For years, running a business on Amazon meant logging into Seller Central. Amazon now wants to change that. At Accelerate, its annual seller conference in Seattle, the company announced on Wednesday, September 23, a new selling partner plugin that lets independent merchants check inventory, change prices, update listings and pull sales analytics from outside AI assistants. It launches in Amazon's own Quick assistant and, in beta, in Anthropic's Claude.
"Our vision was that they would never have to log into Seller Central," Mary Beth Westmoreland, Amazon's vice president of Worldwide Selling Partner Experience, told GeekWire. "We would just bring it to them where they work."
The reasoning is simple. Amazon says about 90% of its selling partners already use some kind of third-party AI to run parts of their businesses. The company has decided to plug into those tools instead of making sellers do their AI work inside its portal.
How the Plugin Works
The plugin brings a seller's listings, real-time performance metrics, inventory levels and sales analytics into the assistant they choose. It can also take action on the account, the same way Amazon's built-in Seller Assistant does inside Seller Central. Amazon says connecting Claude takes about 60 seconds and requires no coding. Sellers decide which kinds of data the plugin can reach, can revoke that access, and must approve each action before it runs. Every interaction is logged in an audit trail.
The plugin is in beta for sellers in Amazon's U.S. stores, and international expansion is planned. As an incentive, every primary selling account holder worldwide can sign up for a free 12-month Amazon Quick Plus subscription through December 31, 2026. They can also name two co-workers to get a free year.
Claude is a natural first partner. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic, and Claude models already run Seller Assistant, which Amazon has built on its Bedrock platform. According to Amazon, the assistant keeps seller data inside Amazon's infrastructure and never shares it outside the company. It has reached more than 90% of selling partners worldwide in their native languages, has hundreds of thousands of active users, and sellers accept its recommendations more than 90% of the time.
"Amazon Seller Assistant already uses Claude models to help sellers make informed, strategic decisions, and they accept its recommendations more than 90% of the time," said Eric Burns, field CTO at Anthropic, in Amazon's announcement. He added that the plugin places those insights "alongside their existing accounting and supplier data connections" in a seller's Claude account.
Always-On Workflows and Memory
Amazon also announced changes to Seller Assistant itself. It now has persistent memory of each seller's pricing patterns, inventory cycles and growth goals, and that memory carries over across Seller Central, Quick and Claude. New Seller Assistant workflows let merchants describe automations in plain language. One example: an alert when a top product drops below a 4-star rating, along with a drafted response plan. These workflows keep running even when the seller is not logged in. A new canvas feature builds a visual workspace from live data, where sellers can model pricing scenarios or diagnose ad campaigns.
"We wanted to provide sellers the ability to be able to automate all of this so that it just works for them 24/7," Westmoreland told PYMNTS.
Early testers are enthusiastic. "What took an afternoon now happens instantly," said James Oliver, founder of Atlas Bar, in Amazon's announcement.
Why It Matters
This is a notable change in how the world's largest online marketplace thinks about its interface. Amazon has long kept tight control over the tools merchants use to manage their presence in its store. By opening Seller Central's capabilities to outside agents, it is giving up the front end while keeping the more valuable layer underneath: the data, the reasoning and the ability to execute. As PYMNTS put it, the chatbot is almost incidental, and the real asset is the plumbing beneath it.
There is a lot of money at stake. Independent sellers account for more than 60% of units sold on Amazon worldwide, and the fees Amazon charges them brought in $46.8 billion in the second quarter, according to GeekWire. That is more than AWS earned in the same period. Those fees are also central to the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust case, which accuses Amazon of overcharging sellers and is set for trial in March 2027. Amazon denies the allegations. Tools that save sellers time could help Amazon argue it is adding value in return for those fees.
Amazon is also still deciding which agents get access. The announcement came days after Amazon blocked Meta's Muse, a consumer shopping agent, from its store. So far the approach is a curated one. Sellers can bring their own AI, as long as it is one Amazon has chosen to support. For Anthropic, the arrangement puts Claude into the daily operations of a very large base of small businesses, which strengthens its position as the default model for commerce workflows.
What to Watch
The main question is how quickly Amazon expands beyond Claude and Quick. Westmoreland said the system was built to be "modular enough for us to continue to publish plugins." Watch whether rival assistants from OpenAI, Google or Microsoft make the list, or whether the partner roster stays limited to Amazon's own product and the AI lab it has invested in. Also watch when the beta reaches international sellers, how many merchants take the free Quick Plus offer before the December 31 deadline, and whether sellers start letting their agents act without approving each step. The FTC trial next spring may also put Amazon's control over seller tooling under closer scrutiny.
“Our vision was that they would never have to log into Seller Central. We would just bring it to them where they work.”— Mary Beth Westmoreland, VP, Worldwide Selling Partner Experience, Amazon
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