Amazon’s “Shop Direct” Lets You Buy Anywhere Without Leaving | Fast Five Shorts

Amazon has expanded its Shop Direct feature to accept third party product feeds, making it dramatically easier for brands to appear in Amazon search results and its Rufus AI shopping assistant, even though they don't sell a single product on Amazon's own Marketplace.

According to ChainStorage, and as many of you loyal listeners likely remember, ShopDirect originally launched as a beta in February 2025, allowing Amazon to surface products from outside its marketplace in search results and and to link customers to the brand's website to complete the purchase.

It now includes over 100 million products from more than 400,000 merchants.

With this announcement, Amazon is now enabling third party feed providers to automatically sync a merchant's catalog, pricing and inventory in real time with ShopDirect.

Customers viewing ShopDirect products have two options.

They can tap Shop Direct to be sent to the merchant's website or tap Buy for me to have Amazon's agentic AI complete the purchase on their behalf and using their stored Amazon address and credit card.

Amazon stated vision around this initiative could not be more frank and not be more clear.

Carter, quote, whenever a customer asks for a specific brand or product on Amazon, we can help them find it and buy it, even if that product is only available in another store.

End quote.

All right, Carter, I'm gonna start you off well on this one because you without a doubt are the man.

You are my go to for all quote, unquote future of e commerce questions.

So here it is.

How smart is this move from Amazon to accept third party feeds into its Shop Direct functionality?

And would you advise brands and retailers to feed the Amazon beast?

Smart versus cruel, right?

Like I think the reality here, and the story goes into depth around some retailers haven't even opted in and start showing up on, on Amazon, right?

From an Amazon perspective, it's brilliant.

Why don't you use the might that you have, right?

You know, even when, when we were talking, I'm gonna say a hundred years ago or whatever you still looked at the first click for shopping is over 50% on Amazon.

And I know for me from a personal perspective, Amazon's where I go for everything.

And if I don't have to go scrape a bunch of random websites or search around for a random D2C store and I can have Amazon just do it all with my safe card, like it sounds great for Amazon and the consumer.

Now the question is, and you think about smaller brands that don't have a presence on Amazon, right?

There's, you know, the argument would be, hey, you're already spending a ton of Money on meta ads.

You're already, you know, spending a ton of money on Google search.

Why don't you just jump into Amazon where the customer actually is?

Okay, cool.

But what are you giving up, right?

What's the data that you're giving up?

And Lord knows that this is a play for data and for ad dollars for Amazon.

Right.

You know, why not just take the entire retail marketing world and just put under your umbrella when you, if you can.

Right?

And I just think that this is Amazon just shifting its weight around, finding ways to not cannibalize, but actually consume the rest of the market, though still small.

Yeah, Cutter, help me understand this too, because, like, why, why if I'm a brand, would I elect to do this?

Why would I elect to do this?

Like, why wouldn't I just go and directly sell on Amazon to begin with if I'm going to allow this to happen through this new, this new feed setup?

I think the, like, the reality is you look at a lot of these, like D2C brands and they're very particular about their web experience.

You know, they have their brand, they have all this stuff.

And so I think they're a little particular and often they don't want to be on Amazon.

It degrades that brand story.

It degrades some of those types of things.

I think it's kind of like they want to have their cake and eat it too kind of thing.

Yeah, I think.

Well, I think the other thing too is, is that, you know, there's a lot of Amazon experts here, but the three piece setup is still really complicated in my opinion.

Right.

Yeah.

And that's me who' being in the Amazon world.

1Pm 3p.

I mean, try to set up a brand on 3p and it's like brand registry.

Like what?

Like, like how much cut are you taking?

You have all this stuff, right?

Yeah.

And so I still think that's a pretty big barrier.

Now.

Those who have become experts in it and can navigate that obviously is a huge multiplier for you if you can actually set it up correctly and actually start to, you know, keep your margins even when Amazon takes its cut.

But I do think that it is.

There's a lot of brands out there that just don't even want to touch it.

Yeah, I think that's fundamentally what's here.

Because the other interesting wrinkle of this story, if you look back at the history of it, like suddenly this has gone from buy for me to shop direct.

And I think that's a marketing positioning.

Right, Carter, like of what you're saying to the brands that they want to be able to, you know, sell with their permission, so to speak, instead of selling without their permission.

And so that's what they're trying to do here because they're like, yeah, it's probably hard to sell on Amazon.

You can still get the benefit of us.

For those that want to still shop your website, yeah, they can still come to your website, they can still browse, they can see all your new cool DTC product.

But philosophically, it's really no different at the end of the day in terms of how this is ultimately going to work.

And the big question though is, and we don't know this from the headlines or what's been shared is like, you know, what kind of data sharing is going on from the first party data for the brands that get entered to, you know, that come to their website from, you know, the Amazon or that gets purchase directly through the buy for me function of Amazon.

Like, do the brands actually get that data at all?

I have no idea.

But you know that those are the big questions here.

But I think the marketing positioning of this, of going to shop direct is really fascinating.

Yeah, it's wild.

And I wouldn't be surprised if stories to come are about how now they're leveraging that traffic data to now sell ads directly to these brands.

Right?

Because you're, they're basically saying, like, why spend money on Meta?

Why spend money on Google?

Just spend it with us here at Amazon because we're already driving X amount of traffic.

What if we put a zero behind that?

How much would you pay for that?

And now all of a sudden this is a huge ad play just to continue the ad dominance in the retail media landscape that Amazon already has.

Right?

That's even the and one ad play.

Because they're going to get more ads even just from being able to surface this up on their site because they can show competing ads to these too.

So yeah, it's amazing.