Amazon on November 4, 2026 launched the Shop Direct Merchant Workspace, a free self-service portal through which eligible online stores can register for Shop Direct, submit product feeds and have their products shown to US shoppers in Amazon search results and inside Alexa for Shopping, without selling in Amazon's store. Merchants can connect through four third-party feed providers - Feedonomics, Salsify, CEDCommerce and VersaFeed - or directly through Amazon's Selling Partner API, and Amazon says participation carries no fees.

In Short

Amazon has opened a free sign-up page where shops that don't sell on Amazon can send in their product lists, so those products can show up when people search on Amazon or ask its Alexa shopping assistant. It matters to online stores and to the agencies that manage their product data, because Amazon becomes a place their products can be found without becoming an Amazon seller or paying a fee. What changes is that a store can now join by itself through a portal, instead of going through a feed company's account manager or an email to Amazon.

What the Merchant Workspace does

Amazon calls the Workspace "a fast, free direct AI connector from their store to Alexa for Shopping and Amazon." In practical terms, the announcement describes a portal with three functions. Merchants register for Shop Direct and connect their store. They submit and manage product feeds. And they can see which of their products are active and available to Amazon customers.

Sign-up runs in three steps, according to Amazon: create a Shop Direct merchant account, verify the business website, and share the catalog, either through a solution provider whose app connects it or by integrating directly with the Selling Partner API (SP-API) "to submit and manage it programmatically." The portal's landing page, in the version Amazon showed, opens with the line "Your products can reach Amazon customers for free. Getting started is simple."

Access is not universal. The Workspace serves "any eligible merchant," in Amazon's words, but the announcement does not set out the eligibility criteria - no minimum catalog size, product category list, revenue threshold or excluded verticals are named. The website verification step suggests Amazon wants proof that the person registering controls the store being listed, though the post does not explain how verification works.

Once connected, merchants keep control of the commercial terms. Inventory, pricing, order fulfillment and customer service stay with the merchant "through the same processes they already use," according to Amazon. Merchants choose which items to include. "There are no fees to participate in Shop Direct, and merchants can opt out at any time," the company states.

What does the "AI connector" do that a feed upload does not? The post does not say. It states that "through our AI connector, Shop Direct provides Amazon customers near real-time information about merchants' products," but every route it describes for getting product data into the program is a feed - submitted through a partner app or through the API.

Four feed providers and a Google-format feed

The Workspace "accepts widely adopted shopping feed formats," according to Amazon, so merchants can reuse feeds they have already built for other shopping destinations. The company says this "significantly reduces the technical lift" and removes the need "to create a new catalog from scratch."

Amazon's developer documentation for the Shop Direct API is more specific about which format that means. Listings are submitted and updated through the SP-API Feeds API using a feed type named GOOGLE_PRODUCT_DATA_FEED - the Google product data format that retailers already maintain for Google Merchant Center - while deletions go through a separate JSON listings feed, according to the documentation. Products that come in variations, such as different colors or sizes, are grouped into families by a shared item_group_id. The documentation limits Shop Direct to the US store. Solution providers that want to build integrations request a dedicated "Shop Direct" role in Amazon's Solution Provider Portal; merchants building their own private integration first sign up in the Merchant Workspace.

That choice matters for the people who run feed operations. A catalog formatted for Google's shopping surfaces becomes, with little or no rework, the input for Amazon's assistant as well. Amazon does not name Google anywhere in its announcement, referring only to "catalogs they've already built for other shopping destinations."

Inside the Workspace, merchants can connect through "established third-party app providers like Feedonomics, Salsify, CEDCommerce, and VersaFeed." Three of those four were already in place. When Amazon first opened Shop Direct to third-party feeds on March 11, 2026, it named Feedonomics, Salsify and CEDCommerce as the participating syndicators and said further syndicators and a merchant-direct portal would follow. VersaFeed is the new name on the list, and the Workspace is the portal Amazon promised in March. At that stage, merchants were told to contact their account representative at one of the three syndicators, or to email Amazon if their provider did not participate.

