The Maze: Amazon’s U.S. shopping service is widening its reach beyond products sold in its own store. Shop Direct reportedly now lists 250 million outside-store products, 2.5 times its March level. The expansion could give shoppers fewer reasons to start elsewhere. It does not establish that merchants are receiving more orders.
Source: Amazon. Frame from Amazon’s March 2026 demonstration showing outside-store sneaker listings with Shop direct and Buy for Me options.
The Details:
More selection, more prominence. The October 28 expansion report says Amazon is also making external offers more visible and displaying more product information before shoppers leave its site. The figures come from The Information, as relayed by PYMNTS. Amazon’s own March disclosure put Shop Direct above 100 million products from more than 400,000 merchants. That is the useful comparison: the catalog has grown substantially since an already large base. It is a distribution update, rather than the first time Amazon has linked to another shop.
Two routes lead to the merchant. With an ordinary Shop Direct listing, the shopper follows a link to the merchant’s website and buys there. For eligible products, the separate Buy for Me option lets the shopper ask Amazon to purchase on their behalf. The customer confirms the item, delivery address, payment method, taxes and shipping charges. Amazon then completes the brand website’s checkout. The brand sends confirmation and remains responsible for delivery, returns, exchanges and customer service. Finding a product through Amazon therefore does not mean Amazon stocks it, ships it or supplies the after-sales service.
Merchants can update the information Amazon shows. Since March, participating businesses have been able to send product, price and stock updates through catalog-management providers including Feedonomics, Salsify and CEDCommerce. These structured product feeds connect merchant information to Amazon search and its shopping assistant, Rufus. Amazon documents U.S. availability across its website, app and mobile web. The October report supplies no worldwide rollout or country breakdown for the larger catalog. It quotes Amazon saying Shop Direct products appear in hundreds of millions of searches monthly. That measures appearances in searches, not the number of people who bought anything.
MarketMaze Take: Amazon can remain the place a shopping trip starts even when another business completes the sale. That is a meaningful competitive position. The merchant keeps its checkout and service obligations; Amazon can still influence which products shoppers discover before they ever reach that checkout.
Owning checkout is only part of independence. The lesson for merchants outside the U.S. is about dependence on discovery platforms, rather than access to this particular service. A brand can sell through its own website while relying on another company to introduce the customer. OpenAI’s March shift toward product discovery and merchant checkout shows that this separation also exists beyond Amazon’s model.
A larger doorway needs a sales test. The strongest objection is simple: more listings and search appearances can still produce little useful business. The reviewed expansion report gives no completed-order total, conversion rate or merchant profit measure. Those missing outcomes limit the claim of success. The evidence supports a broader discovery gateway, while its incremental value to merchants remains unproven.
