Amazon is expanding its Shop Direct program to allow customers to discover and purchase products from external retailer websites within the Amazon app. The company is transitioning from website crawling to direct data feeds, providing a more reliable method for merchants to share product catalogs. A dedicated self-service portal for participating retailers is expected to launch soon.
The program features a Shop Direct tool that links users to brand websites and a Buy for Me AI agent that completes purchases on external sites for the user. This shift to formal data integration establishes an official opt-in process for retailers.
The update addresses previous industry criticism regarding Amazon’s use of web-scraping to include retailers without their consent. Those unauthorized listings frequently resulted in inaccurate product data and unexpected order fulfillment issues for merchants.