Amazon expects more options. "As more developers build Shop Direct integrations with the Selling Partner API (SP-API), merchants will have an even broader range of apps to choose from," the post states.

Free for merchants does not mean free for everyone in the chain. Since 2026, Amazon has charged third-party developers for SP-API access: a $1,400 annual subscription from January 31, 2026, and monthly usage tiers based on GET call volume from April 30, 2026, with sellers and vendors that use the API only for their own business exempt. The Shop Direct announcement does not say whether those fees apply to Shop Direct integrations, or how merchants that build a private integration without being Amazon sellers are treated. Under that structure, POST, PUT and PATCH calls - the kind used to submit feeds - are unmetered, while GET calls count toward the monthly tiers.

The numbers Amazon gave, and the ones it did not

Amazon's scale claims for Shop Direct are broad. Since the program was introduced last year, "tens of millions of customers have discovered hundreds of millions of unique products from other stores," according to the company, and "Shop Direct products are appearing in hundreds of millions of searches monthly."

None of those figures is precise, and none is defined. The post does not say what counts as a customer "discovering" a product - a search impression, a product page view or a click. "Appearing in hundreds of millions of searches monthly" is a measure of exposure, not of visits sent to merchants. The announcement's key takeaways also say the Workspace puts merchants' products "in front of hundreds of millions of customers," a reach figure that is a different thing from the "tens of millions" Amazon says have actually discovered Shop Direct products.

Earlier figures offer a partial baseline. In March, Amazon said Shop Direct included more than 100 million products from more than 400,000 merchants, with tens of millions of those available through Buy for Me, as PPC Land reported at the time. Read literally, "hundreds of millions of unique products" discovered would imply a catalog of at least 200 million items, close to twice the March count at a minimum, by PPC Land's reading. Amazon gave no current product total and no merchant count in the November 4 announcement, so the growth cannot be confirmed.

Buy for Me has grown from a small base. The agentic purchase feature started with about 65,000 products and reached more than half a million by November 2025.

The post also leaves out the numbers that would let a merchant judge the program commercially: referral clicks, click-through rates, Buy for Me order volumes, conversion rates or average order values for Shop Direct listings. Amazon's own store, by comparison, is described in precise terms - "hundreds of millions of products, including 300 million items available with fast, free Prime delivery, across more than 35 categories."

How a Shop Direct listing reaches a shopper

"Selection connected to Shop Direct may be displayed to Amazon customers in relevant searches and within Alexa for Shopping," according to the announcement. In Amazon search, these products are "clearly labeled 'Shop Direct.'"

From there, two paths exist. On the Shop Direct path, a customer taps the "Shop Direct" button on the product page and is sent to the merchant's own store, after a notification that they are leaving Amazon. Or, when the product is eligible, the customer can use Buy for Me by tapping its button. In that flow, customers confirm their order details on Amazon's interface - "including delivery address, taxes, shipping fees, and payment method" - and "Amazon's AI then securely completes the purchase from the merchant's website," according to the post.

Either way, the merchant carries the post-sale work. "Shipping, delivery, returns, exchanges, and customer service are managed directly by the merchant through their existing processes," Amazon states. When Amazon introduced feeds in March, it said merchants receive the customer's name and address on Buy for Me orders; the November 4 post does not describe what customer data passes to the merchant.

Availability covers all US customers on Amazon.com, the Amazon Shopping app, mobile web browsers and Alexa for Shopping, which Amazon describes as its agentic AI shopping assistant. No other country is mentioned.

Merchants that already sell on Amazon are not excluded. They "may also be eligible to participate in Shop Direct and list selection they don't currently sell in Amazon's store," according to the post, and are directed to email shopdirect@amazon.com rather than use the Workspace. Merchants that want to sell inside Amazon's store and use services such as Fulfillment by Amazon and Amazon Ads are pointed to Seller Central.

