Amazon launched Shop Direct Merchant Workspace on November 4, giving eligible online merchants a self-service route to put products into Amazon search and Alexa for Shopping. Amazon says participation carries no fee.
For small retailers, the opening is access to product discovery without moving those sales into Amazon’s store. But access isn’t guaranteed: eligibility requirements remain unspecified, and Amazon’s announcement provides no referral-click, conversion or order-volume figures.
Shop Direct, introduced in 2025, is available to all U.S. customers through Amazon.com, the Amazon Shopping app, mobile browsers and Alexa for Shopping. Amazon says connected products may appear in relevant searches. A labeled Shop Direct button takes shoppers to the merchant’s website after a notice that they’re leaving Amazon.
For eligible products, Buy for Me offers another path. Shoppers confirm their delivery address, taxes, shipping fees and payment method in Amazon’s interface; Amazon’s AI then completes the purchase on the merchant’s website.
AI is opening distinct routes to buyers, from Amazon’s product-discovery channel to small-business prospecting services such as LemonLime. These are different acquisition approaches, not interchangeable ways to reach consumers.
How merchants connect a catalog
Amazon describes three setup steps: create a Shop Direct merchant account, verify the business website and share a product catalog.
Merchants can connect through Feedonomics, Salsify, CEDCommerce or VersaFeed, or integrate directly with the Amazon Selling Partner API to submit and manage catalogs programmatically. Amazon says the Workspace accepts widely adopted shopping-feed formats, allowing merchants to reuse catalogs built for other destinations.
PPC Land reports that Amazon’s developer documentation specifies GOOGLE_PRODUCT_DATA_FEED, the format used for Google Merchant Center, for submissions and updates. Deletions use a separate JSON listings feed.
The Workspace shows which products are active. Merchants choose their selection and remain responsible for pricing, inventory, fulfillment, returns, exchanges and customer service. Amazon says they can opt out at any time and that its connector supplies shoppers with near real-time product information.
PPC Land notes that Amazon’s announcement doesn’t specify qualifying catalog sizes, categories or revenue thresholds. Existing Amazon sellers may also qualify for products they don’t sell in its store, according to Amazon, which directs them to shopdirect@amazon.com.
Discovery isn’t a sales result
Amazon says tens of millions of customers have discovered hundreds of millions of unique products from other stores since Shop Direct’s introduction in 2025. It also says Shop Direct products appear in hundreds of millions of searches monthly.
Those figures describe exposure, not the business that reaches a merchant. Alongside the missing referral and order figures, PPC Land notes that the described Workspace reports active products without specifying traffic or sales reporting.
For an owner deciding whether to add the channel, that suggests a bounded test: establish eligibility and a way to attribute visits and purchases before judging performance. Participation may carry no Amazon fee, but catalog-maintenance work and provider costs still belong in the assessment. The unresolved question is whether discovery produces enough sales, after returns, to justify that work.