Amazon opens search to outside stores

Stores can sign themselves up. Amazon already accepted catalogs through partners. Now a store can create a Shop Direct account, verify its website and choose which products to share. It can reuse an existing catalog through one of four providers or set up a direct software connection to Amazon.

Shoppers have two paths. The Shop Direct button sends shoppers to the store’s website to pay. On eligible items, Buy for Me lets them confirm the order inside Amazon and have its assistant place it on the store’s website. The store sets prices and handles shipping, returns and support either way.

Free to join, with sales still unknown. Amazon charges no participation fee and lets stores opt out. It says Shop Direct items appear in hundreds of millions of searches each month. Amazon hasn’t said how often those searches send shoppers to stores or how many Buy for Me orders they generate.

The work of combining the businesses has begun. The new owner can buy materials in larger volumes and remove duplicate work across factories, warehouses and offices. Kimberly-Clark expects those kinds of changes to generate most of the $2.1 billion in annual benefits it is targeting once the businesses are combined.

Distribution offers a way to grow sales. Kimberly-Clark has pointed to Kenvue’s existing network in India as a way to get Huggies into more stores. Using that network could save the diaper brand from having to build every distribution relationship from scratch. Actual shelf space still depends on what retailers choose to stock.

Beauty shows why those choices matter. Kenvue’s latest quarter showed a 0.5% fall in underlying skin and beauty sales after stripping out currency and changes from acquisitions and disposals. Kenvue pointed to lost distribution and promotion timing in the U.S. and negotiations with retailers in Europe.

Stores and mail stay together. The new CVS Pharmacy would include about 9,000 stores, mail delivery and MinuteClinic walk-in and virtual care. The other company would keep Aetna, a U.S. health insurer, and Caremark, which manages drug coverage and pharmacy networks for health plans. It would also keep CVS Specialty, which fills prescriptions for specialty medicines.

One prescription can involve both companies. Under an existing Caremark option, eligible patients can pick up long-term medication at a CVS store or get it by mail for the same price. CVS told investors it plans to use agreements between the two companies to preserve services they built together.

CVS is targeting the first half of 2028. It says the split would let each business set its own investment priorities. The companies still need final board approval, an effective registration filing and confirmation of the expected tax treatment. CVS says it will keep operating as one company until closing.

Shares cover webshops where the first method could be identified. Home delivery appears first at 89% of Swiss webshops and 87% of UK webshops in the comparison. Denmark instead has staffed parcel shops first at 59%; Estonia has self-service lockers first at 71%. Those are two different ways for customers to collect an order away from home.

Finland shows why the choice is broader than home versus lockers: home delivery leads at 43%, lockers at 26% and staffed shops at 16%. Tembi's checkout visits record retailer presentation. These figures do not measure buyer preferences, parcel volumes or the sales effect of putting an option first. Sample size and weighting are not supplied.

The commercial implication is conditional: if local delivery networks help shape these retailer defaults, expanding abroad can require different collection partners as well as a translated checkout. A popular first position is a useful local benchmark; customer and operating evidence must establish whether it suits a particular retailer.

Marketplaces kept the lead: PYMNTS Intelligence asked 2,191 US consumers in August 2026 to imagine equal items, prices, shipping and returns. 40.2% chose a large online marketplace, versus 16.1% for a brand's own website. These preferences describe a hypothetical purchase, not observed agent orders.

The choice remains open: 21.8% chose a department store or large retailer, and another 21.8% would let AI decide. Brands came last, but shoppers did not reject them entirely; an assistant could still introduce competing sellers.

Better offers beat checkout automation: Among marketplace shoppers, 53.9% cited lower prices or discounts as reasons to buy direct, versus 12.1% for AI-handled checkout. These separate incentives suggest that making payment automatic cannot replace a competitive deal.

Marketplaces are shared shopping sites where businesses sell alongside other sellers. Among online-selling firms with at least ten employees, Italy leads France by 38 percentage points: 65% versus 27% in the 2025 figures published in the European E-commerce Report 2026. Poland is almost level with Italy at 64%; Germany is at 51%, Spain 36% and the Netherlands 32%. These are selected countries, not Europe's six leaders.

France uses owned stores more widely: 94% of its online-selling businesses use their own website or app, against 73% in Italy. The channels overlap: a business can sell through both, so these figures are not exclusive shares of a market.

Expansion needs a local channel test: Italy's wider marketplace use makes local platform operations worth investigating. France's wider owned-store use suggests a different starting point. Neither percentage proves where a new brand will find customers profitably; product category, selling costs and buyer behaviour still need checking.

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Publicis closed its $2.2 billion LiveRamp purchase. A US order lets brands and rival agencies keep using the service to match customer records for ads without buying other Publicis services.

With Meta’s ad-buying software update, leaving settings blank can let Meta add matching catalog products to some new ads or show ads from eligible new ad sets in sales campaigns on mobile devices beyond those selected.

Criteo plans to bring streaming TV ads targeted with shopping data to nine more countries, starting with Brazil and Mexico by year-end. Brands can use their usual ad-buying software where that option is available.

Google is rolling out checkout in Canada for eligible products in AI Mode and Gemini. Shoppers can pay with Google Pay without leaving Google, while participating retailers remain the sellers.

Poshmark cut U.S. shipping from $6.49 to 99 cents on eligible marketplace orders for a limited time, with no minimum. Live-show orders ship free if a buyer spends at least $75 with one seller in one show.

Ahold Delhaize expects €200 million to €250 million in lost fourth-quarter sales after an October cyberattack disrupted online grocery services in the US and Benelux, even as stores stayed open.

Amazon ads can use Attain’s U.S. purchase data to reach shoppers based on where they bought, what they bought and whether they shopped online or in stores. It’s unclear which campaign settings support it.