Amazon is expanding the capabilities of Seller Assistant, its artificial intelligence-powered tool integrated into the company’s Seller Central portal, by introducing agentic supply chain functions designed to support inbound planning and aged inventory management.
Sunny Jain, Amazon’s vice president of Worldwide Fulfillment by Amazon, told Supply Chain Dive that these new capabilities are intended to evolve over time into a personalized advisor covering a seller’s global operations. The system will show where inventory is located, issue proactive alerts and provide the data underpinning its recommendations, according to a Thursday press release.
“The vision here is that you’ve got a supply chain planner inside of Seller Assistant, which will make the decisions you need to make much faster,” Jain said.
The additions form part of a broader Amazon initiative aimed at giving sellers real-time, end-to-end visibility beyond the U.S. and making international expansion easier. The company announced several other supply chain-focused upgrades this week.
Unifying end-to-end visibility
Amazon is also developing a single interface designed to track shipments as they move through Amazon-managed fulfillment centers.
“Sellers will be able to understand not just where their product is, but when it’s being received by the Amazon warehouses and fulfillment centers,” Jain said.
The first version of this consolidated view is intended to make it easier for sellers to evaluate opportunities for international expansion without having to gather fragmented information from multiple dashboards.
“We’re making some big changes in Seller Central, and we’re introducing this unified view that will allow sellers to understand the demand that exists for each of their products and what the economics look like in each of those countries, and what exact steps remain for sellers before they can start selling there,” Jain said.
According to Amazon’s release, the feature is already available to sellers in the U.S., Europe and Japan, with additional countries expected to be added by the end of the year.
Future versions will allow sellers to manage listings, inventory and orders from a single location. Amazon’s systems will also handle translations, identify compliance requirements and adapt products to local currencies.
Managing compliance requirements across markets
Global supply chains can become highly fragmented because product listings often need to be adapted from one country to another to meet local compliance requirements, Jain said.
Amazon therefore plans to provide sellers with a consolidated view of compliance obligations across multiple countries.
“We’re getting the compliance requirements of multiple countries, and we’re going to surface them up in a consolidated fashion all at once, and this recommendation then helps sellers understand how they can create and develop their products, taking into consideration all of the compliance requirements for all of the countries that they want to list in,” Jain said.
The system will also recognize existing certifications, allowing sellers to avoid repeating tests and resubmitting documentation, according to the release.
Sellers involved in the pilot program for one-submission testing reported compliance cost savings of up to 60%.
The feature will initially launch for toys later this year, a category that presents particularly complex compliance requirements. Amazon plans to extend the capability to electronics and other product categories over time, Jain said.
“This is something when you pull it together, you can get the logistics, you can get the compliance, and you can get the listings all unified in a set of tools that makes life easy. That’s the uniqueness here,” Jain said.
Expanding Global Warehousing and Distribution
Amazon is also working to reduce fragmentation across the global logistics network through its Global Warehousing and Distribution service, which was announced last year.
The service allows sellers to replenish goods more easily when inventory is stored in bulk close to manufacturing hubs such as Shenzhen, China.
As Amazon seeks to bring more of the process together, the company wants sellers to manage inventory through a single global pool, with the aim of improving operational efficiency, Jain said.
“Our vision here is that sellers can no longer have to send separate batches of inventory to the individual countries,” Jain said. “They just send one batch, and Amazon’s going to enable them by looking at what demand exists in each [country], and just shooting the inventory into those countries directly.”
Amazon plans to broaden Global Warehousing and Distribution to additional markets outside the U.S. by the end of the year, including the U.K., Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Canada, according to the release.
“The whole idea there is that sellers can send to an Amazon facility that’s close to their manufacturing facility, and then we’ll take care of the rest for them in terms of the distribution of that inventory,” Jain said.
