Amazon spent decades trying to make itself the place where merchants sell. Its next act may be considerably more ambitious: becoming the place where merchants run their businesses, regardless of where the sale happens.

Two exclusive announcements from Amazon shared with PYMNTS this week point in that direction. The company on Thursday (Sept. 24) announced it was opening Seller Central to orders and listings from Walmart, eBay, Shopify and TikTok. The initiative is effectively allowing a competitor transactions to be managed from inside the software of the landscape’s own biggest retail rival.

At the same time, Amazon this week also announced it was expanding its Amazon Seller Assistant from a conversational artificial intelligence tool into a persistent agent capable of monitoring inventory, pricing, advertising, demand and compliance and, with a merchant’s permission, preparing or taking actions.

Individually, the announcements look like productivity upgrades. Together, they reveal that Amazon is moving up the commerce stack from marketplace toward merchant operating system. And that’s something that the rest of the retail world should pay attention to.

More than 95% of independent sellers in Amazon’s store sell through multiple channels, according to the company. Those sellers account for more than 60% of sales in Amazon’s store, per the company. The problem is that every additional channel can create another operational silo: another order queue, product catalog, advertising dashboard and set of fulfillment data.

Still, the most revealing name in Amazon’s new Seller Central integrations is Walmart.

David Forsythe , Amazon’s VP of North America seller business, told PYMNTS in an interview posted on Thursday that the decision reflects how merchants already operate.

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