Amazon lets sellers run shops via Claude, Quick at Accelerate

Amazon's pitch at its Accelerate conference is that sellers should not have to live inside Seller Central, the portal where listings, prices and inventory are normally managed. Vice president of worldwide selling partner experience Mary Beth Westmoreland framed the goal bluntly in an interview with GeekWire: "Our vision was that [sellers] would never have to log into Seller Central." The plugin is the vehicle, connecting an outside assistant — Anthropic PBC's Claude or Amazon's own Quick — to a seller account in about 60 seconds.

The timing is notable because Amazon this week also blocked Meta Platforms Inc.'s new AI agent Muse, which is designed to shop on behalf of 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 has not complied. Anthropic, by contrast, faces no such problem — Amazon is one of its major investors, and Claude already powers Seller Assistant. That relationship, rather than a purely open policy, appears to shape which assistants get in first.

Beyond the plugin, Amazon is adding a canvas feature to Seller Assistant for planning and comparing pricing strategies or ad-campaign effectiveness, plus background automations, and it is offering every seller a free 12-month subscription to Amazon Quick Plus. Whether the plugin becomes the default way sellers work may depend on how quickly Amazon certifies assistants beyond Claude and Quick, and on whether sellers trust an AI to act inside their accounts at all.