Amazon has opened its search results to stores that do not sell on its marketplace. On November 4, the company launched the Shop Direct Merchant Workspace, a free self-service portal where eligible online retailers can register for Shop Direct, submit their product catalogs, and have their goods appear in Amazon search results and inside Alexa for Shopping. The move turns Amazon’s search bar into a doorway to the wider web, with the company’s Buy for Me agent able to complete purchases on the merchant’s own site.
## What the Workspace does
Signing up runs in three steps: create a Shop Direct merchant account, verify the business website, and share the catalog. Merchants can connect through feed providers Feedonomics, Salsify, CEDCommerce, and VersaFeed, or plug in through Amazon’s Selling Partner API. The Workspace accepts the feed formats merchants built for other shopping destinations, so nobody has to build a catalog from scratch.
Once a merchant is in, the Workspace shows which products are active and available to Amazon customers. Shoppers see those items in relevant searches, clearly labeled “Shop Direct.” Tapping the button takes them to the merchant’s own store, with a notice that they are leaving Amazon — and the merchant keeps handling shipping, delivery, returns, and customer service.
Where a product is eligible, Amazon’s Buy for Me agent can finish the purchase without the shopper ever leaving Amazon. The customer taps “Buy for Me,” confirms the order details — delivery address, taxes, shipping fees, and payment method — and Amazon’s AI completes the purchase on the merchant’s website.
It is the same agentic checkout inside Alexa for Shopping, the assistant Amazon keeps expanding as it rolls out Alexa+ to new markets. Shop Direct itself is not starting from zero: Amazon says tens of millions of customers have already discovered hundreds of millions of unique products from other stores through the program.
Shop Direct listings now appear in hundreds of millions of searches every month. PPC Land reported that by March 2026 the program already carried more than 100 million products from over 400,000 merchants, while Buy for Me grew from about 65,000 products to more than half a million by November 2025.
## Our read
This is Amazon playing both sides of the agentic shopping race. On one hand, it has spent the year blocking outside shopping agents from its own store, including litigation against Perplexity and a block on Meta’s Muse in September, as PPC Land noted.
On the other, it is now inviting the whole web’s merchants into its own search — on Amazon’s terms, through Amazon’s connector, with Amazon’s agent closing the sale. The strategy is clear: Amazon would rather be the gatekeeper of agentic shopping than just another store inside it.
The comparison that matters is Google. Google has spent the same weeks putting checkout inside its own AI surfaces, letting Canadian shoppers buy inside Gemini and AI Mode, and booking home services through AI Mode. Amazon’s answer is different: instead of keeping the shopper inside one app, it wants to be the front door to every store.
The risk is trust — Visa’s testing found AI shopping agents fail nearly half their test runs, so Buy for Me has to prove it can spend other people’s money reliably. A wrong order still starts with Amazon’s button, so the reputational cost lands on Amazon even when the merchant ships the goods.
## Why It Matters
For merchants, the offer is free discovery in front of hundreds of millions of shoppers, without paying marketplace fees or handing over fulfillment. The price is dependence: their catalogs flow through Amazon’s connector, and the customer relationship still starts — and often ends — on Amazon’s terms.
For shoppers, the win is simple: a search that finally covers the stores Amazon does not stock. For rivals, the message is that the search bar itself is now the battleground for agentic commerce. Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity all want to be the place a shopping question starts, and Amazon just made its claim on that starting point.
## Background
Shop Direct began last year, with Buy for Me testing starting in April 2025 with a small group of US customers and a limited set of brand stores. The program shifted to merchant-supplied feeds in March 2026, and the new Workspace extends that route to merchants without a feed-provider relationship.
Source: [Amazon announcement](https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-shop-direct-merchant-workspace) · [PPC Land report](https://ppc.land/amazons-new-portal-lets-any-eligible-store-list-in-its-search-for-free/)
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