Amazon Seller Guides

Amazon removes counterfeit and materially different offers from your listing, and leaves sellers of your genuine product alone. Your trademark stage decides the rest. Amazon moderators say a pending application means a test purchase for every offer you report. What Project Zero and Transparency require, what a trademark costs in 2026, and the test-buy review that got one seller deactivated.

Amazon published a revised Business Solutions Agreement on 29 May 2026, effective 24 August. It extends the transfer restriction from the agreement itself to the rights and obligations under it, and explicitly prohibits pledging them as collateral, which is how revenue-based financing and merchant cash advances against Amazon disbursements are secured.

In August 2026 Amazon replaced the invite process for giving outside providers Seller Central access. Access you granted lapses unless you reauthorise by the date in your own notice, and Amazon now approves which roles a provider may hold.

The Prime Big Deal Days cutoffs have passed. Black Friday's are 14 October for AWD, 21 October for FBA minimal splits and 28 October for Amazon-optimized splits. Peak fulfilment fees run 15 October to 14 January with the 3.5% surcharge on top, and peak storage runs on a different calendar.

On 31 August 2026 the FTC and 22 states sued Amazon, alleging it ran genuine ad auctions and then replaced the result with a higher price it set itself - taking over $20 billion from about 1.2 million US advertisers since 2019, more than 500,000 of them small businesses. What the complaint actually says, why no seller could have detected it, and what a remedy would realistically look like.

As of 11 September CBP had accepted about $134.7 billion of IEEPA refunds through CAPE and sent $122 billion, with interest, to Treasury, while 20,184 approved refunds worth $1.3 billion waited for bank details. Who qualifies, how to file a CAPE Declaration in ACE, and the three clocks behind the deadline question.

From 1 August 2026, ad costs come out of the seller account balance before disbursement for the small group Amazon contacted directly, unless they chose Pay by Invoice. The card is kept only as a backup. Why the lost float matters more than the lost card points, and what the change does to working capital.

DD+7 in March, a 3.5% fulfilment surcharge in April, ad spend from the account balance in August. Two of the three change when you get paid and one changes how much is yours. Worked through on a single unit, because confusing the two can lead you to reprice a product that did not need it.

The 75-character limit took effect on 27 July 2026 and Amazon began rewriting non-compliant titles the same day, rolling out through the rest of the year. Brand owners get 14 days to review each one. A separate display change on 10 August moved where Item highlights appear, which matters if you are trying to work out why sales moved.

It is 3.5% of the fulfilment fee, not of the sale price, and Amazon puts the average at $0.17 per unit for US FBA. It arrived in two waves rather than one, it hits cheap small items hardest as a share of revenue, and it is already stacked on top of the holiday peak rates that start on 15 October.

Higher bond minimums, a tangible domestic assets test, beneficial ownership disclosure, and a good standing status without which you cannot import at all. Most of it lands around 30 November 2026, but CBP has voided IOR numbers with inaccurate Form 5106 details since 18 September. Written for a seller doing four containers a year.

The referral fee is charged either way, the Buy Box is still earned rather than bought, and Multi-Channel Fulfillment is a third option. What separates the methods, what Seller Fulfilled Prime commits you to after the July 2026 threshold rise, and why a comparison run before the April fuel surcharge needs running again.

Four identifiers doing four different jobs, and only one of them comes from outside Amazon. Why cheap third-party UPCs fail against the GS1 database, what the GTIN exemption actually asks for, and the March 2026 barcode change that loosened labelling for brand owners while tightening it for resellers.

Amazon publishes five sourcing guidelines, and the fifth says auctions are not a valid source of supply. Where gating sits, what makes an ungating invoice hold up, and why a sourcing decision surfaces months later as an Account Health violation rather than a listing error.

Fraudulent A-to-z claims and "materially different item returned" abuse are a live pattern on the seller forums in 2026, and a claim counts against your Order Defect Rate while it is still pending. The response window, the 30-day appeal that removes the defect, why SAFE-T is usually unavailable, and the cancellation cluster that shows up first.

Referral fees, selling plans, FBA fulfilment fees, and the low-inventory-level surcharge your own sales velocity switches on. January raised US fees by about $0.08 a unit and Europe moved the other way - then April added a 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge worth roughly twice the January increase, on fifteen days notice rather than ninety.

Seller Central has a real notification system: orders, returns, account events, emergencies. The order emails exist but Amazon says not to rely on them and offers no filtering, the Selling Partner API has no fee-change notification at all, and nothing fires when a settlement posts light.

Amazon can re-measure a product into a higher size tier without warning; one seller reported a fee jump from $40.43 to $88.93 per order. How to confirm it happened, request a Cubiscan remeasurement, and claim back the overcharge inside Amazon's 90-day window.

Amazon can move part of a settlement into reserve without warning. Why it happens, what the delivery-date-plus-seven policy promises and when its clock starts, why release dates are estimates rather than commitments, and how to plan cash flow around it.

Amazon closes reimbursement claim windows without a reminder, and the 60-day window covers only one loss type. Inbound shortfalls run nine months but open only once the shipment closes, customer returns run day 45 to day 105, and removal orders have three windows of their own. Every published deadline, and the two places Amazon contradicts itself.

A suppressed listing exists but is not shown. Stranded inventory is FBA stock with no offer attached, and it runs on a deadline: Amazon can require removal after 30 days' notice, or 7 days for anything with an expiration date, then dispose of it. What causes each, and what the Fair Pricing Policy says about pricing errors.

Capacity limits replaced restock and storage limits in 2023, so the allowance is one number in cubic feet and packaging size is inventory strategy. Fees now push from both directions: storage and aged surcharges against overstock, the low-inventory-level fee against running lean. Includes what a September send-in does and does not do.

Amazon started removing Featured Offer seller eligibility requirements in July 2026, completing globally by year end, so an eligibility checklist describes a stage being retired. Selection itself is unchanged and rests on three named inputs. Two of them belong to your competitors, which is why you lose the Buy Box on days you did nothing.

Order Defect Rate under 1% over 60 days is the only order performance metric that applies to FBA orders; Cancellation, Late Dispatch, Valid Tracking and On-Time Delivery are seller-fulfilled only. The published thresholds, the Account Health Rating bands, and the 2026 changes that deactivate one offer instead of the whole account.