Amazon Marketplace Policy and Advertising Updates
Every significant Amazon seller policy change, FBA update, and advertising platform shift in one place. Seller Central news, Amazon PPC updates, compliance changes, and fee revisions all covered and updated monthly.
Amazon changes fast. But 2025 and 2026 have moved at a pace that even experienced sellers and agency teams struggle to track. Policy updates, fee revisions, FBA rule changes, and Amazon PPC platform shifts are all happening at once and they interact with each other in ways that are easy to miss if you follow them in isolation.
This guide brings all of it together. Seller marketplace policy changes and Amazon advertising updates sit side by side in date order so you can see the full picture of what the platform is doing and when. Every update includes the key detail and a clear action step. Use it as a reference, bookmark it, and check back monthly.
How to use this guide: Updates are organized newest-first within each year. Full cards cover major changes with detailed context and seller action steps. Shorter cards below each section cover minor platform updates from the same period. All Amazon PPC changes, Seller Central updates, and policy shifts are merged into a single chronological flow.
Amazon Policy and Platform Updates: 2026
Amazon’s AI-powered Prompts feature for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns moved from open beta to general availability in the U.S. on March 25, 2026, with charging now part of standard CPC billing. Prompts work as an automatic enhancement layered onto existing campaigns, using Amazon’s first-party signals from your product detail pages, Brand Store, and campaign performance data to surface contextual product information to shoppers at specific decision moments during the shopping journey.
The mechanism engages shoppers who are still in the consideration phase with relevant, question-answering content generated automatically from your listing data. All Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns are automatically enrolled without any additional setup. You can review, manage, and pause specific prompts from within each campaign via Campaign, then Ad Group, then Ads, then the Prompts tab. Since billing begins at GA, this is now a live cost item on every active campaign.
Check the Prompts tab inside your active Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns after March 25. Auto-generated prompts pull directly from your listing copy, so weak or vague listing content produces weak prompts. Review and pause any prompts that do not accurately represent the product. Treat this as a prompt to update your listing content if it has not been refreshed recently.
The Sponsored Brands Collections format completed its rollout in mid-March 2026 with two distinct creation options now visible inside the console when building a new SB campaign and selecting Collections.
Automatic mode: Amazon’s AI selects products from your catalog based on your keyword targets and the shopper’s actual query. It also generates the ad title and builds the landing page dynamically. You provide your brand name and logo and Amazon handles everything else, including which products appear. In Automatic mode you can exclude up to 1,000 ASINs you do not want shown, but you cannot control the final selection beyond exclusions.
Manual mode: You choose which products appear in the collection. The format still uses AI-generated landing pages, but product selection remains in your hands. A minimum of 3 ASINs and a maximum of 10 ASINs per ad applies to both modes. These ads are also eligible to appear inside Rufus, Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, which now handles an estimated 13 to 35 percent of total Amazon search volume.
The most important structural note: you cannot change the collection type after an ad group is created. Choosing Automatic versus Manual at setup is a permanent decision for that ad group. Brands with broad catalogs of 50 or more SKUs will likely find the Automatic mode saves significant campaign management time. Brands with small, focused product lines where control over placement matters more should use Manual.
If you run Sponsored Brands campaigns, open the console and review the new Collections format now that it is live. Test Automatic mode for your broadest keyword targets and Manual mode for hero product clusters where you need control. Since collection type is permanent per ad group, set up separate ad groups for each approach rather than committing your full campaign budget to one mode before you have performance data.
Amazon updated its Business Solutions Agreement to include the first formal Agent Policy in the platform’s history, announced on February 17, 2026, and effective March 4. The policy creates a new contractual category called “Agent” covering any automated software or AI tool that accesses Amazon services on a seller’s behalf. Three baseline obligations now apply to all agents. They must identify themselves as automated systems at all times. They must comply with the Agent Policy continuously. And they must cease access immediately if Amazon requests it.
The reach of this policy extends across the entire third-party seller software ecosystem. Pricing tools, restock tools, PPC management platforms, reimbursement services, and any application that interacts programmatically with Seller Central or the Amazon Ads API now has explicit contractual obligations it did not have before March 4. Amazon may restrict access to non-compliant agents without appeal under the updated terms. The update also adds AI and machine-learning development restrictions, enhanced reverse-engineering protections, and a new binding arbitration clause. Continued use of Amazon selling services after March 4 constitutes acceptance of the updated terms whether or not a seller actively acknowledges the change.
Review every third-party tool connected to your Amazon account. Ask each software provider in writing whether their product is fully compliant with the March 4, 2026 BSA Agent Policy. Any tool accessing Seller Central or Amazon Ads data programmatically is in scope. Compliance questions about specific reimbursement services like GETIDA are still being clarified publicly, so proactive confirmation from your providers is essential.
