Amazon.com Inc. said today it’s trying to make life easier for independent sellers using its ecommerce platform with new tools including a plugin that allows them to run their businesses via artificial intelligence assistants.
The new tools, announced at Amazon’s annual seller conference Accelerate, also include automations that can help sellers to monitor their business in the background and take various actions on their behalf. There’s also an enhanced Seller Assistant, which can now remember sellers’ pricing patterns and inventory cycles on an ongoing basis.
However, it’s the new plugin that’s the really big deal. According to Amazon, sellers can now do things like check their inventory levels, adjust product prices and update listings using Anthropic PBC’s Claude or the company’s own assistant, Amazon Quick. It means they no longer have to go to the Seller Central portal to do these things.
“Our vision was that [sellers] would never have to log into Seller Central, Mary Beth Westmoreland, Amazon’s vice president of worldwide selling partner experience, said in an interview with GeekWire.
Amazon said it only takes about 60 seconds for sellers to connect Claude or Quick to their seller account. Once connected, the assistant will be able to pull all of their listings, details on their inventory, sales analytics and performance metrics and then take actions within the user’s account, in the same way they would within Seller Central.
The company reassured sellers that they maintain full control and can choose which types of data the plugin is allowed to access, and they’ll also approve each action before it’s carried out on their behalf. The plugin is available in beta now for U.S.-based sellers, and will expand internationally in the coming weeks.
The decision to support Anthropic’s Claude is interesting, considering that Amazon this week blocked Meta Platforms Inc.’s new AI agent Muse, which is designed to go shopping on behalf of human users. Amazon said Muse is not allowed to use its store, because external agents must identify themselves and follow the rules of its website, and apparently, it hasn’t complied.
But Anthropic has had no such problems, and that’s likely something to do with the fact that Amazon is one of the AI company’s major investors and already has a strong relationship with it. Claude already powers the Seller Assistant, for example. That said, Amazon promised that more integrations are on the way, so users who prefer other chatbots will hopefully be able to use them to manage their Amazon businesses soon enough.
In other updates, Amazon said the Seller Assistant is being updated with a new canvas feature that sellers can use to make plans and strategize, for example by comparing different pricing strategies or analyzing the effectiveness of ad campaigns. Amazon is also looking to sweeten the deal for those who haven’t yet adopted its AI tools, offering every seller on its platform a free 12-month subscription to Amazon Quick Plus.
