Amazon's Shop Direct portal now takes your DTC feed

Amazon's Shop Direct Merchant Workspace is a free portal where an eligible store submits its existing product feed and gets its items shown in Amazon search and Alexa for Shopping without selling on Amazon. Shoppers tap a Shop Direct button, get a notice that they are leaving, and finish checkout on the merchant's own site.

What the Merchant Workspace does

Amazon opened the portal on November 4, 2026. Eligible online stores register for Shop Direct, submit product feeds, and see which of their items are active and available to Amazon customers. Sign-up runs in three steps. Create a Shop Direct merchant account, verify the business website, then share the catalogue through a solution provider's app or by integrating directly with the Selling Partner API.

Four named feed providers sit inside the Workspace, Feedonomics, Salsify, CEDCommerce and VersaFeed. Three of those were already carrying Shop Direct feeds when Amazon first opened the program to syndicators on March 11, 2026 and promised a merchant-direct portal would follow. This is that portal. Amazon's developer documentation names the feed type as GOOGLE_PRODUCT_DATA_FEED, the Google product data format retailers already maintain for Merchant Center, with variations grouped into families by a shared item_group_id. Shop Direct is limited to the US store, and Amazon states there are no fees to participate and merchants can opt out at any time.

What Amazon has not published is the eligibility bar. The announcement says "any eligible merchant" and sets out no minimum catalogue size, no category list, no revenue threshold and no excluded verticals.

How the handoff works

Connected products may be shown in relevant Amazon searches, clearly labelled Shop Direct, and inside Alexa for Shopping. From the product page there are two exits. On the first, the customer taps the Shop Direct button, receives a notification that they are leaving Amazon, and lands on the merchant's store to see the details and complete the purchase. On the second, when the item is eligible, the customer uses Buy for Me, confirms delivery address, taxes, shipping fees and payment method on Amazon's interface, and Amazon's AI completes the purchase from the merchant's website. Buy for Me has scaled from roughly 65,000 products at the start to more than half a million by November 2025.

Either way, the merchant carries everything after the click. Shipping, delivery, returns, exchanges and customer service stay with the store, run through the same processes it already uses, and the merchant keeps control of inventory and pricing.

Amazon published scale and skipped performance. It says tens of millions of customers have discovered hundreds of millions of unique products through Shop Direct and that Shop Direct products appear in hundreds of millions of searches monthly. Those are exposure counts, and PPC Land reads the monthly search figure the same way, as exposure rather than visits sent to merchants. There are no referral clicks, no click-through rates, no Buy for Me order volumes, no conversion rates and no average order values anywhere in the post. Amazon's own store gets precise treatment in the same announcement, with 300 million items available with fast free Prime delivery across more than 35 categories.

The sellers this actually reaches

If every SKU you own is already live in Amazon's store, there is nothing here to connect. The line that matters for an established brand owner sits further down the announcement. Merchants who already sell on Amazon may also be eligible to participate in Shop Direct and list selection they do not currently sell in Amazon's store, and they are told to email shopdirect@amazon.com rather than use the Workspace.

That moves the decision onto the part of your range you have kept off Amazon on purpose. The subscription-only kits. The bundles whose unit economics break once referral and fulfilment fees land. The slow movers you never wanted to warehouse, the limited runs, the sizes you only make to order. Those items can now appear alongside your Amazon listings, in search and inside an assistant, and send the shopper to your own checkout where you keep the margin and the customer record.

Brands most exposed to this are the ones whose DTC site is a real business rather than a brochure, with a feed already built for other shopping surfaces and a checkout that converts cold traffic. A brand with a thin site and no feed operation will spend more effort connecting than the traffic is likely to return, at least while Amazon publishes nothing about what the traffic looks like.

The read on why Amazon built it

Amazon states its goal plainly. When customers search for specific products or brands that are not sold in its store, it wants to give them easy ways to find and buy them on Amazon and through Alexa for Shopping. Read against the timing, that points at keeping discovery inside Amazon rather than at helping merchants reach customers. An assistant that answers "we do not carry that" loses the session to a search engine or another agent. An assistant that answers with an outside store, a label and a button keeps the session, and keeps the next query too. That is a read of the motive, argued from what Amazon says it is trying to fix, and it is the one the evidence supports best.

A second read sits underneath it. Amazon describes the Workspace as a fast, free direct AI connector, while every route it describes for getting product data into the program is a feed. Joining means handing Amazon a structured catalogue of items it has never carried, maintained by the merchant and refreshed by the merchant. Whatever the intent, the effect is that Amazon ends up holding product data it did not hold before, on assortment it does not sell. That layer is where the control question lives, well below the free sign-up.

What free costs you in practice

Joining carries no fee. The cost arrives as feed work, and it recurs. Someone owns the variation grouping, the availability sync, and the diagnosis when items quietly stop showing. Amazon has also charged third-party developers for SP-API access since 2026, a $1,400 annual subscription from January 31, 2026 plus monthly usage tiers based on GET call volume from April 30, 2026, with sellers and vendors using the API only for their own business exempt. Feed submissions through POST, PUT and PATCH calls are unmetered while GET calls count toward the tiers. Amazon has not said whether those fees touch Shop Direct integrations, or how a non-seller merchant building a private integration is treated.

The operational question is how many surfaces one range can sit on correctly at once. Our BioGlück case study covers a consumer goods brand running 22 SKUs across five EU marketplaces, where sales rose over twelve months while ACOS fell, on about fifteen minutes a week hands-on. The published subject of that account is breadth rather than catalogue size, five languages of search terms and five bid environments on a small range. Shop Direct adds one more surface with its own labelling and its own feed grammar, so a founder weighing it is asking a version of the question that account answers.

What to do this week

Three things, in order.

• Pull the SKUs you sell on your own site but not on Amazon, and mark the ones you would be happy for an Amazon shopper to find.
• Have someone check whether your existing Google Merchant Center feed is clean enough to reuse, since the Shop Direct API submits through the Google product data format.
• Instrument the landing side before you connect anything, so Shop Direct referrals are separable in your own analytics. Amazon is reporting no click or conversion data, so your site is the only place the result will show up.

Existing Amazon sellers are routed by email rather than through the portal, so start there if that is you. Run the whole thing as a test with a review date on the calendar. The companion read is our piece on what changed when Amazon replaced Rufus with Alexa for Shopping, because the assistant now surfacing outside stores is the same one deciding when your Amazon listings get named. If you want the ads side of the catalogue running on rules while you test, that is what our self-service platform is built for. Ninety days after you connect, read referral volume and conversion out of your own analytics and decide whether the feed work has earned its place.