Commingling, the practice of pooling identical products from multiple sellers and fulfilling orders from whichever unit is geographically closest regardless of which seller shipped it, ends permanently for all inventory shipped on or after March 31, 2026. Every unit in Amazon’s network will be tracked back to the originating seller account from that date forward. The practical benefit for brand owners is the elimination of a long-standing risk: a counterfeit or poorly stored unit from a different seller being dispatched to your customer under your listing while your compliant inventory sat untouched elsewhere.
Labeling changes for brand owners: Sellers enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry with the Brand Representative selling role no longer need to apply FNSKU labels to products carrying manufacturer barcodes such as UPC, EAN, or ISBN. Amazon will use virtual tracking to attribute units to the correct seller. Products without a scannable manufacturer barcode must still carry an FNSKU sticker. Resellers who are not Brand Representatives must continue applying FNSKU labels without exception. Amazon is waiving low-inventory-level fees at the FNSKU level during the transition period.
Brand Representatives with UPC or EAN barcodes: update your inventory settings in Seller Central before March 31 to switch to manufacturer barcode tracking. Resellers: confirm your FNSKU labeling workflow is operational and do not send commingled inventory after March 31.
Amazon’s Brand Stores management API moved from beta to general availability in February 2026, giving all Brand Store owners the ability to programmatically manage their Amazon storefronts for the first time without beta constraints. The API allows brands and advertisers to retrieve and update product content and selection across Brand Store pages and submit store updates for moderation at scale. For brands managing stores across multiple markets or running frequent seasonal campaigns, this replaces the manual, page-by-page update process with a single programmatic workflow.
The GA release followed Amazon’s launch of section-level performance metrics for Brand Stores in beta on January 16, 2026, which provides granular engagement data covering renders, viewable impressions, clicks, and click-through rate for each individual component within a storefront. The combination of section-level measurement and programmatic management creates a proper testing framework for Brand Store optimization.
If you work with a developer or agency technical team, connect to the Brand Stores API now that it is in GA. At minimum, use the section-level metrics launched January 16 to identify which sections of your storefront drive the most engagement and which are ignored. This data should directly inform your next Brand Store redesign.
Amazon added an “All Tools” tab inside the Amazon Ads console that displays every available advertising tool in a single clean view. Before this update, many features including AMC, Brand Metrics, Data Manager, DSP reports, Attribution, and Creative Studio were scattered across menus and submenus that sellers often navigated past without realizing the feature existed. The consolidated tab reduces friction in tool discovery and increases adoption of underused capabilities. Amazon Ads experts flagged this as a small UI change with a significant practical impact: tools that previously went unused because sellers did not know they existed are now visible in a single click.
Amazon launched the Amazon Ads MCP Server in open beta, built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for how AI systems communicate with external tools. The server connects AI agents to Amazon Ads API functionality and acts as a translation layer, turning complex advertising operations into simple natural language instructions. Pre-built tools enable end-to-end Sponsored Products campaign creation in a single prompt, campaign expansion to new countries in one step, and performance reporting queries written in plain English. For agencies and advertisers who are already using AI agent workflows, this infrastructure connects those agents directly to the Amazon Ads stack.
Amazon launched a beta option in rule-based bidding for Sponsored Products called “Automatically optimizing ROAS within the campaign budget.” The feature lets Amazon adjust bids throughout the day to maximize ROAS while spending the full daily budget, without requiring a seller to set a specific ROAS target or floor bid. The implication is that Amazon controls both bidding and pacing simultaneously within these campaigns, which PPC practitioners have noted requires careful monitoring before scaling.
Amazon launched Auto Budget Sharing, which allows budget to flow automatically between campaigns within a portfolio based on real-time performance signals. When one campaign exhausts its daily budget while another has headroom, the system redistributes available spend to the higher-performing campaign. This reduces the manual work of reallocating budgets daily in large accounts but also reduces the predictability of how individual campaign budgets are consumed, making portfolio-level spend monitoring more important than campaign-level monitoring.
Amazon launched Optimized Targeting for Sponsored Display campaigns focused on conversion goals. The feature uses Amazon’s first-party signals to automatically expand targeting beyond manually selected audiences to reach additional shoppers predicted to convert based on behavioral patterns similar to recent buyers. For conversion-focused Sponsored Display campaigns, this effectively gives the algorithm permission to pursue incremental reach outside the stated targeting parameters when it identifies high-probability converters.
