Amazon expands Shop Direct with three new partners

Amazon has expanded its Shop Direct program, which takes people directly to a brand’s website to make a purchase, with the addition of three new partner platforms that merchants can use to sync their inventory.

Merchants without an Amazon presence can connect their product catalogs through third-party feeds on aggregator platforms like Feedonomics, Salsify, and CEDCommerce, to join Amazon’s Shop Direct.

“Merchants will be able to go contact their feed aggregator and say, ’Turn it on for Amazon,’” Amanda Doerr, VP of core shopping at Amazon, told Retail Brew. “They can leverage existing feeds that they have and send those over to us, and we’ll make that part of our Shop Direct selection.”

The thinking behind scaling Shop Direct, Doerr said, was to make Amazon the place where every shopping journey begins, even if it ends somewhere else. “We think that earns trust,” Doerr said.

The other reason for adding more weight to Shop Direct was to help Amazon’s AI assistant Rufus gain access to robust, real-time inventory data across the internet, not just from Amazon’s everything store.

“Our goal with Rufus is to make it the world's best shopping assistant,” Doerr said. “And we know that customers expect these AI shopping assistants to have knowledge of the world’s inventory. So it wouldn’t be [a] very useful shopping assistant if it was only just focused in one store.”

Shop Direct, powered by AI, was introduced in February 2025 and counts more than 400,000 merchants as part of the program, according to Amazon.

“What we do see is that customers appreciate this when they’re looking for a specific brand,” Doerr said. “To see not only what does Amazon have to offer, if they don’t have that brand, but how do I get to that particular brand, and how does that kind of compare against the whole selection?”

In the coming weeks, Doerr said, Amazon plans to further extend the Shop Direct program and introduce a “self-service portal setup for merchants who don’t leverage a feed aggregator” like the ones Amazon has already partnered with.