Amazon opens a free Shop Direct portal for outside stores

On November 4, 2026, Amazon launched the Shop Direct Merchant Workspace, a free, self-service portal that lets an online store put its catalog into Amazon search without selling on Amazon. The store registers, verifies its website and sends a product feed. Its products then show up, labeled Shop Direct, to US shoppers on Amazon.com, in the Amazon Shopping app and in Alexa for Shopping.

There are no fees, according to Amazon. The merchant keeps its own pricing, fulfillment and customer service, and the sale happens on the merchant's own site.

That makes Amazon search a place where your DTC store, your retail partners' sites and your resellers' stores can all appear next to your own Amazon listings. If you've spent years keeping your Amazon price and your DTC price in step, that's now a question you need to answer on purpose.

What Amazon launched on November 4, 2026#

The Shop Direct Merchant Workspace is a portal for outside stores, not Amazon sellers. Amazon describes three steps: create a Shop Direct merchant account, verify your business website, and share your catalog. The catalog can come through a solution provider, with Amazon naming Feedonomics, Salsify, CEDCommerce and VersaFeed, or directly through Amazon's Selling Partner API (SP-API).

Amazon's SP-API documentation for Shop Direct fills in the mechanics. Listings are submitted with the GOOGLE_PRODUCT_DATA_FEED feed type, and the program runs only in the US store. Shop Direct listings can appear in Amazon searches, Alexa for Shopping searches and on dedicated Amazon detail pages, and customers finish the purchase on the merchant's website or through Buy for Me. A store that already sends a Google Merchant Center feed has most of the work done.

Amazon frames it as filling gaps in its own selection. "Shop Direct makes it simple for merchants to have their selection discovered by Amazon customers," said Amanda Doerr, Amazon's vice president of Core Shopping. Amazon says that since the program launched, tens of millions of customers have discovered hundreds of millions of products from other stores through Shop Direct, and that those products appear in hundreds of millions of searches each month. Amazon didn't give a merchant count, click-through rate or sales figure.

Existing Amazon sellers may also be eligible, for products they don't sell on Amazon. Amazon asks them to contact shopdirect@amazon.com.

How a Shop Direct sale works#

A Shop Direct sale happens on the merchant's site, not Amazon's. In search, the product carries a Shop Direct label. The shopper then goes one of two ways, both described in Amazon's March 2026 announcement.

With the click-out route, the shopper taps Shop Direct, sees a notice that they're leaving Amazon, and lands on the merchant's product page. With Buy for Me, the shopper confirms the order on Amazon and Amazon's AI completes the purchase on the merchant's site with the shopper's stored shipping and payment details. The merchant gets the customer's name and address and handles everything after that.

Amazon hasn't published how Shop Direct items rank against products sold on Amazon, whether they can be advertised, or what referral data the merchant gets back. PPC Land's write-up flags the same gaps, and also notes that Amazon hasn't set out eligibility criteria such as a minimum catalog size.

Our read: this is a channel control problem first#

It's easy to read Shop Direct as a free traffic source for small stores. For an established brand, it's a channel control question, and it has three parts.

Your DTC store. Putting your own site into Amazon search is free reach, but it puts your DTC price on the same results page as your Amazon offer. If they differ, the shopper sees it. And a sale that moves from your Amazon listing to your site may help margin while costing you Amazon sales history and reviews on the ASIN. We'd make that call deliberately, by product, rather than switching on the whole catalog because a feed provider made it one click.

Your retail partners. Any retailer or specialty site that carries your products can now list them in Amazon search for free. That's mostly good for sell-through. It's also another price that sits next to yours, set by someone else.

Your resellers. This is the part we'd watch closest. A reseller you've removed from your Amazon listings, or one that never had a Seller Central account, could register its own website and appear in Amazon search with your products. Amazon hasn't said how Brand Registry or its other brand tools apply to Shop Direct listings. Until it does, assume the tools you use against marketplace sellers may not reach a Shop Direct store, and that the work moves back to your distribution agreements.

This is the same discipline as pricing unauthorized sellers off your listings, which we cover step by step in how to price unauthorized resellers off your Amazon listings, applied to a new surface. And it fits a pattern we wrote about on November 4, 2026: Amazon has been blocking outside AI shopping agents from its store while pulling other stores' catalogs into its own. The more selection Amazon can show inside Alexa for Shopping, the less reason a shopper has to go anywhere else to search.

What to do this week#

As of November 5, 2026, Shop Direct is US-only, and Amazon hasn't said much about ranking, ads or brand protection. We'll update this piece when it does. Until then, the brands that come out ahead will be the ones that decided who gets to sell their products in Amazon search, instead of finding out from a search result.

If you want help sorting out which stores belong in that search result, it's part of what we do in channel control and brand protection.