Amazon integrated Sponsored Products placements into Alexa Plus conversational shopping on Echo Show devices in the U.S. Shoppers asking Alexa product questions now encounter paid ads within the conversational interface, extending PPC reach beyond screen-based search results into voice-assisted shopping. This marks the first time Sponsored Products have been embedded in a conversational AI interface beyond Rufus.
Amazon began rolling out the new AI-powered Sponsored Brands Product Collections format to all U.S. advertisers from January 28, 2026, replacing the previous product collections setup. The change is structural and affects how campaigns are built and how ads appear to shoppers. Custom headlines, lifestyle images, and branded creative assets have been removed from the format. Instead, Amazon dynamically surfaces key product details and visuals directly from your product listings.
The new format requires a minimum of 3 ASINs per ad and supports up to 10. Existing campaigns with only one or two ASINs can continue running and be optimized, but no new ad groups can be added to those campaigns. Any new collections campaign created after the rollout must meet the 3-ASIN minimum. For brands with large catalogs, this opens up cross-promotion opportunities by surfacing complementary products in a single ad unit. For brands with narrow product lines, it requires restructuring campaign architecture to meet the new minimum. Single-ASIN Sponsored Brands strategies need to migrate to Sponsored Products or standard Sponsored Brands Video formats.
Audit all active Sponsored Brands Product Collections campaigns. Any campaign currently running with one or two ASINs is locked out of new ad groups. Decide whether to restructure those campaigns to meet the 3-ASIN minimum, shift budget to other formats, or maintain the existing campaign as-is while building a new compliant structure in parallel.
Fulfilled by Merchant sellers now have four calendar days, extended from the previous two business days, to inspect returned items and issue a refund decision. The extra time allows for better documentation, photography of damage evidence, and more careful evaluation of return eligibility before issuing or disputing a refund. The enforcement mechanism is the detail that matters most: if a seller does not process the return within four calendar days, Amazon automatically issues a full refund to the buyer on the seller’s behalf. Once an automatic refund has been issued, access to the standard SAFE-T reimbursement pathway is severely restricted and the practical recovery options are limited to a narrow set of verifiable policy violations.
Build a daily returns review workflow. Set an alert for every new FBM return the moment it arrives. Inspect, photograph, and process within 72 hours of receipt to keep a safety buffer before the automatic refund trigger. For high-volume FBM sellers, this process needs an SLA documented and assigned to your warehouse or VA team.
Amazon launched section-level performance metrics for Brand Stores in beta, providing granular engagement data for every individual component of a storefront: renders, viewable impressions, clicks, and click-through rate per section. Previously, Brand Store analytics reported at the page level only, making it impossible to know which section of a page was driving clicks and which was being ignored. Section-level data enables proper A/B testing and layout optimization at a level of detail that was not available before.
U.S. FBA fulfillment fee increases took effect January 15, 2026, following the fee-stable year of 2025. The average increase of $0.08 per unit was announced on October 15, 2025. While Amazon framed the increase as representing less than 0.5 percent of a typical item’s selling price, the real impact depends heavily on price point. For a product selling at $12.99, the eight-cent increase represents roughly 0.6 percent of revenue but can represent 3 to 4 percent of contribution margin where FBA costs already compress margins significantly. Low-price, high-volume SKUs absorb this disproportionately.
Peak fulfillment surcharges apply annually from October 15 through January 14 and include additional charges for hazardous materials and low-priced items below category thresholds. Referral fees were reduced for home products, pet clothing, groceries, and vitamins. European FBA fulfillment fees in Germany, the UK, France, Italy, and Spain dropped by approximately 0.26 to 0.32 euros per parcel from February 1, 2026, one of the most meaningful European fee reductions in several years, driven directly by Amazon’s need to remain competitive against Shein and Temu on small-parcel economics.
Re-model unit economics for every ASIN under $15 using the January 15 fee schedule. Identify which SKUs are now unprofitable or marginal and either raise price, reduce COGS, or suppress the listing. For European sellers, recalculate profitability under the February 1 EU fee reductions to identify any categories where the math now supports expansion.
From January 1, 2026, Amazon discontinued all prep and item-labeling services for FBA shipments across the U.S. store, covering standard FBA, AWD, Amazon Global Logistics, Amazon SEND, and the Supply Chain Portal. The option to pay Amazon to apply poly bags, bubble wrap, dunnage, or FNSKU labels at a fulfillment center no longer exists. Every unit must arrive fully prepared and correctly labeled before it enters the Amazon supply chain. This is not a phase-out: it applied from day one of the calendar year with no grace period for legacy workflows.
