Browse discussions
Sort by
Filters
Browse discussions
Celebrating 25 years of retail transformation
Twenty-five years ago, Amazon welcomed independent sellers into our store—sparking a shift that redefined how customers shop and how entrepreneurs build their businesses. Today, we're celebrating you and how we continue to write the story of the most successful partnership in the history of the retail industry.
Your achievements tell an extraordinary story of transformation and success. You now account for more than 60% of all sales in Amazon's store. In 2024 alone, you employed over 2 million people in the U.S.—creating jobs, supporting families, and strengthening communities across the country. You've generated more than $2.5 trillion in cumulative sales since 2000, and remarkably, you continue to set new milestones as your sales in the first ten months of 2025 are already outpacing your sales during our partnership's first 10 years combined.
The creativity, resilience, and innovation of our selling partners have shaped Amazon into what it is today, fueling choice, value, and convenience for customers around the world. From the entrepreneur who started making products in their home to the established brand expanding globally, you've proven what's possible when innovation meets opportunity.
To hear a message from members of our leadership team as they thank you for this incredible partnership, click here.
As we look ahead, we are confident that our partnership’s biggest achievements are still to come. We continue to innovate on ways to create new and bigger opportunities for you to reach customers around the world while removing barriers and simplifying how you sell. As we like to say, it's still Day 1—and there is still so much yet to invent and accomplish together in the future.
To every seller reading this: thank you! Your success is – and will continue to be – at the heart of this story, and we will continue to work to help drive your success. Your partnership has made this 25-year journey possible, and we're deeply grateful for your trust, creativity, and commitment to excellence. Here's to many more years of your success.
We want to thank you for your continued partnership in serving customers with amazing products, great prices, and convenient delivery. Our partnership has driven record-breaking sales for independent sellers like you. We’d like to share our 2026 updates to US Referral and Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) fees.
In 2026, FBA fees will increase by an average of $0.08 per unit sold, or less than 0.5% of an average item’s selling price. This is on top of no increase in US Referral and FBA fees in 2025. We have been working hard to drive innovation and efficiencies that keep costs down, which helps keep fee increases low for you. Our fee changes are significantly less than inflation and less than the 3.9%-5.9% annual cost increases from other major US carriers during the last two years.
We continue to better align our fee structure and rates to our underlying costs. We’ve created more granularity in our fee structure so we can offer lower fees where our costs are lower, and higher fees where we provide enhanced services or additional value that come at a higher cost. This includes investing in improved forecasting, inventory placement, and automation that drives faster delivery promises and higher sales for billions of products fulfilled through FBA. We’ll also add new returns features, reduce defects that cause missing and damaged inventory, and provide faster removals processing. You also gain the opportunity to achieve lower fee options where it makes sense for your business, including by updating your product packaging, selecting lower cost inbound shipment options, and maintaining healthy inventory levels.
We continue to focus on providing you with stability by minimizing your operational burden and costs. There will be no new FBA fee types in 2026, and we’re providing earlier notice and improved tools to make it easier for you to optimize your sales and profitability. To understand how these changes will impact your business, you can use the Revenue Calculator and Fee and Economics Preview report which are being updated with the 2026 rates. You can also use the new Profit Analytics dashboard to get a detailed view of your unit economics, including the ability to see how fee changes impact each of your products. You have at least 90 days before any fee increases take effect.
For specific fee change details, go to 2026 US Referral and Fulfillment by Amazon Fees. Unless otherwise noted, all changes will be effective January 15, 2026.
Thank you for selling in Amazon’s store. Your success remains our priority as we continue to provide enhanced capabilities to support your business growth and provide a great value. We appreciate your partnership and look forward to an even greater year of seller success in 2026.
Note: This article was updated on July 31, 2025, for clarity
On August 4, we’ll launch a simplified experience for customers to provide feedback on you as a seller. Customers can now provide star-only ratings without written feedback— in addition to the option to provide written feedback if they choose. Our preliminary tests show that this simpler process helps sellers collect more ratings faster. We also found in our tests that many of these star-only ratings come from customers who have had positive order experiences but previously did not provide written feedback, which in turn may lead to an increase in the average seller ratings for many selling partners.
Customers will be required to select a reason before they can submit any rating below four stars. We’ll review this reason to ensure it meets the seller feedback eligibility criteria. For example, if a customer leaves a low rating because they are dissatisfied with a product, we'll automatically omit it because it is not relevant to your performance as a seller.
We’ve also implemented solutions that allow us to automatically detect and remove abusive feedback, without any action required from you. If you believe a rating (with or without feedback) is abusive, you can request additional review through Report a violation.
To learn more, go to Monitor Feedback and Performance.
Hi sellers,
Please see the new announcement thread which covers updates made to the variation theme change: Update to irrelevant or redundant variation theme removal.
