Amazon Wants to Run Merchants’ Businesses Beyond Amazon

Amazon spent decades trying to make itself the place where merchants sell. Its next act may be considerably more ambitious: becoming the place where merchants run their businesses, regardless of where the sale happens.

Two exclusive announcements from Amazon shared with PYMNTS this week point in that direction. The company on Thursday (Sept. 24) announced it was opening Seller Central to orders and listings from Walmart, eBay, Shopify and TikTok. The initiative is effectively allowing a competitor transactions to be managed from inside the software of the landscape’s own biggest retail rival.

At the same time, Amazon this week also announced it was expanding its Amazon Seller Assistant from a conversational artificial intelligence tool into a persistent agent capable of monitoring inventory, pricing, advertising, demand and compliance and, with a merchant’s permission, preparing or taking actions.

Individually, the announcements look like productivity upgrades. Together, they reveal that Amazon is moving up the commerce stack from marketplace toward merchant operating system. And that’s something that the rest of the retail world should pay attention to.

Read more: Amazon Builds Its Own Answer to Walmart’s 5,000 Stores 

Customer Lifetime Value Moves From Share of Wallet to Share of Workflow

More than 95% of independent sellers in Amazon’s store sell through multiple channels, according to the company. Those sellers account for more than 60% of sales in Amazon’s store, per the company. The problem is that every additional channel can create another operational silo: another order queue, product catalog, advertising dashboard and set of fulfillment data.

Still, the most revealing name in Amazon’s new Seller Central integrations is Walmart.

David Forsythe, Amazon’s VP of North America seller business, told PYMNTS in an interview posted on Thursday that the decision reflects how merchants already operate.

“For many of those sellers, Walmart is one of those channels,” Forsythe told PYMNTS. “We really believe that when sellers succeed across their entire business, they’re going to succeed on Amazon as well. This is just a reality of having multiple channels, and we want to support sellers across all those channels.”

Amazon is effectively acknowledging something marketplaces once had an incentive to resist, which is that merchants are going to try and sell everywhere they can in order to capture new growth. And creating a business model on top of that acknowledgement starts looking less like a marketplace dashboard and more like a lightweight commerce ERP.

Read more: Amazon and Walmart Test Whether Drones Can Make Rural Delivery Pay 

Retail Platforms Set Their Sights on the Merchant’s System of Record

For years, Amazon and Walmart competed primarily over shoppers, sellers and merchandise. But if commerce remains structurally multichannel, another contest emerges: Who becomes the system through which merchants understand and operate those channels?

Findings in the September 2026 edition of the Share of Wallet: Amazon vs. Walmart report from PYMNTS Intelligence estimate that Walmart controls roughly 21% of U.S. food and beverage spending, compared with about 3% for Amazon. More strikingly, Walmart’s advantage has expanded since 2019 even as Amazon has nearly doubled its share of retail overall.

An AI agent that sees only Amazon sales has an incomplete picture of a multichannel merchant. An operating layer capable of seeing activity across Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, TikTok and eBay potentially has much richer context from which to identify demand, inventory and profitability problems.

In the next phase of commerce, the platform with the most valuable storefront may not necessarily have the strongest position. It could be the platform that knows what is happening across all the storefronts, and has permission to do something about it.

That is an operating loop, not a chatbot.

Add to that, of course, the Sunday (Sept. 20) news that Amazon has blocked Meta’s new personal artificial intelligence agent, Muse, from its eCommerce site, and it shows that the ecommerce titan already recognizes the power of permission in retail’s new landscape.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Will the 2026 Shopping Season Go Agentic?” found that roughly 132 million people have made a retail purchase with AI assistance, while 22% now begin online retail research in an AI tool.

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