Amazon Accelerate 2026: New Tools Give Small Sellers More Capacity, Simplicity, and Global Reach

By SBE Council at 30 September, 2026, 7:29 pm

By Karen Kerrigan –  

Each year, Amazon Accelerate provides a window into where e-commerce is headed. The annual small-seller gathering also showcases new tools and capabilities to help strengthen small-seller competitiveness. This year’s event was held in Seattle from September 22-24, and several significant announcements related to AI agents, multichannel-commerce connectivity, and global selling.

I’ve attended Amazon Accelerate in the past, and one consistent take-a-way is Amazon’s focus on reducing the time, cost, and complexity associated with running and growing a business. The thousands of small sellers who attend the conference look forward to hearing about the new tools and innovations developed by Amazon, and of course networking with fellow attendees to swap tips and intelligence.

Make no mistake, small businesses are central to Amazon’s marketplace. More than 60% of sales in Amazon’s store come from independent sellers and most are small and medium-sized businesses. In 2025 alone, U.S.-based independent sellers sold more than 4.6 billion items in Amazon’s store and exported more than 580 million items globally.

Those numbers underscore the scale of small-business participation on Amazon and the opportunity created when entrepreneurs have access to sophisticated technology, logistics, and global markets. The numbers also align with what SBE Council’s research conveys about how small businesses are operating in the current market.

Our 2026 Small Business Technology Use Survey found, for example, that 93% of small businesses use multiple channels to drive sales, 82% are investing in AI tools, and 74% say digital platforms make it easier to compete with larger firms.

Thirty percent of small businesses in our survey sell on Amazon, and most of these Amazon sellers are also multi-channel sellers – 98% use other sales channels such as their own websites, social media platforms, other e-commerce platforms, brick-and-mortar stores, and community and seasonal in-person events, among other channels. That makes the new developments announced at Amazon Accelerate particularly newsworthy and significant for small sellers.

AI that Moves from Assisting to Doing

Perhaps the biggest shift is the next evolution of Amazon’s Seller Assistant.

Seller Assistant has been evolving from an AI tool that answers questions and provides recommendations into an agentic system that can reason, plan and – subject to seller-defined controls – take action. The newest Seller Assistant tools and selling partner plugin add workflows that can continuously handle or monitor routine activities such as inventory, pricing, account health and product opportunities. Small business owners describe what they want accomplished in everyday language, establish guardrails, and determine whether the system should simply make recommendations or take actions subject to their approval.

Amazon is also taking Seller Assistant beyond Seller Central. A new selling partner plugin is launching with Amazon Quick and in beta with Anthropic’s Claude, allowing sellers to connect Amazon information and capabilities with AI tools they already use.

This development hits on one of the most important opportunities AI presents for small businesses: capacity. Small business owners are often constrained by the hours, people, and expertise they can deploy. Functions such as pricing, inventory analysis, advertising, compliance and market analysis often required additional employees (or even departments) as a company grew.

AI agents and tools are beginning to change that equation. They give small business owners additional operating capacity without requiring the hefty organizational infrastructure that traditionally accompanied it.

One Workspace for the Multichannel Small Business

Another Accelerate announcement recognizes a market reality that SBE Council has been documenting for years: small businesses are increasingly multichannel, and they experiment with and add new sales channels on a regular basis.

Amazon’s new multichannel selling tools will allow sellers to connect Amazon, eBay, Shopify, TikTok and Walmart activity within Seller Central. Orders, listings, fulfillment and analytics can increasingly be viewed and managed from one workspace. This is helpful because selling through multiple channels creates opportunity, but can also create complexity.

Different logins, listings, order systems, inventory information and analytics consume time. A small business may gain customers by adding another sales channel, but simultaneously add another layer of administrative work. Amazon’s new tools aim to reduce that tradeoff. Sellers will be able to update product information across channels, manage orders from multiple sources and get a consolidated view of profitability and performance.

SBE Council’s 2026 survey found that 37% of small businesses added new sales channels in 2025 and 47% planned to add more channels in 2026. Among Amazon sellers specifically, again, our research finds they are highly diversified across various sales channels.

That is the modern small business marketplace. Small business owners and their teams are meeting customers wherever those customers prefer to shop, and technology is making it increasingly possible to manage potential complexity.

“Going Global” Becomes Less Daunting

Amazon unveiled new global expansion capabilities designed to make it easier for sellers to enter international markets by reducing some of the biggest barriers and friction points: compliance, localization, logistics, and inventory management.

Through the Amazon platform alone, we already have a sense of the scale of the opportunity for small sellers. U.S.-based independent sellers exported more than 580 million items globally in 2025 from the Amazon platform.

The new capabilities are designed to help sellers identify international demand, understand the economics of entering different countries, localize listings, manage compliance requirements and coordinate inventory and logistics across markets.

One helpful development relates to compliance. Amazon is beginning to enable sellers to complete one testing submission that can satisfy requirements across multiple countries, rather than repeating the process market by market. Early participants in the pilot program have reported compliance-cost savings of up to 60%.

For a large company with international legal, logistics and compliance teams, these hurdles are manageable. For a small or micro business, they can determine whether exporting is feasible at all.

The Small-Business Operating System Keeps Getting More Powerful

SBE Council’s research consistently finds that entrepreneurs have embraced digital platforms and AI because these tools allow them to do more and sell more with limited resources.

Among the Amazon sellers in our 2026 survey, 98% say Amazon’s pricing structure is fair and allows them to compete, while 94% say the platform provides significant support to small sellers. Nearly two-thirds (66%) report higher margins on Amazon than on other channels, with another 23% reporting roughly comparable margins.

The newest Amazon Accelerate announcements help explain why innovation within these platforms matters. AI agents expand capacity. Multichannel tools support revenue generation and reduce complexity. Global selling capabilities expand market access with less friction and cost.

For small business owners, the takeaway from Amazon Accelerate 2026 is not simply that there are several new tools to try. It is that the infrastructure available to small businesses continues to become more sophisticated, accessible, and interconnected. That means entrepreneurs can spend more time doing what they do best: creating, innovating, serving customers, and growing their businesses.

Karen Kerrigan is President & CEO of the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council.