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Amazon announced on Thursday that sellers can now manage their eBay, Shopify, TikTok and Walmart businesses from inside Seller Central. I think it's the most strategically important seller announcement Amazon has made this year, even though the press release reads like a housekeeping update.

Sellers connect their other accounts and see orders and listings from every channel in Seller Central, with a profitability dashboard pulling in sales and ad spend. A product description edited once gets reformatted for each marketplace. A Shopify order appears next to your Amazon orders, and one click sends it to Amazon's Multi-Channel Fulfillment network, with tracking pushed back to Shopify. It rolls out to U.S. sellers over the coming months at no additional cost.

Amazon says more than 95% of its independent sellers already sell across multiple channels. It doesn't define the term and it's Amazon's own number, but it lines up with what sellers tell me. Most of them handle this today with spreadsheets or with paid software from companies like Rithum and Linnworks. Amazon now offers a free version inside the dashboard they already use every day, which puts those software companies in a difficult position.

The dashboard is free and the fulfillment isn't. Amazon's own demo shows a Shopify order being shipped by Amazon, so I'd expect MCF volume to be how this gets measured internally.

Amazon already sees part of a seller's off-Amazon business. It handles MCF and Buy with Prime orders, and it tracks public prices on other sites. Connecting Walmart and TikTok adds the numbers Amazon can't get any other way, including sales on orders it doesn't ship, ad spend and profit by product. According to a footnote, the seller chooses what to connect and can disconnect at any time, and the data won't be shared with other sellers or used to inform Amazon's retail business decisions. The footnote doesn't say whether the data can feed Amazon's ad business or its Buy Box and pricing decisions, or what happens to data already collected once a seller disconnects.

In 2020 the Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon employees had used individual seller data to develop private-label products, and Amazon said its policies already prohibited that. If I ran a brand whose Walmart business was growing fast, I'd read the full terms of service before connecting that account. I might use the tool for listings and fulfillment and keep profit reporting somewhere Amazon can't see it.

The only seller quoted in the release, Pamela Lee at Elizabeth Mott, says her three-person reporting team used to spend about five hours a month logging into each channel to compile numbers. I'd want to hear from a brand doing eight figures across five marketplaces before putting much weight on the efficiency argument.

Amazon says it wants Seller Central to be where independent sellers run their entire business, and those sellers already account for more than 60% of sales in Amazon's store.

Walmart built its marketplace as the alternative to Amazon. Shopify has spent years selling itself as the merchant's home base, while also working with Amazon on Buy with Prime. I haven't seen either company comment on their merchants running those businesses from Seller Central. If you sell on Walmart today, would you give Amazon a live view of that business to save five hours a month?

John Furner signed a public pricing pledge on September 25. Walmart says it won't use a customer's income or shopping history to set prices.

I think it's smart positioning, though it costs Walmart very little. The company has run Every Day Low Prices for more than 50 years, and personalized pricing never fit that model at the shelf. A good chunk of the letter defends digital shelf labels. My guess is that's where most of the customer worry comes from, since shoppers see a screen where a paper tag used to be and assume the number can change while they're standing in the aisle.

I'd want to know more about verification. Furner says people will stay in charge of pricing and that Walmart will monitor and test its own technology against the commitments, so the company is checking its own work. The letter mentions no outside audit and no published results.

Other retailers will probably get asked whether they'll put something similar in writing. I couldn't find anything in the letter about how a customer would know if Sparky broke the promise.