Amazon Moves to Catalog Nearly Every Product on Earth to Counter AI Shopping Rivals

Amazon is pursuing an ambitious plan to compile product data on nearly every item for sale globally, according to an exclusive Reuters report published November 13. The strategy is designed to give Amazon a comprehensive product catalog that would underpin its own AI shopping tools and defend against rival AI agents from Google, OpenAI, Perplexity and others that threaten to reroute consumers away from Amazon's platform.

The effort reflects a broader arms race in AI-driven commerce. Third-party AI shopping agents have been able to surface product information and complete purchases without routing customers through Amazon, cutting into the company's ability to capture ad revenue and consumer data. Amazon has already moved aggressively to block several of these agents, including suing Perplexity over its Comet browser and blocking shopping agents from Meta and OpenAI. Building a definitive global product database would give Amazon's own tools, including Alexa for Shopping, a structural data advantage those rivals cannot easily replicate.

Amazon shares were up approximately 1.1 percent in premarket trading on the day of the report, reflecting investor optimism about the company's positioning in the AI shopping landscape. The plan extends Amazon's existing Shop Direct Merchant Workspace, a free self-service portal launched recently that allows external retailers to feed their product catalogs directly into Amazon searches and Alexa for Shopping, connecting off-Amazon inventory to more than 310 million global Amazon shoppers.