The financial risk is significant. Shipments created after January 1 that arrive unprepared or incorrectly labeled are ineligible for reimbursement if units are damaged or become untraceable during receiving. Amazon has closed the reimbursement safety net for non-compliant units. Early 2026 industry data showed a 30 to 40 percent surge in sellers seeking certified 3PL arrangements to handle prep, with typical cost increases of $0.15 to $0.40 per unit depending on prep type required.
Audit every ASIN in your catalog for prep requirements. Confirm your current supplier or 3PL can meet Amazon’s prep standards for each product type. Update all inbound shipment workflows. If you do not yet have a prep-capable 3PL relationship, this is now an operational requirement, not a cost consideration to defer.
Amazon implemented a shopping-signal enhanced last-touch attribution methodology for all view-based campaign measurement from January 1, 2026, affecting Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display vCPM campaigns, and Amazon DSP across 28 global markets. The previous standard model applied conversion credit broadly to all ad views within a 14-day window. The new methodology uses machine learning to evaluate placement context, browsing behavior, and shopping journey stage. It focuses credit on ad views that occur during genuine brand discovery moments such as exploratory browsing or general category searches, and applies a shorter attribution window to views that occur later in a known purchase funnel where the ad view had less causal influence.
Amazon introduced dual reporting through a “standard” metric family using the new methodology and an “all views” metric family preserving the historical 14-day window for comparison. Advertisers seeing sudden ROAS drops in Sponsored Display vCPM or upper-funnel Sponsored Brands campaigns in January 2026 are largely seeing this attribution model change, not a real change in campaign effectiveness. The metrics have changed; the underlying performance may not have.
Compare standard and all-views metrics in Sponsored Display and Sponsored Brands vCPM reports. Do not reduce upper-funnel budgets based on lower standard ROAS alone. Use the AMC Conversion Path Report to confirm whether these campaigns are contributing assisted conversions before making spend decisions. This is also the right moment to set new attribution-adjusted baselines for any automated bidding strategies with ROAS targets.
Amazon’s advertising platform now operates on a predictive budget model that allows the algorithm to exceed a campaign’s declared daily budget by up to 25 percent when it identifies high purchase intent among shoppers. The platform can also redistribute funds across campaigns within the same portfolio based on real-time performance signals, and may deploy a significant portion of the daily budget early in the day when morning conversion probability is predicted to be high.
The commercial logic is straightforward: Amazon spends more when conversion probability is higher, which can improve overall ROAS. The seller experience is that budgets assumed to be fixed are now variable in ways that are difficult to predict without real-time monitoring. For accounts with carefully modeled monthly advertising spend tied to cash flow planning, this behavior can silently produce meaningful overspend across a large campaign portfolio.
Set portfolio-level budget caps in addition to campaign-level daily budgets. A portfolio cap creates a hard ceiling the dynamic algorithm cannot breach. Review actual spend against budgeted spend weekly for any account where overspend would affect cash flow or total ACoS targets. Do not monitor this monthly.
“Amazon PPC is no longer a keyword auction. The budget rules, bidding algorithms, attribution models, and ad formats have all been rebuilt for a customer matching model. The sellers losing ground in 2026 are running 2023 playbooks.”
Amazon Policy and Platform Updates: 2025
Amazon launched unified reporting that consolidated data analysis across Sponsored Ads and DSP campaigns through a single report builder interface inside the Ads console for the first time. Previously, Sponsored Ads and DSP performance data lived in separate reporting environments that made cross-format analysis a manual process. The unified report builder includes 15 months of daily reporting history and six years of monthly data. A consolidated KPI bar and cross-product views provide a single view of performance across the full advertising funnel without needing to export and join separate reports.
Amazon announced Ads Agent, built on Amazon Bedrock, as a conversational AI assistant embedded directly within Amazon Marketing Cloud. Ads Agent goes beyond the earlier SQL generator to support full analytics query generation through natural language, connecting Amazon’s first-party insights to advertising performance data. A user can describe what they want to analyze in plain English, and Ads Agent writes the SQL query, runs it, and surfaces the result. What previously required an analyst building complex queries manually over several hours can now be completed in a conversation.
Unlike generic AI SQL tools, Ads Agent has deep knowledge of AMC’s specific datasets, syntax requirements, and privacy constraints built in. It also connects to external performance data, allowing AMC outputs to be interpreted alongside non-Amazon signals. At unBoxed 2025, Amazon confirmed that Ads Agent will expand its capabilities through 2026 to include proactive suggestions, trend surfacing, and multi-step workflow automation within the AMC environment.
Access Ads Agent through your Amazon Marketing Cloud interface. Start with a Path to Purchase query and an Audience Overlap query using the natural language interface. Both typically surface budget allocation insights within the first session. If your agency or team has been avoiding AMC because of SQL complexity, the natural language interface removes that barrier.
