Amazon Opens Shop Direct to Outside Stores — Free, and Your Competitors Can Use It

Amazon announcement: 4 November 2026

Amazon has launched the Shop Direct Merchant Workspace, a self-service portal that lets eligible online stores submit a product feed and appear in Amazon search and Alexa for Shopping — without selling in Amazon’s store. Joining previously went through a feed provider’s account team. Now you create an account yourself.

US shoppers only. Amazon says Shop Direct products already appear in hundreds of millions of searches each month.

1. How It Works

• Create a Shop Direct account, verify your business website, and share your catalogue.
• Widely used shopping feed formats are accepted, so an existing catalogue can usually be reused as-is.
• Connect through Feedonomics, Salsify, CEDCommerce, VersaFeed, or directly via the Selling Partner API.
• Items appear in relevant searches with a Shop Direct label.
• Shoppers either click through to your site, or — where eligible — use Buy for Me, where Amazon’s AI completes the purchase on your website.
• You choose which items to include and can opt out at any time.
• Amazon says there is no fee to participate.

Pricing, inventory, fulfilment, returns and customer service all stay with the merchant. Amazon is supplying demand, not operations.

2. What This Means If You Already Sell on Amazon

Two things, pulling in opposite directions.

First, the opportunity: existing Amazon sellers may be eligible to list products they do not sell in Amazon’s store. If you have a catalogue that never made sense in FBA — slow movers, oversized items, bundles, anything where the fee structure killed it — Shop Direct is a route to Amazon search traffic for those products without putting them in FBA. Eligibility is confirmed by emailing shopdirect@amazon.com.

Second, the threat: a free, self-service portal means brands that previously had no presence on Amazon can now appear next to you in search results, with no referral fee and no FBA cost in their margin. Some of them will be your competitors.

3. What Amazon Has Not Said

Two gaps matter. Amazon has not explained how Shop Direct items rank against products sold in the Amazon store, and it has not published click or conversion data for the programme.

Without the ranking answer, nobody can tell you whether a Shop Direct listing competes with your ASIN or sits below it. Treat anyone claiming otherwise with suspicion, and find out by looking.

4. What to Do This Week

• Search your top keywords and look for Shop Direct labelled results. That tells you whether the programme is already live in your category and who is using it.
• List the products you sell off-Amazon and decide, per product, whether it belongs in Shop Direct or in your Amazon catalogue.
• If you already sell on Amazon, email shopdirect@amazon.com to confirm what you are eligible to list.
• Tighten titles, images and attributes on anything you submit. In a search result you are competing for the click against listings with Amazon’s own conversion machinery behind them.