Amazon lets sellers run Walmart, eBay, Shopify and TikTok orders from Seller Central

Amazon said on 24 September that sellers will be able to handle orders from Walmart, eBay, Shopify and TikTok inside Seller Central. The company announced it at its Accelerate conference. The tools reach sellers in the United States over the coming months and carry no extra fee.

One order list for four rival platforms

Sellers connect their other shops on a new multichannel settings page. Orders from all of them then land in a single list, and a seller can send them out from one place. Amazon says unified product descriptions, listings written by its models and cross-channel earnings reports will follow. The plumbing comes from Veeqo, the order management company Amazon bought in 2021. Rival platforms keep opening up in the same way, as when Shopify put Shop Pay checkout into Meta’s Muse.

Mary Beth Westmoreland says Amazon will not touch the data

The obvious question is what Amazon does with the numbers a seller shows it about Walmart or eBay. Mary Beth Westmoreland, who runs the worldwide selling partner experience, told GeekWire the data is only ever shown back to that seller. She repeated that it will never be used for anything else, including search rankings. Sellers have reason to ask. A US regulator has already said that Amazon quietly raised ad auction prices for years.

Rithum and Linnworks lose their reason to exist for small sellers

Multichannel software is a paid category today. Sellers buy it from firms such as Rithum and Linnworks to join their marketplaces together. Amazon is now giving a working version of the same job away inside a dashboard those sellers already open every morning. Cross-border selling has been widening for a while, since TikTok Shop let sellers in eight EU markets reach UK buyers.

Amazon gains the one thing it did not have: a daily view of what its sellers do on Walmart, eBay, Shopify and TikTok, offered for free. Small sellers gain a tool they were paying for. Rithum and Linnworks lose the entry-level end of their market, and Walmart and eBay lose the habit of their sellers logging in somewhere else first. The part still to be settled is whether sellers believe the promise about the data, because there is no way for them to check it.