Amazon is making it easier for merchants to participate in Shop Direct, its AI discovery experience that surfaces products from outside its own marketplace, by integrating with third-party feed syndicators including Feedonomics, Salsify, and CEDCommerce. The new 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 Rufus answers.
Quick Backstory: Shop Direct launched as a beta in February 2025, when Amazon began testing a feature that linked customers to a retailer’s website when its own search results didn’t include the product they were looking for. Customers would see product information on Amazon and could click through to the retailer’s site to check pricing and delivery options. The program has since expanded and is now live for all U.S. customers on Amazon’s website, mobile app, and AI shopping assistant.
A year later, Shop Direct now indexes over 100M products from more than 400k merchants, with tens of millions available through the “Buy for Me” agentic feature that lets Amazon complete the purchase on a customer’s behalf.
The new integrations with third-party product feeds give merchants a faster way to submit their products into Amazon’s index, while also allowing them to use their existing product feeds, as opposed to making a new one specifically for Amazon.
Amazon says it plans to add support for more feed providers and is also developing a merchant portal that will allow merchants to submit their product feeds directly.
As for Amazon’s benefit, TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez wrote:
“While the move to be included on Amazon could certainly boost a brand’s exposure and potential sales, it could also give Amazon insights into which brands, products and price points are most appealing to customers. The company could use this information to improve its own business by providing data on competing products, tracking trends, identifying potential Buy with Prime partners, and more.”
MajeseticIQ founder Joe Nilsen says the playbook is familiar:
“This is not a traffic referral program. This is one of the most efficient competitive intelligence plays in retail history. And merchants are plugging in the cables themselves… Free access builds dependency. Dependency enables monetization. Monetization funds the next moat.”
Last year, when Amazon started growing its Autos division, I asked:
“Why in the world would Hyundai, Ford, and soon to be other auto manufacturers give away control of their inventory and sales process to the most unscrupulous and ruthless of partners? Has the automobile industry learned nothing from what happened to retailers in the books and toys industries after partnering with Amazon? Why would automakers do this? So they can later pay Amazon advertising fees after they’ve helped build its market share?”
I could ask similar questions about merchants that participate in Shop Direct.
