The Maze: Amazon opened a free sign-up portal on November 4 for eligible online stores that want their products to appear in US Amazon searches. The portal, called the Shop Direct Merchant Workspace, also puts submitted products in reach of Alexa for Shopping, Amazon’s shopping assistant. Shop Direct already sent some shoppers to other stores. The new portal gives those stores a way to submit and manage their own products.
Source: About Amazon. Amazon’s Merchant Workspace demo shows the two shopping options and the ways stores can connect a catalog.
The Details:
A catalog stores can manage. Amazon began accepting feeds through three catalog providers in March and said a merchant portal would follow. At the time, Feedonomics told its customers to contact their account representative to get started. With the new portal, a store can create an account, verify its website and connect the product data it already sends to other shopping sites. Four providers can make the connection, or the store can set up a direct software link to Amazon. Amazon says stores can choose what to include, see which products are active and opt out. It charges no participation fee. For a store that already maintains a product catalog, the change is one more place to send that data.
Two ways to buy from the same store. Say a US shopper finds a kettle from an independent retailer in Amazon search. The Shop Direct button sends the shopper to that retailer’s site to pay. If the offer is eligible for Buy for Me, the shopper can instead confirm the address, shipping, taxes and payment details on Amazon. Amazon’s assistant then places the order on the retailer’s website. The store sets prices, manages stock, ships orders and handles returns and customer service in both cases. Amazon’s March announcement said customers could track assisted orders in Amazon and the merchant received the customer’s name and address. The feature itself started as a limited US app test in April 2025.
Search appearances are a starting point. Amazon reported more than 100 million products from more than 400,000 merchants in March. Its November announcement uses a different yardstick. It says Shop Direct items appear in hundreds of millions of searches a month. The release gives no current merchant count, no count of shoppers sent to retailer sites and no Buy for Me order totals. Earlier reporting also documented a merchant who said its products appeared without its authorization, and Amazon said merchants could ask to be removed. Voluntary catalog submission gives participating stores a way to choose what to share. Amazon has yet to clarify how the new portal affects older ways of finding outside products.
MarketMaze Take: Amazon can win the first search even when another store makes the sale. Google has offered free listings in its Shopping results for years, giving retailers another place to show products before a sale on their own site. Amazon’s twist is that for some items it can also keep the order confirmation in its own interface. A store that joins Shop Direct can therefore reach Amazon shoppers through two very different paths. The referral sends a visitor to the store. Buy for Me can send an order without the shopper visiting the store at all.
For retailers, the economic question is what each path adds. Visits that produce new customers are worth more than visits from people who were already heading to the store. Assisted orders can be useful even without a visit, but their value still depends on the margin left after shipping, service and returns. Amazon’s search figures cannot settle that question.
