Amazon announced a new program called Amazon Ad Retail Service that lets other retailers use its advertising technology to showcase ads on their own websites. The service enables retailers to manage product ads on their search, browse, and product pages to help customers with product discovery and purchase decisions. It's currently available to multi-brand retailers in the US with an e-commerce site or app.
Here's how Amazon Ad Retail Service works:
- A brand wants to advertise on your retail site — either promoting their products within your site or on a different online store.
- The retailer sends the advertiser to Amazon Ads console where their ad inventory is hosted.
- The brand manages their advertising through a familiar console.
- The brand also has the ability to advertise on other retail sites who offer ad inventory through its platform.
- Ads can incorporate availability, price, shopper search query, and the category or product being viewed.
- Retailers determine ad formats to fit the size of their templates, as well as where ads appear on their websites and how often they're shown.
- Retailers can also choose whether the ads lead visitors to the product page, displays a quick view of the product, or takes them directly to their cart to checkout.
- Retailers can make their ad offerings available via the Amazon Ads console and APIs to reach more advertisers.
- Amazon says that the service, which is hosted on AWS, operates on dedicated systems with access controls designed to ensure that retailer info is separate from Amazon info.
- It uses machine learning models to process contextual information like search queries and product attributes to serve relevant ads.
- Ad measurement takes place in AWS clean rooms to generate anonymized reports for the retailer and its advertisers.
- Retailers pay fees based on usage levels, but pricing has not been disclosed.
The service is currently in beta with iHerb, Oriental Trading Company, and Weee!, with additional brands like Tilly’s launching soon.
I see the appeal of having Amazon's ad tech powering your retail website's search and display ads, but let's also not act like selling / managing ads on a website is some incredible feat in 2025. Amazon has great tech, sure, but there are other solutions available that don't involve sending your advertisers to Amazon.
If I was a multi-brand retailer, I'd be concerned about two things:
- Sending my advertisers to Amazon Ads console, where I'd be ultimately helping to build a retail media network that collectively devalues the ads on my own website, and instead just makes me another cog in Amazon's wheel.
- Why would I want to display ads on my retail website that lead to products on other websites? The focus seems to be on “creating new advertising revenue streams” — but at what cost? Likely I paid to get that shopper on my website. Now I'm sending them away?
Juozas Kaziukėnas of MarketplacePulse nailed it on LinkedIn today. He wrote, “If a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water, which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger. That's Amazon.”
What are your thoughts on Amazon Ad Retail Service? What am I missing or not understanding about its benefits to retailers? Hit reply and let me know or join the convo on Mikael Brakker's LinkedIn post.