Amazon’s new pitch to merchants sounds generous: “Bypass all fees — let customers shop your brand directly.”
Here’s the fine print,
A shopper searches for your brand → clicks your website → makes a purchase.
But the transaction still happens inside Amazon’s app. You get the sale. Amazon gets the customer.
If that sounds familiar, remember Shopify’s “one-page checkout”?
Merchants loved it — until they learned every buyer was being funneled into Shopify Audiences. Your checkout data became their data to monetize.
Different platform, same playbook. Merchants win short-term revenue but lose long-term customer relationships and retargeting power.
The fight isn’t over ad spend anymore but over data infrastructure. In an AI-first world, the companies that own data pipelines own the future.
If you don’t control your infrastructure, you don’t control your customers. No matter whose checkout they use.
