Amazon just made it a lot easier to put products from your own website in front of Amazon shoppers without selling them on Amazon. This week it launched the Shop Direct Merchant Workspace, a free self-serve portal that connects your store's catalog to Amazon search and Alexa for Shopping. If you run a DTC site alongside an Amazon or Walmart business, this deserves an hour of your time this week.
What Amazon announced
Here is what Amazon confirmed in its announcement and developer docs:
- The Shop Direct Merchant Workspace is a free, self-service portal where eligible merchants register for Shop Direct, submit product feeds, and see which of their products are live to Amazon customers.
- Sign-up is three steps: create a Shop Direct merchant account, verify your business website, and share your catalog through a solution provider or directly through the Selling Partner API.
- Amazon named Feedonomics, Salsify, CEDCommerce, and VersaFeed as connection partners. Through the API, listings go in using a Google product data feed.
- Shop Direct products can appear in relevant Amazon searches and inside Alexa for Shopping, labeled "Shop Direct." Shoppers tap through to your site, or on eligible items use Buy for Me, where Amazon's AI completes the purchase on your website for them.
- You keep inventory, pricing, fulfillment, returns, and customer service. There are no fees, you choose which items to include, and you can opt out at any time.
- Existing Amazon sellers may also qualify to list selection they do not sell in Amazon's store by emailing shopdirect@amazon.com.
Amazon says tens of millions of customers have discovered hundreds of millions of products through Shop Direct since it launched last year, and that Shop Direct products show up in hundreds of millions of searches a month. The program is US only.
How we got here
Shop Direct and Buy for Me are not new. Earlier this year, Modern Retail and Business Insider reported that brands found their products listed on Amazon through these programs without ever opting in, and the way out was emailing branddirect@amazon.com. What changed this week is that there is now a real front door. You control the feed, the selection, and whether you participate at all.
Why it matters
My read: Amazon wants every shopping trip to start on Amazon or Alexa, even when Amazon does not carry the product. That cuts both ways for operators.
- The upside is free discovery on the biggest product search engine in the US for items you do not want to run through Amazon's store, like site-only bundles, DTC exclusives, or products you keep off the marketplace on purpose.
- The downside is more competition on the search results page. If you sell on Amazon, Shop Direct listings from other brands can show up for the same searches, and those brands are not paying referral fees or ad costs to be there.
- Buy for Me orders land in your site's order flow, but the shopper experienced it as buying "on Amazon." If your shipping is slow or returns are painful, that shopper is comparing you to Prime, not to your own past customers.
Who it affects most
- DTC brands that stayed off Amazon on purpose. Based on this year's reporting, you may already be showing up. Now you can decide on your own terms.
- Hybrid brands with SKUs that only live on their own site, which now have a free path to Amazon traffic.
- Brands with wholesale or reseller agreements that restrict Amazon. Modern Retail's story included a brand whose wholesale partner flagged listings that showed up on Amazon this way.
- Amazon sellers in crowded categories, who now share search results with off-Amazon stores.
What I would do this week
- Search Amazon for your brand and your top site-only products. See whether anything already shows as Shop Direct or Buy for Me, and what that listing looks like.
- Decide in or out on purpose. If you are in, register through the Merchant Workspace so you control the feed. If you are out, opt out in writing and recheck in a week.
- If you join, start with products you do not sell on Amazon. Sending Amazon shoppers to your site for a SKU you also sell on Amazon can pull sales away from the listing you have spent money ranking.
- Clean up your Google Shopping feed first. That is the format Amazon takes, so bad titles, images, prices, or stock status now show up on Amazon too.
- Make sure your operations can handle Buy for Me orders. Tag them, ship them fast, and make returns easy.
- Track it yourself. Amazon's announcement describes visibility into which products are active, not sales reporting, so watch your own site analytics and order sources closely.
Decide how your brand shows up on Amazon
Shop Direct is a real channel decision, not a checkbox. Get it wrong and you either miss free demand or start competing with your own Amazon listings. If you want help mapping which products belong on Amazon, which belong on Shop Direct, and which should stay off both, Talk to a strategist and we will build that plan with you.