Amazon Opens Its Platform While Walmart Automates Its Warehouses

The headlines this week show that while Walmart is investing in supply chain automation, with 23 of its 42 regional distribution centers in the U.S. currently being retrofitted, Amazon is broadening what its search engine can do.

On Wednesday (March 11), the eCommerce juggernaut said it expanded Shop Direct, a program that surfaces products from other retailers’ websites when Amazon does not carry them itself. The move makes Amazon a gateway to the wider internet, not just its own marketplace.

The practical change is significant. Shop Direct now lists more than 100 million products from over 400,000 merchants. A customer searching for a specific brand or item that Amazon does not stock will see those outside products appear in results, clearly labeled, alongside Amazon’s own listings. From there, customers can click through to the merchant’s website to complete the purchase.

To scale the program, Amazon has added support for third-party product feeds from Feedonomics, Salsify, and CedCommerce. These are feed aggregators that many retailers already use to share catalog data with other partners. Merchants can now simply turn on the Amazon connection through their existing aggregator, and their inventory, pricing and product details will sync to Amazon in real time. The service costs merchants nothing.

See also: Consumer Wallet Reset: How Amazon Wins Discretionary Spend and Walmart Holds Necessities

Amazon Brings the Agentic Angle to its Platform

The more consequential development may be what happens after a customer finds a product. Amazon is now rolling out a feature called Buy for Me, which uses an artificial intelligence (AI) agent to complete the purchase on the customer’s behalf, on the third-party merchant’s website, without the customer ever leaving Amazon.

The process works like this: a customer selects a Shop Direct product and taps Buy for Me. Amazon’s AI navigates to the merchant’s website, fills in the customer’s saved address and encrypted payment details, and completes the transaction. The customer confirms order details on a familiar Amazon checkout screen. The merchant fulfills and ships the order. Amazon tracks it under a dedicated “Buy for Me Orders” tab.

Amazon is still refining its approach to the agentic commerce layer and is exploring both direct web interaction and emerging AI protocols to make purchasing more seamless. For now, the primary focus is on expanding the catalog of available products.

For merchants, the appeal is reach. Appearing in Amazon’s search results, and in Rufus, its AI shopping assistant, puts a brand in front of hundreds of millions of potential buyers at the moment they are actively looking to purchase. The setup requires minimal technical effort, particularly for sellers already using a supported feed aggregator.

The strategic calculus for Amazon is also clear. Every search that begins on Amazon, even one that ends in a purchase on another retailer’s site, is a search that did not start on Google. Amazon gains data on which products and price points drive customer interest. That data has value well beyond any single transaction.

Read more: Introducing the ‘Know Your Agent’ Framework for the Age of Agentic Commerce 

Walmart Focuses on Rebuilding the Supply Chain

While Amazon expands outward digitally, Walmart is investing heavily in the physical infrastructure that underpins retail. About 60% of the retailer’s U.S. stores receive freight from automated distribution; while 50% of U.S. eCommerce center volume is automated.

During Walmart’s fourth quarter 2026 earnings call, executives stressed that they would continue to invest in upgrading their stores and back-end facilities with automation capabilities, telling investors that store investments were “outperforming” internal plans.

At the same time, in the coming months, Walmart plans to open several “Store of the Future” locations, including sites in Florida and California. These stores are designed to blend automation, digital integration, and improved customer experiences into a new retail model.

For Walmart, this dual-purpose model leverages one of its greatest advantages: proximity. With thousands of stores across the United States, Walmart is often located within a short drive of most American households. Turning those stores into mini-distribution centers allows the company to deliver products quickly without building entirely new infrastructure.