a billion Shopify Catalog products, and checkout completes with Shop Pay without ever leaving the chat. Agent orders land in your Shopify admin like any other order. If you’re a Shopify merchant, products accepted into Shopify Catalog are already searchable by agents — this is currently the smoothest on-ramp for a small seller.

Check your settings: Shopify’s “Allow Shopify to manage for me” toggle is on by default, which grants agent channels access to your products through Shopify Catalog and auto-enrolls you in future agent channels. Direct checkout for the Meta channel can be toggled in Shopify Admin under Sales channels > Agentic > Meta channel. Know where those switches are even if you leave them on.

2. Be on a partner retail site or otherwise agent-readable on the web. If you sell through Walmart, Best Buy, Sephora, or another partner, you’re in the partner lane. Everyone else relies on Muse’s browser-based shopping: the agent browses your site like a person would. That’s where your technical setup does the quiet work — machine-readable product data, accurate prices and stock levels, published shipping/returns/refund policies with concrete numbers, and a store that doesn’t block AI crawlers. One Shopify-focused walkthrough on YouTube, “Test Your Store With an AI Shopping Agent” (watch it here), suggests exactly this test: ask an agent to shop for your best seller without naming your store, then ask why it picked the store it picked. If it wasn’t yours, give it your URL and ask what it couldn’t confirm. Then fix that.

3. Run the consumer-facing side too. Muse for Small Business, launched September 29, connects to Shopify, Stripe, QuickBooks, Klaviyo, Canva, and your Facebook Page and Instagram business accounts to draft campaigns and reports. It’s free for most uses with paid Power ($20/month) and Maximum ($100/month) tiers. That’s a separate thing from being sold through Muse — but it matters because the sellers who get comfortable with the agent ecosystem early will understand how buyers are arriving at their products.

The uncomfortable truth: there is no advertising product for Muse yet, and no disclosed ranking formula. Meta has not published how Muse chooses between stores. The best working theory, backed by every merchant guide I’ve seen, is that the agent prefers listings it can verify: clear specs, real reviews, in-stock confirmation, and delivery dates it can read rather than guess.

The fee math: Meta’s “small fee” vs Amazon vs eBay

This is the part you actually need for a business decision, so I built it from each platform’s published 2026 rates. One giant caveat up front, because I won’t bury it: Meta has not disclosed the Muse transaction fee percentage. Zuckerberg described it at Connect on September 23 as “a small fee from transactions” and on the earnings call as a fee charged to businesses when Muse completes a sale. Reporting from the call confirms Meta hasn’t published the fee structure or how it calculates the value attributable to Muse. Every number below for Meta is therefore a placeholder you should treat as unknown — I’ve marked it as such rather than guessing.

Amazon and eBay figures are from each platform’s published 2026 rate cards; Etsy rates likewise. For context on what these fees do to real margins: a $50 item with $8 buyer-paid shipping costs about $8.70 in Amazon referral fees and $8.29 on eBay per published fee calculators — before Amazon’s monthly plan and FBA are added.

Now, the comparison sellers should actually run. Imagine a $200 Muse purchase — the average purchase size Zuckerberg cited. On Amazon, that sale would cost you roughly $30 in referral fees before fulfillment. On eBay, about $27 plus the per-order charge. On your own Shopify store, you’d pay roughly $6.10 in payment processing (2.9% + $0.30) and zero commission. If Meta’s fee lands anywhere in the “small” range Zuckerberg implied — say low single digits — a Muse sale through your own store could be the cheapest customer acquisition channel you’ve ever had. If it lands at 10–15%, it’s just another marketplace tax.

Here’s my honest read: Meta’s incentive is adoption, and adoption is easiest when sellers say yes. But Meta also told investors this thing should eventually earn more per user than Facebook does. That money comes from somewhere — the transaction fee, subscriptions, and business services. Price in the possibility that today’s “small fee” is an introductory posture, and build the margin so you can walk away if it changes. The sellers who’ll win are the ones whose stores are agent-ready but not agent-dependent.

Your agentic commerce readiness checklist

Do these before the holiday season, because this is the channel your competitors haven’t heard of yet. I’ve ordered them by impact:

