Important Amazon Weekly News #24

What happened  
In an interview in Davos, Jassy explained that Amazon and its sellers stockpiled inventory in spring 2025 to avoid price increases linked to Trump-era tariffs. Those inventories ran out by the fall, and consumers are now seeing higher prices.

Seller responses vary: some pass the added costs directly to buyers, others absorb them to protect demand, while many choose a middle ground. Amazon says customers are still spending — but shopping behavior has changed. Buyers are more price-conscious, actively looking for deals, and delaying purchases of higher-priced non-essential items.

This contradicts Jassy’s statements from July, when he called reports about tariff-driven price hikes exaggerated and argued that Amazon’s diverse seller base would keep prices low. He now acknowledges that options for price containment have largely been exhausted.

Why it matters  
Jassy articulated what most sellers already know: retail operates on single-digit margins, and a 10% cost increase cannot simply be absorbed. Research shows that U.S. consumers ultimately bear about 96% of the tariff burden, which has generated roughly $200 billion in government revenue.

Sellers face a difficult reality. Industry reports indicate that in 2025 Amazon suppressed Buy Box eligibility for sellers who raised prices by as little as 5–10%. One seller behind the Wall Decals brand said his listing was penalized after a $2 price increase, even though his costs rose 25% due to tariffs on Chinese imports.

What it means for Amazon sellers  
Survival increasingly means choosing the least damaging option. Raising prices risks losing traffic; absorbing costs destroys margins. Compromise strategies only work while reserves last. Since no seller has infinite resources, price increases eventually become unavoidable.

What happened  
Starting January 26, Shopify merchants pay 4% to OpenAI on sales completed via ChatGPT. Combined with Shopify’s payment processing fee (around 2.9%), total costs come to roughly 7% per transaction.

For comparison, selling on Amazon typically involves a 15% referral fee, plus another 10–15% of revenue spent on advertising just to gain visibility in search results. In practice, Amazon often captures 25–30% of a sale before FBA fees are even factored in.

More than one million Shopify sellers now have potential access to ChatGPT’s audience, which generates an estimated 3.9 billion product-related queries per year. According to analytics platform Northbeam, AI-driven search traffic grew from 0.01% to 0.15% of total e-commerce traffic in 2025 — a 15× increase in a single year.

Why it matters  
ChatGPT is offering something Amazon has largely eliminated: organic visibility without mandatory ad spend. OpenAI states that ads do not influence ChatGPT’s answers and are always clearly labeled. If this policy holds, sellers gain a channel where products surface through contextual questions, not keyword bidding.

This represents a fundamental shift: discovery based on intent and problem-solving, rather than who spends the most on ads.

What it means for Amazon sellers  
For sellers, ChatGPT is a low-risk experiment. Integration doesn’t require inventory migration or operational changes, fees are fixed, and advertising is optional. For niche products that struggle in traditional keyword-driven search, this opens the door to true organic demand.

The real question is scale. Today, AI-driven commerce is still a small slice of the market — but it’s growing fast. If OpenAI maintains a clear separation between answers and ads, this could become the first genuinely organic sales channel in years.

What happened  
Amazon announced the policy update for FBM orders. Under the new rules, the 30-day window starts from the later of:

• the date the return is scanned at the seller’s warehouse, or

• the date the refund is issued.

For lost shipments, the countdown begins from the last carrier scan. Amazon says the change aligns SAFE-T with the standard U.S. return period and the A-to-Z appeal window. The company advises sellers to review all returns and refunds older than 30 days before February 16 to file any eligible claims.

Why it matters  
SAFE-T claims are the only formal protection sellers have against buyer fraud, shipping damage, and issues outside their control. Reaction on the Seller Central forums has been overwhelmingly negative.

Sellers argue the system already rejects most claims, and that Amazon frequently allows buyers to select broad return reasons that qualify for free return shipping. The core frustration: buyers can initiate returns for up to 45 days, Amazon can take months to process FBA returns, yet sellers now have just 30 days to submit a claim once a return is received.

What Amazon sellers should do  
Before February 16, sellers should audit all returns older than 30 days and submit SAFE-T claims where applicable. After that date, compensation opportunities may be permanently lost.

The change is especially painful for sellers who wait for final shipping cost data before filing. Going forward, sellers may need to automate return monitoring and submit claims immediately — even with partial data — rather than waiting for full reconciliation.