At its annual seller conference on Thursday, Amazon.com (AMZN) announced that merchants on its platform can now use the company's software tools to manage inventory on rival platforms, including Walmart, Shopify, and eBay. Sellers will be able to update product listings across different platforms and track orders from each platform through a unified dashboard in Amazon Seller Central.
Mary Beth Westmoreland, Amazon's Vice President of Global Selling Partner Experience, said in an interview that the new feature stems from Amazon's 2021 acquisition of e-commerce startup Veeqo. She said Veeqo provided the "infrastructure" to connect different retail platform websites and data. Amazon said that about 95% of independent sellers on its platform also sell through multiple channels.
However, in recent years, Amazon's share of these merchants' overall retail business portfolios has been steadily increasing. Over the past few years, Amazon has already offered multi-channel fulfilment, allowing merchants to use Amazon's logistics network to deliver orders generated on other retail platforms. Amazon stated that data entered by merchants through this tool will be strictly isolated and will only remain within the Seller Central system, inaccessible to other Amazon business units. The company also emphasized that it will not use this data to support its own retail operations.
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