NEW YORK, January 5, 2026, 07:40 ET — Premarket
- AMZN hovered near $226.50 in premarket trading after ending last week lower.
- Evercore’s Mark Mahaney reiterated a Buy call, saying “agentic commerce” is nearing prime time inside Amazon’s store.
- Investors are looking to U.S. payrolls on January 9 and Amazon’s next earnings date, which remains unconfirmed.
Amazon.com (AMZN) shares were little changed in premarket trading on Monday, around $226.50, after Evercore ISI reiterated a buy rating and a $335 price target, pointing to the retailer’s AI shopping assistant Rufus. Evercore analyst Mark Mahaney said “agentic commerce” — AI that can take actions for shoppers — is “coming very soon,” and he projected it could add up to $31 billion to Amazon’s 2028 revenue, TipRanks reported. TipRanks
The call lands as investors look for measurable payoffs from consumer-facing AI, not just bigger data-center budgets. For Amazon, the fastest read-through is simple: if AI lifts the conversion rate — the share of shopping sessions that end in a purchase — it can feed both retail volumes and the ads that sit alongside product searches.
Macro timing matters, too. Equity futures were modestly higher early Monday, with traders focused on a run of labor-market data later this week that can shift rate expectations and swing high-growth megacaps.
Amazon has been laying the groundwork for that AI pitch inside its core store. In its most recent quarterly update, the company said more than 250 million customers had used Rufus in 2025 and that shoppers using it were 60% more likely to complete a purchase; it also posted advertising-services revenue of $17.7 billion, up 24% year-on-year, while AWS sales rose 20% to $33.0 billion. Amazon forecast fourth-quarter net sales of $206.0 billion to $213.0 billion and operating income of $21.0 billion to $26.0 billion.
The competitive angle is two-sided. A stronger on-site shopping assistant can keep consumers inside Amazon’s own funnel rather than relying on outside search or chat tools, while a higher-intent shopper base supports Amazon’s ad business, which competes for brand budgets with Alphabet and Meta. On the enterprise side, any signal on AWS demand still gets read against cloud rivals led by Microsoft.
Technically, the stock has been trading near its 200-day moving average — a widely watched long-term trend line that smooths the last 200 closes — around $226.86, and below its 50-day average near $232.10, according to MarketBeat. The shares have traded between $161.38 and $258.60 over the past 12 months.
For the next catalyst, traders will focus on what Amazon says about holiday-season demand, the pace of AWS growth and the trajectory of advertising, along with any update on the cost of building out AI capacity. Any new disclosure on Rufus usage, conversion lift, or monetization would add color to the Evercore thesis.
But the AI upside is not free. If consumer spending softens, or if agentic shopping changes how ads are shown and measured, Amazon could face questions about whether AI boosts incremental demand or simply shifts traffic in ways that pressure margins and ad pricing.
