Marketplace Briefing: Amazon expands AI-powered Shop Direct program that lets customers buy from other retailers’ sites
This is the latest installment of the Marketplace Briefing, a weekly Modern Retail+ column about the ever-changing e-commerce marketplace landscape. More from the series →
Amazon is expanding Shop Direct, an AI-driven program that lets shoppers find and buy products from other retailers even when those items aren’t sold on Amazon.com.
The company announced Wednesday it is widening access to Shop Direct by allowing merchants to automatically sync their catalog, pricing and inventory through third-party feed providers, including Feedonomics, Salsify and CedCommerce. The aim is to make it easier for brands to surface their products in Amazon search results and its AI shopping assistant Rufus.
The move is part of Amazon’s broader effort to make its website the starting point for every online purchase, including those that ultimately take place outside its own marketplace. Shop Direct allows customers to click out to a brand’s website to complete a purchase. The program, which Amazon introduced in February 2025, now includes more than 400,000 merchants and over 100 million products, according to the company. Shop Direct listings appear alongside standard Amazon product results and in recommendations from the company’s Rufus AI shopping assistant, where they are clearly labeled before linking to a brand’s website.
Amazon says it expanded the program in response to interest from brands. It has received positive feedback from both merchants and customers and has fielded requests from companies of all sizes looking to join Shop Direct, according to the company.
Amanda Doerr, Amazon’s vice president of core shopping, said the company sees Shop Direct as a way to expand selection while improving the customer experience.
“We’re really excited to have this expanded selection to offer to customers, so that Amazon can be a trusted first place for them to start their shopping journeys, and Rufus can really be the world’s best shopping assistant, by knowing and being aware of all of this inventory that exists,” she said.
Shop Direct positions Amazon more like a search engine, similar to Google, which indexes retail websites and directs shoppers to merchants across the web. The program’s feed format is similar to Google Shopping and is designed to make participation as simple as possible for merchants. “We wanted to make it as easy and low-lift as possible, so that merchants could use existing feeds and turn it on for Amazon,” Doerr said.
Amazon says the program is free for merchants. Doerr declined to share any details about potential monetization plans. For now, the company is focused on expanding product selection rather than monetizing the program.
The company also says the feeds help improve the quality of product data shown to customers, particularly as Amazon builds out AI-driven shopping tools. Better data is especially important as Amazon invests in AI-powered discovery tools like Rufus, which relies on product information to generate recommendations. The more products Rufus can pull from — including items not sold on Amazon — the more relevant its recommendations may become. That could help Amazon keep shoppers engaged on its platform, even if they ultimately buy elsewhere.
“This gives us a really easy way to get that complete data directly from merchants, rather than having to go source that ourselves through publicly available data on the internet,” Doerr said. “We want Rufus to have all of that high-quality data to reason with and to provide those great product recommendations and be aware of what’s available in the world of e-commerce.”
Merchant value
Still, questions remain about how much value Shop Direct delivers to merchants, particularly those that do not currently sell on Amazon.
Juozas Kaziukėnas, an independent e-commerce analyst, said the program appears designed primarily to improve Amazon’s own product data while making it easier for the company to aggregate information from across the web.
“The benefit to merchants is not clear,“ Kaziukėnas said. The expanded Shop Direct program “improves the data quality on Amazon’s side, but it’s not clear how much impact this Shop Direct feature is having on driving clicks to merchant websites,” Kaziukėnas said.
Amazon says it has referred customers millions of times to merchant sites through the program, though the company is not able to track whether Shop Direct referrals lead to completed purchases because transactions take place on merchants’ own websites.
For brands, Shop Direct helps them “get more discovery and visibility in front of customers,” Doerr said.
The expansion of Shop Direct follows backlash from some merchants about the program and a related feature called Buy for Me, which uses AI to complete purchases on a shopper’s behalf without leaving Amazon’s app. Many brands said their products appeared on Amazon.com through these features without their consent. While sellers can request to opt out, merchants told Modern Retail that Amazon did not seek permission beforehand. Some also said the programs resulted in inaccuracies, including incorrect product details and outdated inventory information.
By letting merchants directly provide their own product data, the company is giving brands more control over how their listings appear, including pricing, availability and product details. That could help Amazon avoid errors that previously frustrated some merchants and potentially improve trust with brands that have been wary of how their products are displayed.
It remains unclear how widely AI shopping agents will be adopted, but Amazon appears to be preparing for a future where they could play a larger role in how people shop online. The company has already taken defensive steps, including suing Perplexity over its AI shopping browser, Comet.
Doerr said Amazon is seeing strong interest from brands that want to showcase their full product catalogs, including items they may not sell through Amazon’s traditional first- or third-party marketplace. She added that some existing Amazon sellers are also using Shop Direct to highlight products not currently available through the marketplace.
Looking ahead, Amazon said it plans to add more feed partners and continue expanding the program.
As Doerr put it, “I want my shopping agent to know about all of the inventory that exists in the world, not just a subset from one store.”
What I’m reading
- Amazon won a court order temporarily blocking Perplexity’s AI shopping bot from buying items on its marketplace, per Bloomberg.
- Amazon is ramping up internal guardrails after a string of recent outages tied to AI-assisted coding errors struck the company’s e-commerce business, according to Business Insider.
- Amazon sold $37 billion of U.S. bonds as part of its push to expand artificial intelligence infrastructure, Bloomberg reported. Amazon also made its debut in the European bond market.