Amazon Now Accepts Your Google Feed for Free. Should Your Brand Send It?

What Amazon opened, and what it left out

Amazon has opened the Shop Direct Merchant Workspace, a free portal where a store that sells nothing on Amazon can register, verify its website and submit a product feed. The products then appear in Amazon search results and inside Alexa for Shopping, labelled Shop Direct. A shopper taps through to your site to buy, or on eligible products taps Buy for Me and Amazon's agent completes the purchase on your checkout.

The feed is one you probably already maintain. Amazon's developer documentation describes Shop Direct listings as submissions through the Selling Partner API in the Google product data feed format, the same file you send to Merchant Center. You can connect through Feedonomics, Salsify, CEDCommerce or VersaFeed, or build a private app against the API. Amazon says participation carries no fee and no referral commission on Buy for Me orders.

What the announcement, published in early November, leaves out matters as much. There are no referral click counts, no conversion rates and no Buy for Me order volumes. "Hundreds of millions of searches monthly" is exposure across the whole program, not visits to any one store. The portal's FAQ sets eligibility: own an ecommerce site, sell in US dollars and ship to the United States. Merchants that already sell on Amazon cannot create a Workspace account yet and are routed to an email address instead.

The sentence that turns this into a decision

The Shop Direct FAQ says Amazon "may use publicly available information from your website to make your products discoverable to customers." Read that twice. The choice for a US DTC brand is not whether to appear on Amazon. The choice is whether Amazon's copy of your catalog comes from a feed you control or from whatever its systems read on your pages. Opting out is an email to shopdirect@amazon.com.

That reframes the work. If your products can already surface from scraped data, the title, price, image and availability a shopper sees come from your pages as Amazon read them, refreshed on Amazon's schedule. A feed gives you the fields and the update cadence. The announcement calls the result near real-time, the documentation states no refresh interval, so plan to measure it rather than assume it.

This is the reverse of the question we asked when Alexa for Shopping replaced Rufus. Then, the point was that listing work done inside Amazon stays inside Amazon. Now your own feed is an input to Amazon's assistant, which means the feed quality you built for Google carries into a third surface.

Three questions before you submit anything

Do you want Amazon shoppers at all?

Brands stay off Amazon for price control, channel conflict or brand experience. Shop Direct keeps you as seller of record, with your own checkout, returns and customer service. On Buy for Me orders, Amazon relays customer communication through a unique email address per order, and its FAQ says it prohibits using those transaction details for sourcing, inventory or pricing decisions in its own store. Read the terms, then decide with the channel owner. If the answer is no, send the opt-out email before your products appear.

Is your Google feed clean enough to reuse?

The listing tutorial accepts five attribute groups from the Google schema: basic product data, price and availability, product category, product identifiers and detailed product description. Shipping, returns, destinations and campaign attributes are ignored, and optional attributes may not be stored or displayed. So the feed Amazon reads is your Merchant Center feed minus the parts Google uses for ads and delivery.

The error reference tells you what will fail. Variation families need an item_group_id plus a variant attribute from the accepted list: color, size, material, pattern, age group or gender. Any other varying attribute turns the item into a standalone listing. Error 101283 flags a product that "lacks information that is important for helping customers make purchasing decisions." Images must be publicly reachable and compliant or they fail at fetch time. These are the same gaps that produce Merchant Center warnings, so fix them once and both channels benefit.

Which products go in first?

You choose what to include. A DTC exclusive range, or the part of the catalog you want found by shoppers who start on Amazon, is a sensible first set. Hold back products with thin descriptions, no GTIN or unstable stock until the feed returns clean. Each submission takes up to 25,000 records, so the limit is quality, not size.

The practical work, scoped

1. Search Amazon for your brand name and three product names. Record whether Shop Direct listings already appear and what title, price and image they carry. That is your baseline.
2. Decide participate or opt out, in writing, with the channel owner. Either route is one email or one sign-up.
3. If participating, export the Merchant Center feed and check it against the five supported groups: GTIN or brand plus MPN, google_product_category, availability, price, a description that states material, use and size, and variant attributes from the accepted list.
4. Submit through your feed provider or a private app, pull the processing report and work the errors by code.
5. Tag the destination. Add a UTM parameter to the link you submit so GA4 separates Shop Direct click-throughs from other Amazon referrals. Buy for Me orders land on your own checkout, so flag them by the relay email domain and count them separately from human sessions.
6. Repeat the baseline search after two weeks and compare what Amazon shows with what you sent.

What to leave for later

Keep the catalog as it is. Reuse the Google feed rather than rebuilding for Amazon. Expand to the full range only after the first set returns clean. Treat an appearance in Amazon search as a listing, and treat a recommendation inside Alexa for Shopping as a separate outcome that Amazon decides. Keep your seller account strategy on its own track, because the Workspace serves stores that are off Amazon for now.

Where Paz fits

Paz experts find and fix product-information gaps from your own sources, you approve the guidelines, and the platform publishes the corrections to your feeds and pages and tracks them against a baseline. The same clean Google feed now reaches Merchant Center, ChatGPT and Amazon's Shop Direct. If you want the feed checked before you submit it, Talk to us.