Amazon Accelerate 2025 delivered three updates that collectively represent the most significant shift in seller analytics access in years.
Amazon Marketing Cloud is now open to every seller. Previously accessible only to brands with active DSP contracts or agency relationships, AMC became directly available through the Ads Console for any seller running Sponsored Products, with no partner, rep, or DSP commitment required. No-code query templates were introduced alongside Ads Agent (launched in beta) to reduce the SQL knowledge barrier that had kept AMC out of reach for most seller-side teams.
Custom Analytics Workbench. Amazon launched a free Seller Central tool with over 100 metrics that lets sellers build personalized reports spanning advertising, sales, and operational data in a single interface. Previously, creating a combined view of advertising performance and inventory data required exporting from multiple separate reports and joining them manually in a spreadsheet.
Agentic Seller Assistant replaces Project Amelia. The AI assistant formerly known as Project Amelia was upgraded and renamed Seller Assistant. The new agentic version can understand context, set goals, and take proactive actions including monitoring inventory levels, preparing shipment recommendations, and surfacing Account Health issues before they escalate. Unlike earlier versions, the Seller Assistant executes multi-step tasks autonomously rather than just answering questions.
Access AMC through Ads Console under Measurement and Reporting. Use the pre-built no-code templates for Path to Purchase and Overlap reporting first. Open the Custom Analytics Workbench and build one combined advertising and sales report for your top 20 ASINs. Both will likely surface insights within your first session that standard reports do not show.
As part of the broader lab compliance overhaul announced in July 2025, Amazon introduced a specific additional requirement for the toys and children’s products category from September 3. Sellers must now complete annual testing or documented verification through a compliant Testing, Inspection and Certification provider on a recurring basis, not once at product launch. The TIC provider must be CPSC-accepted for U.S. marketplace sales. Sellers who had obtained a one-time compliance certificate at launch and never revisited it are now in ongoing non-compliance. Lab booking lead times typically run four to eight weeks, which means the planning cycle for annual recertification needs to begin 90 days before the compliance anniversary date.
Build annual TIC testing into Q1 planning for every children’s ASIN in your catalog. Set a calendar reminder 90 days before each ASIN’s compliance anniversary to initiate the testing booking. Verify that any lab you book is on Amazon’s approved list and not on the Suspended Validation Labs list before submitting documentation.
Amazon changed the seller feedback system so that buyers can leave a star rating without any written comment. This increases Amazon’s volume of seller performance data but removes the context sellers had used to understand and contest unfair ratings. The standard dispute pathway through Feedback Manager no longer applies to star-only ratings. Sellers can only pursue disputes through the “Report a Violation” route, which requires a specific, identifiable policy violation rather than a general disagreement. A silent one-star rating with no written explanation is now permanent with no standard removal route.
Shift focus entirely to proactive post-purchase experience management. An automated follow-up message sent within Amazon’s permitted communications policy, asking whether a buyer is satisfied, surfaces issues before they become a silent negative rating. Packaging quality, listing accuracy, and on-time delivery are the three primary drivers of star-only ratings. These are the levers to optimize now that written context is not reliably available.
Amazon published a Suspended Validation Labs list and made clear that compliance documentation from any lab on that list is treated as no documentation at all. A certificate from a low-cost local testing facility, particularly non-internationally-accredited labs commonly used in China, now results in listing suppression and Account Health penalties as if no certificate had been submitted. The policy directly targets a longstanding shortcut where sellers met Amazon’s document requirement on paper while using facilities that did not meet the underlying safety standards. Amazon’s position is that the certificate is only as reliable as the issuing lab.
Go to the Service Provider Network inside Seller Central and cross-reference every lab you currently use against the Suspended Validation Labs list before your next compliance submission. A rejected submission from a suspended lab counts as a non-submission on your Account Health record.
Amazon updated Partnered Carrier Program rates to charge adjustment fees when a seller declares one package size and the carrier scan records a different measurement at pickup or receiving. The change targets sellers who had been systematically under-declaring shipment dimensions to reduce PCP rates. For sellers who always declare accurate dimensions, there is no impact. For those using rounded, historical, or approximate dimension data in shipping templates, reconciliation fees can accumulate quickly across high-volume inbound shipments. The fix is a one-time physical measurement of your standard carton sizes and an update to your Seller Central shipping templates.