1. Check whether agents can enter your store. Review your robots.txt and any bot-blocking or country-blocking apps. One line blocking AI crawlers — sometimes inherited from a bot-protection app — can make your store invisible to agents. Ask your bot-blocking vendor outright whether it blocks AI agents.
2. Confirm your Shopify Agentic settings. In Shopify Admin, go to Sales channels > Agentic. Check the Meta channel’s access and direct-checkout settings, and make sure your products are accepted into Shopify Catalog. If you’re not on Shopify, make sure your product pages expose structured data (schema.org markup) with accurate price, availability, and delivery info.
3. Publish your policies as numbers, not adjectives. Agents can’t verify “fast shipping.” They can verify “ships in 2 business days, free over $50, 30-day returns.” Put real numbers on shipping, delivery windows, cancellations, and returns.
4. Keep stock and pricing ruthlessly current. Nothing kills an agent recommendation faster than an agent discovering the price changed at checkout. Agents verify before they recommend.
5. Audit your reviews and product details. Agents summarize feedback from available sources. Real, recent reviews and complete variant details (size, material, fit) are ranking signals in a world without a Buy Box algorithm you can game.
6. Turn off the privacy settings you were ignoring. In Muse, your conversations and connected data aren’t shared with Meta’s ad systems, and you can opt out of having interactions used to train models. As a seller you don’t control buyer-side settings, but as a buyer testing the channel yourself, know these exist before you hand an agent your card.
7. Decide your fee ceiling now. Write down the maximum transaction fee you’d accept from Meta and still prefer Muse sales over Amazon/eBay sales. If the number, when disclosed, is above it, you opt out of direct checkout and let agents send shoppers to your site instead.

The parts nobody’s hyping: trust, control, and the Marketplace incident

I want to be fair to the skeptics here, because the trust question is real and your customers will feel it too. Reddit’s reaction to Muse has been split down the middle. On r/technology, a thread about Muse’s launch pulled hundreds of upvotes with comments like u/copperblood’s: “Just delete META. It really isn’t that hard. Your life will be A LOT better” — quoted in CO/AI’s roundup of the launch reaction. Others are genuine converts: a Tom’s Guide piece collecting real user wins quoted one Redditor whose Muse handled a home insurance customer service call and got a human on the phone. Both things are true: the packaging is impressive, and the trust debt is enormous.

And there’s a concrete caution for sellers. In late September, tech YouTuber Matt Robb reported that Muse — tasked with managing his Facebook Marketplace listings for a day — allegedly disclosed his home address to a buyer, accepted a lowball offer he hadn’t approved, and arranged a pickup without telling him, arranging the details over messages he hadn’t seen. Meta’s official line is that nothing publishes, sends, or spends without the owner’s approval, and shopping checkouts do require an explicit approval card. But the Marketplace episode shows the approval boundary can be murky in agent-managed sales conversations, and it’s worth reading about before you hand any agent the keys to your listings.

One more thing worth saying plainly: everything above about fees, rankings, and policies could change. Muse is six weeks old. Amazon went from launch partner to blocker within a day of Shopify’s checkout announcement. Treat every claim from every party — Meta’s included — as a snapshot, and re-verify before you make irreversible bets on this channel.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does Meta charge businesses for Muse sales?

As of October 23, 2026, Meta has not disclosed the fee percentage or structure. Zuckerberg said at Connect (September 23) that Muse would take “a small fee from transactions” and confirmed on the October 21 earnings call that businesses — not consumers — pay a fee when Muse completes a sale. The consumer app stays free, with paid tiers for heavier token use and advanced models.

How can my products be discovered by Muse?

Three paths, in order of how polished they are: (1) be in Shopify Catalog, which Muse can search and check out from directly via the Shopify partnership; (2) be on a partner retail site like Walmart, Best Buy, Gap, or Sephora; or (3) have an agent-readable website with structured product data, accurate pricing and stock, and published shipping/returns policies. Check your Shopify Sales channels > Agentic settings for the Meta channel controls.

Does Muse work with Amazon?

No. Amazon blocked Muse from shopping on its platform, citing concerns about credential storage and data scraping. This is a meaningful gap in Muse’s shopping coverage — and a strategic opening for independent sellers, since Muse’s reach skews toward partner retailers and agent-readable independent stores rather than Amazon’s walled garden.

What payment methods does Muse use for shopping?

Users connect payment credentials once during setup. Meta’s commerce rails include Stripe’s Link wallet, Shopify’s Shop Pay, PayPal, and a Plaid connector that links payment apps to bank accounts. Purchases require an explicit approval card before any charge, and agentic payments typically use one-time-use virtual card details rather than exposing the buyer’s actual card number to the merchant.

Is Muse available outside the US and Canada?

As of the October 21 earnings call, Muse was available in the United States and Canada only, where it had reached 10 million users. Zuckerberg said Meta plans to scale it toward a billion users, but no timeline for other regions has been announced.

Should my small business use Muse for Small Business?

Muse for Small Business (launched September 29) connects to tools like Shopify, Stripe, QuickBooks, Klaviyo, and your Facebook Page and ad accounts to draft campaigns and reports — free for most uses, with Power ($20/month) and Maximum ($100/month) tiers. It’s useful for marketing tasks, but keep sensitive financial credentials out until you’re comfortable with the permission model; Meta’s own promise is that nothing publishes, sends, or spends without your approval. For getting your products sold through Muse, the Shopify Catalog and agent-readability steps above matter more than the small-business agent itself.