Amazon's pitch to merchants

Amazon frames the program as a response to where shopping starts. "As customers increasingly look to Amazon and Alexa for Shopping as the place they start any shopping mission - not just from Amazon's store - merchants who aren't participating in Shop Direct are missing out on that demand," the post states.

Amanda Doerr, vice president of Core Shopping at Amazon, made the same argument. "Customers are increasingly trusting Amazon and Alexa for Shopping as the place to start any shopping journey - whether what they're looking for is in our store or somewhere else on the web," Doerr said. "Shop Direct makes it simple for merchants to have their selection discovered by Amazon customers. We created the Merchant Workspace to make it fast and easy for merchants to be part of this growing experience using the catalogs they've already built for other shopping destinations."

The company's stated goal is about search queries it cannot currently fill. "Our goal is that when customers search for specific products or brands that aren't sold in our store, we want to provide them easy ways to find and buy them on Amazon and our Alexa for Shopping agent," according to the post. Shop Direct items "build on our already broad selection to help ensure customers can find what they are looking for even if Amazon doesn't carry it."

Put differently: a shopper who would otherwise leave Amazon to search elsewhere can stay on Amazon's search page or inside its assistant, even when the product sits on another retailer's site.

From scraped listings to a sign-up form

The Workspace arrives after a contested start for the program. Amazon began testing Buy for Me on April 3, 2025, with a subset of US customers in the Amazon Shopping app and a limited number of brand stores and products, according to the company's announcement at the time. By November 2025, Rufus displayed Buy for Me and Shop Direct buttons for products that Amazon did not stock.

How those products got there became a point of dispute. At the turn of the year, independent brands including Bobo Design Studio and Hitchcock Paper said in social media posts that Amazon's beta was pulling products from their websites without consent, creating listings they had not opted into and could not opt out of. The brands reported outdated prices and out-of-stock items, and orders arriving from anonymous proxy email addresses. PPC Land's report on the complaints, published January 3, 2026, carried no Amazon response.

The March 2026 shift to feeds changed the entry route to one where merchants hand Amazon their own data through a syndicator. The Workspace launched on November 4 extends that to merchants without a syndicator relationship. What the post does not address is whether listings created from web scraping of merchant sites remain part of Shop Direct, or whether the program now relies only on merchant-submitted feeds. The announcement describes no route other than feeds and the API, and it mentions opting out only once, in a single sentence.

Amazon has said elsewhere that its own agent is transparent. In a dispute with Meta in September 2026, Amazon said Buy for Me identifies itself and lets brands opt out, according to GeekWire's reporting cited by PPC Land.

An open door for merchants, a closed one for outside agents

There is an asymmetry in the arrangement. Amazon's AI completes purchases on other retailers' websites on its customers' behalf. On its own website, Amazon has spent the past year restricting other companies' shopping agents.

In August 2025, an update to Amazon's robots.txt file restricted AI crawlers from Meta, Google, Huawei, Mistral and others. On November 4, 2025 - a year to the day before the Workspace launch - Amazon demanded that Perplexity stop its Comet browser from shopping on Amazon, and it filed suit the same day under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. A federal judge granted Amazon a preliminary injunction on March 9, 2026, and the Ninth Circuit stayed the order pending appeal. Perplexity's appeal brief alleged that Amazon itself had listed Perplexity's merchandise through Buy for Me without consent - an allegation, not a finding.

Amazon also changed its seller contract. Under an Agent Policy in the Business Solutions Agreement that took effect on March 4, 2026, AI agents operating on Amazon must identify themselves as automated systems and stop access if Amazon asks. In September 2026, Amazon cut off Meta's Muse agent from buying on Amazon.com after Meta did not agree to exclude its store.

Most large retailers have taken the opposite stance toward outside agents. A PSE Consulting study published in September 2025 found that most major UK and US merchants welcome AI agents, and described Amazon as the exception.

Amazon's position, then, is consistent on one point: its own assistant should be the agent customers use. Andy Jassy told analysts on October 29, 2026, that more than 400 million customers had used Alexa for Shopping over the previous 12 months and that US users spend 50% more per order than those who do not use it, and that Amazon expects the assistant to become the primary shopping agent customers use to shop Amazon. Shop Direct widens what that assistant can offer without Amazon holding the inventory.