Amazon replaced the old Manage Your Compliance dashboard with a new “Policy Compliance” section in Seller Central, centralizing product safety, food safety, and documentation status across your entire catalog in a single interface. Compliance flags for individual ASINs are now visible alongside outstanding documentation requirements and links to the Service Provider Network for finding approved labs. For sellers managing large catalogs, this makes it possible to identify compliance gaps before listing suppression is triggered.
On May 23, Amazon expanded AMC’s data history from 13 months to five full years of retail purchase data through its Retail Purchases dataset, available as part of the paid AMC Features suite with a 60-day free trial. The five-year lookback dramatically increases the value of customer lifetime value analysis and seasonal trend modeling in AMC, giving advertisers context that was previously impossible to obtain through platform-native tools.
On the same date, Amazon introduced a New-to-Brand (NTB) audience feature for Sponsored Brands, allowing advertisers to apply bid boosts specifically to shoppers who had not purchased from the brand in the prior 12 months. Advertisers who applied a bid boost of 100 percent or more for NTB shoppers saw twice as many orders from new customers on average. This makes it possible to run acquisition-focused campaigns separately from retention campaigns within the same Sponsored Brands setup, rather than optimizing both use cases with the same bid strategy.
Enable the NTB bid boost in your acquisition-focused Sponsored Brands campaigns now. Even a 50 to 100 percent bid adjustment for NTB shoppers can meaningfully shift the balance of new versus returning customer orders. For AMC, start the 60-day free trial of the Retail Purchases dataset and run one lifetime value analysis for your top three ASINs.
From May 15, Amazon introduced a revised size-based pricing model for apparel, bags, and backpacks that calculates FBA fees using the lower of parcel size or unit weight. Seven new size categories were added for greater fee precision. No returns fees are charged for backpacks and handbags under this revision, with any prior charges refunded. For sellers in these categories, this was the first meaningful fee reduction in several years and required recalculating unit economics to reflect the improved margin position.
From April 14, any sharp item arriving at an Amazon fulfillment center without proper puncture-resistant packaging is destroyed on receipt with no corrective process, no reimbursement, and no notification window. The policy covers knives, blades, tools, and any product presenting a puncture hazard. Unlike most compliance changes that allow a grace period, Amazon applied this rule with immediate binary consequences from day one: units that comply are accepted, units that do not comply are destroyed. The seller is billed for the destruction. This is a zero-warning policy with a permanent cost consequence for non-compliance.
Test your current packaging against the puncture-resistance standard before your next inbound shipment. Communicate the requirement explicitly to your 3PL and your supplier as many default to standard poly bags that will not pass. Apply this review to any product Amazon’s receiving team could classify as having a sharp edge.
Two significant seller tools launched on January 27, 2025. First, Amazon made AMC reporting accessible via a new enhanced dashboard with real-time hourly metrics and audience-building capabilities for both Sponsored Ads and DSP campaigns. This was the first step toward the full AMC open access that completed at Amazon Accelerate in September. Audience building for Sponsored Display campaigns became available inside this dashboard, enabling advertisers to create custom audiences from AMC data without a separate DSP seat.
The second launch was the Inventory Defect and Reimbursement (IDR) Portal, which replaced the fragmented reimbursement tracking that had existed across multiple Seller Central menus. The IDR Portal provides a single dashboard covering warehouse losses, damages, and customer return claims. Claim statuses are labeled Eligible for Claim, In Progress, or Resolved, making it significantly easier to manage the 60-day filing window that had just taken effect on January 9 without losing track of active claims.
If you have not yet connected the IDR Portal into your regular Seller Central workflow, do it now. Set a recurring weekly time block to review and act on Eligible for Claim items. The 60-day window runs continuously so claims that were eligible last week are seven days closer to expiry this week.
Amazon began enforcing three simultaneous title standards across most product categories, with automated suppression for listings that failed to comply within a 14-day correction window.
200-character cap: Most categories are now limited to 200 characters including spaces. Titles exceeding this limit are either automatically truncated or suppressed from search results. Amazon’s automated correction often removes more than just the excess characters, which can reduce keyword coverage in running PPC campaigns that relied on title-matched terms.
Special character restrictions: Exclamation marks, question marks, underscores, and similar characters are banned unless they form part of a registered brand name. Many sellers had been using these characters for visual emphasis in keyword-rich titles built under older optimization approaches.
Repetition rule: Any word repeated more than twice in a title context is a violation. Singular and plural forms count as the same word. Title changes triggered by this enforcement also affect the Sponsored Products keyword relevance signals Amazon uses to determine which search queries your ads are eligible to compete for.
Export a bulk listing report and scan for titles over 180 characters, titles containing banned characters outside of registered brand names, and titles that repeat any keyword more than twice. Prioritize your top 30 revenue ASINs. Correct titles before Amazon’s automated system does it for you with less precision.
