Amazon has grown Shop Direct, its program for listing products sold on other websites, to 250M listings, up 150% from March, according to The Information. Amazon is also displaying those products more prominently within its search results, expanding upon earlier placements within its Alexa shopping chatbot.
Quick Backstory: Shop Direct is Amazon’s AI discovery experience that surfaces products from outside its own marketplace by integrating with third-party feed syndicators like Feedonomics, Salsify, and CEDCommerce, and by crawling and indexing the greater web. The integrations allow brands to automatically sync their catalog, pricing, and inventory in real time so that their products can appear in Amazon search results and Alexa answers. It launched in beta in February 2025, and then expanded in March 2026 through those integration partners.
Flash forward to today, and Shop Direct is rapidly consuming the web and growing Amazon’s external product catalog. The company has also introduced dedicated pages to showcase outside listings from brands like Alo Yoga and Warby Parker that show more product details on its own site before shoppers click through to an outside retailer, which is honestly pretty wild. It’s like Amazon is building its own internal marketplace of independent brands to replace shoppers having to visit their websites. Did anyone ask or give permission for this?
An Amazon spokesperson told The Information:
“Amazon is increasingly a destination where customers can find and buy products not just from our store. Tens of millions of customers have discovered hundreds of millions of unique products from other stores through Shop Direct since the program launched, and Shop Direct products are appearing in hundreds of millions of searches monthly. We’re pleased with the foundation we’re building—broad selection, quality search results, and a growing customer response that reinforces our commitment to making every product discoverable, no matter where it’s sold.”
Why is Amazon doing this?
E-commerce is going agentic, and Amazon wants to be where the journey begins. Over half of US shoppers already begin their search directly on Amazon’s platforms, which is a market share it’s had to claw away from Google over the past two decades, and one that the company does not want to lose. Amazon understands that where consumers begin their shopping journey is more valuable than where they end it, and it wants to continue to be that destination.
When it comes to agentic commerce, Amazon has two choices to maintain its dominant position as the “everything store.” It can either let third-party agents shop its product catalog (low-margin end result), or build the dominant agent that shoppers use to buy across the greater web (high-value shopper intent). In these early days, Amazon is smartly focused on the latter, and it’s better positioned than any company on earth to offer the best shopping agent on the web, given its existing troves of retail and consumer data.
People want to shop the greater web now through one portal, and Amazon is giving them the ability to do so, just through its own agents. For most shoppers, it’s a great solution from a company they already trust. However, the big catch for merchants right now is that they’re included by default unless they opt out, and many don’t even know their products are listed. Eleven merchants and agency staff told The Information that Shop Direct has driven few sales, and that some listings show the wrong product details or link to unauthorized resellers.
Amazon says it’s building reporting so brands can at least see the traffic it sends, but it’s coming at this with an opt-out mentality, not an opt-in. Though to be fair, aren’t they all?
