Amazon’s Shop Direct and the rise of offsite product recommendations
Amazon is driving more and more offsite discovery.
Amazon’s Shop Direct program, in which products that aren’t being sold on Amazon show up in Amazon search and in Alexa recommendations, has expanded to 250 million offsite product listings.
That is 2.5x the number of products available through Shop Direct in March, according to eMarketer.
The expansion of Shop Direct means that shoppers who search for products on Amazon (or in Alexa) are, more and more, seeing products from DTC sites.
If you look up glasses on Amazon, for instance, you might now encounter a carousel of glasses available to purchase through Warby Parker.
When shoppers click to view an offsite product, Amazon sends them directly to the DTC site—through a hyperlink with a UTM tag, so store owners can see that Amazon was the referrer.
Shop Direct is a big deal for any brand that doesn’t have their full catalog available on Amazon.
Through Shop Direct, you can promote those products to Amazon shoppers, but still require a purchase on your DTC—so you keep all of the sales, and the data, that comes with it.
Do brands have control over Amazon Shop Direct?
Amazon recently made it possible for merchants to control whether or not their offsite products are discoverable on Amazon through Shop Direct.
Last week, Amazon announced the Shop Direct Merchant Workspace.
This feature lets merchants, through an AI connection, feed their product information directly to Amazon itself and to Alexa for Shopping specifically.
Shop Direct Merchant Workspace ensures that shoppers who search for your products, or who ask Alexa about them, will still be directed offsite to your website.
The AI connector ensures your product information is updated in real time.
Why is Amazon promoting offsite products?
Shop Direct is expanding as the competition over who controls product discovery in an AI-centric world heats up.
Google’s AI Mode is scraping and recommending products from across the internet, and so is Meta’s Muse, which already has agreements to purchase on customers’ behalf on Shopify, Walmart, and more.
Amazon’s Shop Direct ensures that its own AI agent, Alexa for Shopping, can similarly recommend a wide assortment of products—even if those products aren’t for sale on Amazon.
Through Amazon’s Buy For Me service, Alexa can then make offsite purchases on the shopper’s behalf, too.
This is all happening at the same time as Alexa for Shopping is becoming available over text message. Shoppers can now get all of these product recommendations without ever logging into Amazon.
What does Amazon Shop Direct mean for brand analytics?
As Amazon and Meta drive product sales across a wider assortment of channels, it’s becoming more important than ever for brands to maintain a multi-channel view of performance.
The discovery that happens on Amazon does not necessarily translate to sales on Amazon—just as plenty of shoppers discover products on TikTok and then buy them elsewhere.
To see the impacts of your marketing strategies holistically, brands need to build out views of all of their channels at once.
Intentwise’s powerful data foundation is designed to connect all of these channels into a single surface.
Our AI Gateway MCP, which supports data across Shopify, Walmart, TikTok, Amazon, Google, and Meta, embeds the expertise to help you build cross-channel dashboards or analysis.
With natural-language prompts, you can create your own refreshable views, from end to end, showing all of the cross-channels metrics you want.
You can bring in whichever metrics you desire, and map your channels together however makes sense.
Here’s an example of a Claude Live Artifact we built recently, using demo data. Claude or Copilot can quickly metrics like Blended ROAS for you.
But you can imagine your own version of this, tracking your preferred view of cross-channel performance.
It would be just as easy to use the UTMs within the Shop Direct links to analyze how many of your Shopify sales, for instance, can be traced back to Amazon itself.