Amazon enabled creation and management of campaign budget rules through bulk sheets, allowing advertisers to set automated spend adjustments for specific days or campaigns in a single file upload rather than configuring each rule individually inside the console. For accounts managing 50 or more campaigns, this reduced daily budget management time significantly. Budget rules now follow the same bulk workflow as keyword bids, negative lists, and campaign settings.
Amazon added a “cart abandoners” metric in Brand Analytics identifying customers who added a product to their cart but did not purchase within 90 days. Sellers can build a custom retargeting audience in AMC from this data and activate it through Amazon DSP or Sponsored Display campaigns to re-engage warm, high-intent prospects who never completed the purchase. Cart abandoners consistently outperform cold prospecting audiences in return-on-ad-spend because the purchase intent has already been demonstrated.
Amazon retired the 360-degree product image feature and replaced it with 3D model support and Augmented Reality functionality. Shoppers can now interact with detailed 3D product models or place furniture and home decor items in their physical space using the “View in Your Room” AR feature. For sellers in home, furniture, and lifestyle categories, creating a 3D model asset is now an active optimization opportunity that separates listings from competitors still using static imagery.
Amazon held U.S. referral fees and standard FBA fulfillment fees flat for the entirety of 2025, the first fee-stable year in several years for sellers. Non-peak FBA fulfillment fees for apparel stayed unchanged from January 15. Amazon also waived inbound placement service fees for new parent ASINs enrolled in the FBA New Selection Program during qualifying shipment periods, giving new product launches a meaningful cost advantage during the critical early ranking weeks. Inbound placement service fees on large bulky items with minimal shipment splits were reduced by approximately $0.58 per unit. For sellers who had been adjusting pricing annually to absorb Amazon’s fee increases, 2025 provided a year to rebuild margin without a forced price revision.
If you raised prices in Q4 2024 to absorb anticipated fee increases that did not materialize in 2025, review whether any of those price changes reduced conversion rate enough to warrant reverting. Stable fees combined with slightly reduced prices can improve organic rank and overall ACoS simultaneously.
The Conversion Path Report, previously limited to select advertisers, opened to all sellers on January 13, 2025. The report tracks a shopper’s full advertising touchpoints across a 30-day window before purchase, covering Sponsored Products, Sponsored Display, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored TV, and Amazon DSP. It reveals the sequence of ad impressions a buyer encountered before converting rather than attributing the sale solely to the last-click event. For sellers running multiple campaign types, this report frequently shows that awareness and consideration campaigns running at what appears to be poor ACoS are actually the first touchpoint in a significant portion of eventual conversions, making the case for sustained upper-funnel investment.
On the same date, Amazon added an AI-powered SQL generator to Amazon Marketing Cloud, allowing advertisers to write complex audience and analytics queries using plain English descriptions. The audience for this capability at launch was advertisers with AMC access but without dedicated SQL analysts. The natural language interface democratized the most powerful analytics layer in Amazon’s advertising stack.
Find the Conversion Path Report inside your Ads Console under Measurement and Reporting. Run it for the past 30 days and look specifically at how many conversions attributed to Sponsored Products or branded search were preceded by a Sponsored Display or Sponsored Brands impression. This typically reveals that upper-funnel campaigns deserve a larger budget allocation than last-click ROAS suggests.
This pair of changes represents the single largest financial hit to FBA sellers in 2025, arriving in two stages that many sellers missed until they noticed the difference in their reimbursement figures.
Stage 1 (January 9, 2025): The window for filing lost or damaged inventory claims was cut from 18 months to 60 days. Sellers who were not actively auditing FBA reconciliation reports monthly lost access to every pending claim older than two months without any transition period to prepare.
Stage 2 (March 10, 2025): The reimbursement basis shifted from selling price to manufacturing cost only. Shipping, packaging, branding, prep, and margin are all excluded. A branded product retailing at $40 with a $10 production cost now receives roughly a $10 payout instead of the $32 to $38 a seller might previously have received. Industry analysis puts the average reduction at 65 to 75 percent. Sellers can input their own manufacturing cost data via the “Manage Your Manufacturing Cost” page in Seller Central. Where this is left blank, Amazon estimates conservatively.
Populate the Manage Your Manufacturing Cost page for every active ASIN in your catalog. Set a recurring 30-day calendar block to audit FBA reimbursement claims inside the IDR Portal. Missing the 60-day window is a permanent loss with no appeals process available.
