Amazon expands Amit Agarwal’s role to lead global selling partner services
The move follows the transition of Dharmesh Mehta, who led SPS for more than a decade, into a technical advisor role reporting directly to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
Agarwal, currently Senior Vice President for International Emerging Stores, will continue to oversee Amazon’s marketplace operations across a group of high-growth countries while taking on leadership of SPS. He will report to Doug Herrington, CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores.
The expanded mandate positions Agarwal at the centre of Amazon’s marketplace strategy. SPS oversees the tools, infrastructure, and services used by millions of third-party sellers globally, including onboarding, payments, logistics integrations, advertising products, compliance systems, and seller support.
Third-party sellers now account for the majority of units sold on Amazon’s platform, making SPS a critical driver of both growth and profitability.
Agarwal is one of Amazon’s longest-serving executives, having joined the company in 1999. Over more than two decades, he held leadership roles across engineering, retail, and international expansion. He is widely associated with Amazon’s push into emerging markets and played a key role in building the company’s India business—one of its most competitive and closely regulated geographies.
As head of International Emerging Stores, Agarwal oversees Amazon’s operations in markets, including India, Brazil, Mexico, the Middle East, South Africa, and Australia.
These regions combine long-term growth potential with regulatory complexity, fragmented logistics, and price-sensitive consumers—conditions that closely intersect with the seller-services model Amazon uses to scale its marketplaces.
By combining oversight of emerging-market storefronts with global seller services, Amazon is bringing together two parts of its business that increasingly depend on one another. In many international markets, marketplace expansion is driven less by Amazon’s own inventory and more by local sellers using Amazon’s logistics, payments, and advertising tools.
Broader responsibilities at a sensitive time
The leadership change comes as Amazon’s marketplace business faces scrutiny in several regions over seller fees, platform rules, and competitive practices. Regulators in the US, Europe, and India have raised questions about the balance of power between large platforms and third-party sellers, adding pressure on the ecommerce giant to demonstrate transparency and consistency in how seller services are managed.
Agarwal’s expanded role places him in a position to influence how Amazon aligns seller growth, compliance, and monetisation across regions with different regulatory expectations. His experience operating in India, where Amazon has had to repeatedly adjust its marketplace structure as per policy changes, is likely to be relevant as the company navigates similar challenges elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Mehta, who previously led SPS, will work closely with Amazon’s top leadership. The advisory role is often used as a rotational position for senior executives involved in company-wide strategy and long-term planning.
Mehta joined Amazon in 2002 and has been closely associated with the development of seller-facing systems, trust and safety mechanisms, and fraud prevention tools. His transition marks the end of a long operational tenure running SPS.
The change consolidates significant operational responsibility under Agarwal at a time when Amazon is seeking efficiency, clearer accountability and tighter coordination across its marketplace businesses. With control over both seller infrastructure and emerging-market operations, Agarwal becomes one of the most influential executives within Amazon’s retail organisation.
Edited by Suman Singh
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