Competing routes for the same catalogs

Amazon is not the only company asking retailers for their product data. In September 2025, OpenAI introduced Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, starting with US Etsy sellers and planning to add more than a million Shopify merchants; merchants pay a fee on completed purchases. In January 2026, Google launched the Universal Commerce Protocol, an open standard for agent-led shopping co-developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart. Amazon was not among its partners or endorsers.

Shop Direct differs from both in its economics, at least as Amazon describes it. There is no fee to participate and no stated commission on Buy for Me orders. The cost to Amazon is the value of keeping the shopper on its surfaces; the benefit to the merchant is a referral or an order it would not otherwise have had.

Feed companies sit in the middle of all of these programs. The same catalog data, prepared once, can now be distributed to Google's shopping surfaces, to AI assistants and to Amazon's search results. Amazon's decision to accept the Google feed format lowers the switching cost for merchants who already maintain one.

What it means for merchants and advertisers

For retailers that do not sell on Amazon, the program offers placement in Amazon search and Alexa for Shopping without a marketplace account, fees or fulfillment commitments. Yet the announcement leaves several commercial questions open.

Ranking is one. The post does not explain how Shop Direct products are ranked against products sold in Amazon's store, or whether Amazon applies different quality or price signals to them. Advertising is another. Amazon points merchants who want to use Amazon Ads to Seller Central and does not say whether Shop Direct listings can be promoted with sponsored placements, or whether they appear next to them. Measurement is a third. The Workspace, as described, shows which products are active - not impressions, clicks or sales. The post does not mention referral tagging or reporting that would let a merchant attribute Shop Direct traffic or Buy for Me orders in its own analytics.

For brands that do sell on Amazon, Shop Direct creates a second route for items they keep off the marketplace. It also means Amazon's search results include retailers that pay none of Amazon's selling fees, a group the Workspace is designed to enlarge.

And for Amazon, the trade is plain enough. Each Shop Direct listing is a search Amazon no longer loses to another website. How often that turns into an order, and how much traffic it actually sends to merchants, is something Amazon has not disclosed.

The Workspace's link to Amazon's other moves toward merchants' own websites is also visible. In September 2026, Amazon said customers of Amazon Supply Chain Services, the logistics offering it opened to businesses of any size in May, who use its Multichannel Fulfillment service could add the Prime badge and Prime delivery to their own websites and, separately, save 15% to 25% on fulfillment fees. Shop Direct runs in the other direction - bringing those websites' products into Amazon - but both make Amazon part of a merchant's business outside the Amazon marketplace.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Amazon, merchants that sell on their own websites, Amazon sellers with products they keep off the marketplace, and the feed providers Feedonomics, Salsify, CEDCommerce and VersaFeed, with Amanda Doerr, vice president of Core Shopping at Amazon, speaking for the company.

What: The Shop Direct Merchant Workspace, a free self-service portal where eligible merchants register for Shop Direct, verify their website, submit product feeds through a partner app or the Selling Partner API, and see which products are active. Shop Direct products appear in Amazon search and Alexa for Shopping, labeled "Shop Direct," and send shoppers to the merchant's site or, when eligible, are bought by Amazon's Buy for Me agent. Amazon's developer documentation shows listings submitted in the Google product data feed format.

When: November 4, 2026. Amazon introduced Shop Direct in 2025 and opened it to third-party feeds on March 11, 2026.

Where: The United States only, on Amazon.com, the Amazon Shopping app, mobile web browsers and Alexa for Shopping.

Why: Amazon says it wants shoppers who search for products it does not carry to find and buy them without leaving Amazon or its assistant. For merchants, the program offers free placement in Amazon search, while the announcement leaves open how Shop Direct items are ranked, whether they interact with advertising, how much traffic they send and whether listings built from scraped websites remain in the program.