Amazon integrated QuickBooks directly into Seller Central, allowing sellers to manage cash flow, profitability, and tax reporting from within the Amazon dashboard. The integration connects to QuickBooks Capital for financing based on Amazon seller data and adds AI-powered financial insights surfaced inside Seller Central. For sellers who were previously exporting data from Seller Central and importing it manually into QuickBooks, the integration eliminates that reconciliation process entirely.
Rufus launched in beta in early 2024 but became a genuine advertising strategy concern during 2025 as adoption scaled sharply. By Q4 2025, Amazon reported that Rufus had 250 to 300 million active users with interactions up 210 percent year over year and was on track to contribute over $12 billion in incremental annualized sales. From January 2025, Amazon integrated Sponsored Products placements into Rufus conversations, meaning paid ads now appear within the conversational AI interface alongside organic recommendations from the assistant.
The critical difference from traditional PPC is that Rufus surfaces results based on shopper intent and product context, not keyword match. Listings with weak benefit statements, incomplete product attributes, or inconsistent messaging across title, bullets, and A+ Content are less likely to appear in Rufus responses regardless of bid level. An “Account Memory” feature introduced in late 2025 incorporates a shopper’s purchase history, Prime Video viewing, and Audible listening into recommendations. The “Help Me Decide” comparison feature launched in October 2025 means that listings with clear, specific differentiation perform better in head-to-head AI comparisons than listings relying on generic benefit statements. Sponsored Brands were deepened within Rufus placements through late 2025 into 2026.
Treat Rufus optimization as a content task. Fill every Seller Central attribute field including optional ones. Write bullet points that answer specific “why” questions rather than listing product features. Rufus reads your listing like a human and surfaces products to shoppers asking natural language questions. Complete, specific, benefit-focused listings with clear use cases win in Rufus results.
Amazon extended the 2025 holiday return window to January 31, 2026, covering purchases made between November 1 and December 31. The 92-day window is longer than prior years and pushed cash flow finalization for Q4 revenue into Q1 for sellers with high holiday sales volumes. Alongside this, Amazon introduced additional per-return fees for products that consistently exceed their category-level return rate thresholds. The policy targets listings with misleading descriptions or image sets that drive “not as described” returns, which Amazon’s data suggests account for approximately 40 percent of total return volume across the platform. The Return Insights dashboard inside Seller Central tracks ASIN-level return rates against category thresholds.
Review Return Insights weekly and flag any ASIN approaching 80 percent of its category return threshold as a red alert. Adding 10 or more lifestyle images and a short product video reduces “not as described” returns measurably. For FBA items under $20 where return shipping exceeds 40 percent of item value, enabling Returnless Refunds can be net-positive despite the lost unit.
Amazon Marketing Cloud introduced a Share of Wallet analysis through the NCS CPG Insights Stream beta, a paid feature providing transaction signals across 3 million-plus UPCs and 4,500 product groups. This allows brands to measure how Amazon advertising influences offline purchase behavior and benchmark their performance against category competitors. It represents the first tool available to sellers that measures cross-channel advertising impact without requiring a custom survey or third-party measurement solution.
Amazon introduced the ability to update video creatives in live Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Products campaigns without losing historical performance data. Previously, changing a creative required restarting the campaign from scratch, which reset the algorithm’s learning period and lost accumulated performance signals. The ability to iterate without a data reset makes creative testing practically viable during active campaigns for the first time. Sponsored Brands Video became a mainstream placement during 2025, with enhanced linking options to specific Brand Store pages rather than just the storefront homepage.
Amazon launched an Unmet Demand Insights tool inside Seller Central that surfaces catalog gaps where customers are actively searching on Amazon but not finding products that adequately meet their needs. The tool generates AI-powered product proposals and demand forecasts from observed search pattern gaps. For sellers and agencies with product development capacity, this turns Amazon’s own search data into a prioritized product opportunity roadmap based on real, live demand rather than external market research.
At unBoxed 2025, Amazon upgraded AI Creative Studio to function as a “virtual creative director,” generating full video and display campaigns from simple text prompts. An integration with Adobe Express was also announced, allowing advertisers to build and push creatives directly into Amazon Ads accounts using pre-built Sponsored Brands video and DSP display templates. Early testing showed a 26 percent reduction in bid-optimization workflow time for advertisers using the AI-guided campaign setup within the new unified Campaign Manager workspace.
Amazon expanded the Category Insights dashboard with two new tabs. The Top Grossing tab shows aggregated sales revenue and unit volumes for the top 10 ASINs in a selected category over the past 12 months, enabling competitive positioning and market saturation analysis. The Newly Launched tab highlights the top 10 new ASINs from the past six months based on sales and units, helping sellers identify emerging trends and successful launch strategies within their categories. Both tabs are available inside Brand Analytics in Seller Central.