Facilitating Immersive Shopping Experiences with Amazon Anywhere Using AWS

Launched in May 2023 as an invitation-only service, Amazon Anywhere is a set of APIs that developers can use to build a seamless Amazon shopping experience directly within third-party applications. Using Amazon Anywhere, end users can become end customers, purchasing relevant and curated items from Amazon stores without leaving the app. For example, players can instantly order a unique character T-shirt as they play. 

Although Amazon Anywhere began in gaming, developers can use its APIs to create immersive shopping experiences powered by Amazon in other interactive environments, such as augmented reality and mobile apps. This makes it possible for developers to sell physical products—showing users product details from the Amazon catalog, near-real-time pricing, and delivery promises—directly from within the experience. Amazon takes care of the seamless ordering experience, fulfillment, and post-purchase customer service so that developers can focus on creating the games and apps their users love. 

External developers aren’t the only ones who can take advantage of Amazon Anywhere’s capabilities. Thanks to its extensibility, Amazon is using the same core technology to give customers the ability to link their Amazon account to bring the Amazon shopping experience in Amazon advertisements within their favorite social media services. 

Amazon Anywhere is built entirely on AWS and fully integrated with the Amazon Retail infrastructure. “We are building on the trust that AWS has created with its services, scalability, reliability, and performance and paring it with the pricing, selection, and convenience Amazon is known for,” says Steve Macbeth, director of technology for consumer electronics at Amazon Retail.

Amazon Anywhere used AWS Fargate—a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine—and AWS Lambda—a serverless compute service that developers can use to run code for virtually any type of application without provisioning or managing servers—to build the APIs. It used these services along with Amazon API Gateway, a fully managed service that makes it simple for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at virtually any scale (see Figure 1). “We wanted to make sure that the architecture design takes into account scale and security as the number one priority,” says Maryia De Silva, senior business development manager at AWS. “When the Amazon Anywhere team decides to expand, the solution is so robust that there shouldn’t be any challenges launching it anywhere.”

To speed up the development of the Amazon Anywhere APIs, the team took advantage of AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), which accelerates cloud development using common programming languages to model applications. They also provisioned their application with AWS CloudFormation, which developers use to model, provision, and manage AWS resources by treating infrastructure as a code. “Amazon Anywhere uses AWS CDK to manage its infrastructure as code and deploy to new regions around the world with little effort,” says James Park, a senior AWS solutions architect who worked with the Amazon Anywhere team.

The Amazon Anywhere team built the service to be lightweight for other developers to integrate through a simple public end point and REST APIs. “App developers can rely on Amazon Anywhere to provide a seamless checkout experience,” says Cole Lakes, senior technical product manager for the Amazon Anywhere team. “They don’t need to worry about compliance and security for managing payments or about holding onto physical inventory to ship to their customers. The Amazon shopping experience becomes part of their application for that seamless checkout flow.”

With its simple-to-use APIs, developers can quickly get started with integrations and can hit the ground running as they build the additional experience around the APIs. After a simple integration, partners can expect high performance, low latency, and 99.999 percent uptime.

In addition, Amazon Anywhere has demonstrated how it builds on customers’ trust in Amazon to improve purchase rates for partners. In fact, the team found that, after authenticating their accounts, customers had a high intent to purchase because of the immersion in the shopping experience. “When a customer sees relevant and contextual products in the third-party application and decides to connect their Amazon account to checkout, there’s a high level of intent to actually purchase the product,” says Lakes. “This shows that seeing the right products in the right place increases conversion, helping developers improve their monetization.”