The news: Amazon is considering building a massive collection of data on every item for sale across the globe, including products it doesn’t carry, according to a Reuters report.

The “World Project Graph” could strengthen Amazon’s position as consumers’ go-to shopping destination while facilitating its agentic commerce ambitions. The retailer’s ultimate goal is to become the sole authority that shoppers consult over the course of their customer journey—from discovery to purchase—supplanting Google and other third parties, such as brand websites and review sites.

What this means for retail: While it’s unclear whether Amazon will move forward with the project, its objective ties in neatly with other recent initiatives aimed at fortifying its ecommerce advantage and keeping third-party AI platforms at bay. For example, the data would directly support its Shop Direct capability by ensuring greater accuracy about product details, pricing, and stock levels, helping to solve one of the feature’s greatest pain points while bolstering customer trust.

Access to more comprehensive product data across the retail ecosystem could bolster Amazon’s own agentic shopping ambitions. The company’s own AI agent, Alexa for Shopping, currently provides inaccurate information often, according to internal documents reviewed by Reuters, but solving that problem could increase adoption of Amazon’s agentic shopping tools both on and off its platform.

The bigger question is how Amazon expects to gain access to that data. The company currently has agreements with Coca-Cola, Bayer, and several other companies to contribute product data and is in talks with others. Merchants participating in Shop Direct can also submit product feeds via a newly launched self-service portal, although they can also limit the number of items Shop Direct has access to. But building the graph would require Amazon to gather info from other brands’ and retailers’ websites, which could trigger fierce opposition from the very companies Amazon is seeking to undercut.

Amazon is essentially looking to challenge Google, which is using its own Shopping Graph—which contains over 50 billion product listings, two billion of which are updated hourly—to power agentic shopping via Gemini and AI Mode. But Amazon’s position as a competitor to many of the retailers whose data it’s hoping to acquire could limit its ability to build the comprehensive repository required to enhance the reliability of its agentic shopping tools and increase customer trust.

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