The news: Amazon is expanding Seller Central to let merchants manage sales across eBay, Shopify, TikTok, and Walmart alongside their Amazon businesses from a single dashboard. It plans to add more channels and capabilities in the coming months.

The new multichannel tools will let sellers connect accounts from those platforms to Seller Central and manage listings, orders, fulfillment, and performance in one place.

Unlike previous cross-channel initiatives such as Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF)—which lets merchants use Amazon’s logistics network to fulfill orders placed elsewhere—the new tools extend Seller Central itself beyond Amazon’s marketplace. They will gradually roll out to US sellers at no additional cost.

“We want [sellers] to be successful no matter where they sell, in Amazon’s store or anywhere else,” Mary Beth Westmoreland, vice president of Worldwide Selling Partner Experience, wrote in a blog post.

Zooming in: The tool enables sellers to update product descriptions across multiple marketplaces at once, with Amazon automatically adapting content to each platform’s requirements. They can also see orders from connected channels in one place and choose whether to fulfill them through Amazon.

Eventually, Amazon plans to give sellers a real-time view of profitability across channels, incorporating sales, traffic, and ad spending to show which products and channels deliver the strongest returns.

Implications for marketplace operators, retailers, and brands: Amazon is making a play to become the operating system for its sellers’ ecommerce businesses, even when the transaction happens somewhere else.

The use case is clear: More than 95% of Amazon’s independent sellers operate across multiple channels, requiring them to juggle separate listings, orders, inventory, and analytics. Seller Central could bring much of that work into one place.

For Amazon, the opportunity goes well beyond making Seller Central stickier. A merchant managing a Walmart, Shopify, or TikTok order inside Seller Central is one step closer to using Amazon to warehouse and fulfill it. We expect 39.7% of US ecommerce sales to take place on Amazon this year, leaving 60.3% elsewhere. The tools build on Amazon’s efforts in recent years to capture revenue from those transactions through services like MCF, Amazon Warehousing and Distribution, and Buy with Prime.

But Amazon has plenty to prove. Established multichannel commerce providers already offer broader capabilities and support more channels. More importantly, Amazon has to overcome a trust gap: Sellers would be giving a company they also compete with greater visibility into their operations across rival platforms. Smaller merchants may decide the convenience and free access outweigh that risk, while larger sellers may prefer to keep more control over their data and operations. Ultimately, Amazon needs to show that the benefits of consolidating more of a seller’s business in Seller Central outweigh the risks of becoming even more dependent on Amazon.