---
Between September 2, 2025, and November 30, 2025, we will remove variation themes from our product templates that aren’t relevant or frequently used, to simplify your listing experience. We’ve already marked the impacted themes as Deprecated: Do Not Use in the product template Variation Theme Name field.
If you try to update a listing with a deprecated variation theme, you’ll receive an error message that states, “the value specified is invalid” and the update will not be successful.
To update your ASINs with impacted variation themes, we recommend that you take the following steps:
- Go to Manage Inventory, and delete the existing parent ASIN.
- Remove Parentage Level, Child Relationship Type, Parent SKU, and Variation Theme Name attributes from the child ASINs that were tied to the parent ASIN.
- Create a new parent ASIN with an available variation theme.
- Assign your relevant child ASINs to the new parent ASIN.
If you’re unable to update impacted variation themes, your child ASINs will remain active as stand-alone listings so customers can continue to purchase your products.
For more information about variation themes and how to manage variations, go to Variation relationship FAQ.
To view the complete list of variation themes we’re removing, go to Variation themes planned for removal.
We're updating our product title policy to standardize listings and enhance the shopping experience across our stores.
Over time, we’ve observed that product titles have become longer, and they sometimes include redundant wording or characters that can decrease customer confidence. These new policy changes will help ensure that product titles are clear, concise, and consistent.
The following new requirements will take effect on January 21, 2025:
- For most product categories, titles may not exceed 200 characters, including spaces.
- The special characters !, $, ?, _, {, }, ^, ¬, and ¦ are not allowed, unless they are part of the brand name.
- Titles may not contain the same word more than twice. Prepositions, articles, and conjunctions are exceptions.
If you have titles that do not comply with the requirements listed above, we recommend that you update them.
Starting January 21, all title changes will be subject to the updated policy, and you'll be able to view and fix any non-compliant titles in Manage All Inventory.
Additionally, we'll provide override suggestions for non-compliant titles to brand owners in Review Listing Updates. Brand owners will have 14 days to act upon on the suggestions before we update the titles to comply with our requirements. These suggestions will be rolled out gradually.
Your listings will remain active during this process, and you’ll still be able to make edits to your product titles as long as your changes comply with the new policy.
We'll host an Ask Amazon event on January 8, 2025, during which our experts will answer your questions about title requirements on Amazon Seller Forums.
For more information, including character limits by product category and store, go to Product title requirements and guidelines.
Update to the FBA inventory reimbursement policy
Note: This article was updated on December 19, 2024, to include a clarified definition of "manufacturing cost."
We’re updating our Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) inventory reimbursement policy to help provide you greater transparency and more predictability in how reimbursements are calculated for items that are lost or damaged before a customer order. This will help drive a more consistent approach that works as we support sellers with supply chain services across their sales channels.
Effective March 10, 2025, we’ll reimburse you based on the product manufacturing cost of the affected inventory. "Manufacturing cost" means your cost to source a product from a manufacturer, wholesaler, reseller, or produce the item if you are the manufacturer. It excludes costs such as shipping, handling, customs duties, or other costs.
To help provide you greater control and accuracy, you can choose how we determine the manufacturing cost for your products:
- We’ll provide a manufacturing cost estimate for you. This estimate is based on a comprehensive evaluation of comparable products sold by Amazon, by other sellers, and through wholesale channels.
- You can provide your manufacturing costs directly. If you don’t provide your own costs, we’ll automatically apply our estimate which you can change when you’re ready.
To help you prepare, you can view and manage manufacturing costs in the Inventory Defect and Reimbursement portal starting in late January using a new Manage Your Manufacturing Cost page.
We’re constantly refining our operations and processes to prevent products from being lost or damaged and having to be reimbursed. For cases where reimbursement is necessary, we’re focused on ensuring timely compensation. We now offer automatic reimbursements for items lost in our fulfillment centers, saving you time, and eliminating the need for you to submit a claim to receive reimbursement.
For items that are lost or damaged after a customer order in Amazon’s store, we’ll continue to reimburse you for the sales price on the original order minus applicable fees.
For more information on the policy change, please visit the Changes to program policies.
On August 20, 2025, we announced that irrelevant or redundant variation themes would be removed from our listing experiences. These variation themes are marked as “Deprecated: Do Not Use” in our new product templates. We also published a list of variation themes and product types affected by this change.
This change was only intended to impact variation themes that were not needed. We've revised the list to only remove variation themes that had no sales in the past 12 months. Additionally, we won’t remove any versions of critical variation themes like size, color, and style for applicable "Product Types".
Your existing variation families will continue to operate normally, with no disruption to sales. If you want to update them, you can do so at any time. Child ASINs will stay active even if you choose to update your variation themes.
To view the updated list of variation themes we’re removing, go to Variation themes planned for removal.
For more information about variation themes and how to manage variations, go to Variation relationship FAQ.
We appreciate your feedback and remain committed to providing you with a best-in-class listing experience.
- © 1999-2025, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates
