Amazon is considering a project called World Product Graph that would assemble information about products sold across the web, including goods it does not stock, according to Reuters. The reported plan is meant to give shoppers more product detail without requiring them to leave Amazon to research on search engines, brand sites, review pages, or forums.
This is not an announced service. Reuters reviewed an internal Amazon planning document and spoke with people familiar with the effort, but could not determine whether the project will be built or when it might launch. Amazon said draft and outdated materials can give an incomplete view, and that a brainstorming document does not necessarily reflect its current plans.
How would World Product Graph collect product data?
The internal document says the effort depends on understanding how brands arrange product information on their own websites. Its proposed inputs include product data supplied continuously by brands and retailers, alongside data Amazon could collect by crawling other retailers’ sites, Reuters reported.
That leaves some very practical blanks. Reuters could not establish how Amazon would crawl those sites or whether it would need permission in every case. The document said Coca-Cola and Bayer had agreed to provide product data and referred to a possible Procter & Gamble trial; those companies did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
According to the document, a broader store of information could help customers identify a newer model or a specific color variant, and help Amazon suggest products based on a shopper’s history or other data. Robert Tekiela, a vice president in Amazon’s Selection & Catalog Systems unit, was organizing the project, Reuters reported.
Why does Amazon want a larger product index?
The plan is partly about keeping research on Amazon rather than sending people elsewhere for product comparisons and answers. It is also aimed at AI shopping agents, software that can carry out shopping tasks for users. If such tools need product facts and relationships between items, a larger Amazon-held catalog could make Amazon a data source for those systems.
The document also linked the proposal to Amazon’s own shopping assistant, previously known as Rufus and now called Alexa for Shopping. It described some answers as wrong or incomplete and said the service was expensive to run. Amazon disputed the document’s usage figures as significantly outdated and said its own data put Alexa for Shopping’s global accuracy at roughly 97%.
Reuters said the planning memo listed October 1, 2027, as an aspirational release date. It also reported that this type of internal PR/FAQ memo does not automatically become a product and that World Product Graph could still be changed or abandoned. Amazon already operates Buy for Me and Shop Direct, which surface products sold on other sites and can let Amazon act as an intermediary in a purchase; employees described the proposed project as an expansion of that work, Reuters reported.
This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.
