Amazon is turning its own site and app into a starting point for the entire web’s shopping, not just its marketplace, with an expanded Shop Direct experience that quietly changes how you’ll discover and buy products online.

If you haven’t bumped into it yet, Shop Direct is that extra section that appears when you search for something specific on Amazon—often a brand name or a niche product—and Amazon doesn’t actually sell what you’re looking for in its own store. Instead of ending the journey there, Amazon now pulls in products from other retailers’ sites and shows them right inside Amazon search results on the web, in the Amazon Shopping app, and via its AI assistant Rufus. These results are clearly labeled “Shop direct,” so you know you’re about to be sent to an external store, not a third‑party Amazon listing.

From a shopper’s perspective, the flow is intentionally low‑friction. You search on Amazon like you always do, you see a mix of regular Amazon listings and an extra block of products from other merchants, and you get two paths from there. Tap “Shop direct,” and Amazon will kick you over to the merchant’s own website to complete the purchase, after warning you that you’re leaving Amazon. Or, if the item is eligible, you’ll see a “Buy for Me” button that keeps you in the familiar Amazon checkout, while Amazon’s AI quietly goes off and completes the order on the merchant’s site in the background using your saved address and payment details. You get tracking and order details inside Your Orders on Amazon, but shipping, returns, and customer service still come from the merchant, not Amazon.

Behind the scenes, the big change Amazon is announcing is how easy it’s becoming for brands to plug into this ecosystem. Instead of building custom integrations, merchants can now use the same product feeds they already send to partners like Google Shopping or social commerce platforms—via feed providers such as Feedonomics, Salsify, and CEDCommerce—to sync their catalog, pricing, and inventory in real time with Shop Direct. That means if a price changes or a SKU goes out of stock on a brand’s own site, Amazon’s results and Rufus answers can update accordingly without the merchant doing anything extra. Amazon says additional feed syndicators and a direct merchant portal are on the way, which will let even more brands come on board without heavy engineering work.

Scale‑wise, this is not some tiny beta tucked away in a corner of the site anymore. Amazon says Shop Direct already covers more than 100 million products from over 400,000 merchants, with “tens of millions” of those items available through the AI‑powered Buy for Me option. The company also says it has already referred customers “millions of times” to outside stores, which gives a sense of how often people’s searches on Amazon are now ending on someone else’s website. Notably, Amazon isn’t charging referral fees for these orders or for Buy for Me transactions today, but it does gain something arguably more strategic: visibility into demand and pricing for products it doesn’t carry, plus more reasons for shoppers to start their search on Amazon in the first place.

Rufus, the company’s AI shopping assistant, is becoming a crucial layer in this story. It already sits on top of Amazon’s catalog and your personal shopping history to answer open‑ended questions like “What’s a good noise‑canceling headphone for long flights?” or “What do I need to set up a home gym?” and then recommends products. With Shop Direct wired into those same systems, Rufus doesn’t just surface items from Amazon’s own marketplace; it can also show products from other merchants, again with either a Shop Direct link or a Buy for Me button depending on what’s supported for that item. In practice, that turns a conversational search inside Amazon into a discovery tool for the wider retail web, while still keeping you inside the Amazon interface most of the time.

For merchants, this is a bit of a paradox: Amazon is both a competitor and, increasingly, a traffic source. On the plus side, Shop Direct puts a brand’s own site in front of “hundreds of millions” of Amazon customers who are already in a buying mindset and searching for specific products or brands. Because the merchant name is clearly displayed and the actual transaction (in both Shop Direct and Buy for Me scenarios) is with the brand, companies can still own the relationship post‑purchase—handling shipping, returns, and any follow‑up marketing. Amazon, meanwhile, uses its AI and traffic scale to act as the top of the funnel: it surfaces the right product, routes the shopper to the right store, and in some cases even handles the checkout automation.

There’s also a strategic play on the Amazon side around data and habit. By supporting structured product feeds and leaning on AI, Amazon positions itself as the default place you go to start shopping, even if the final purchase happens elsewhere. Every time a user types a branded query or a niche product search into Amazon instead of a search engine, Amazon is reinforcing its role as the first stop in the shopping journey. Over time, that could weaken the direct traffic that many retailers get from search engines and comparison sites, and instead route those discovery moments through Amazon’s AI layer.

It’s also a glimpse of how agentic AI is quietly being woven into everyday ecommerce. Buy for Me is essentially Amazon’s AI acting like a personal shopper that fills in forms, verifies totals, and completes a transaction on a third‑party site so you don’t have to hop around tabs and re‑enter your details. Combined with other AI features like Help Me Decide (for picking between similar products) and Amazon Lens Live (for visual search from your camera), Amazon is clearly betting that the future of online shopping looks less like browsing endless grids and more like handing off tasks to an assistant that handles comparison, discovery, and checkout on your behalf.

The open question now is how aggressively brands will lean into this. For some, Shop Direct could become a major acquisition channel that complements their own SEO and ad spend. For others, there’s a real concern about Amazon sitting in the middle of their customer journey and collecting behavioral data, even if it isn’t charging fees yet. But one thing is obvious from this launch: Amazon doesn’t just want to be the place where you buy things on Amazon—it wants to be the front door to shopping across the web, with its AI quietly running the show in the background.