Amazon Expands Max Box Length for FBA Orders — What Sellers Need to Know
Effective June 20, 2025, Amazon has officially increased the maximum box length for FBA shipments in the US from 25 inches to 36 inches. This is a welcome update for brands shipping larger or longer products — or for those trying to streamline packaging across multiple sales channels.
Here’s the new FBA standard-size box limits:
- Length: up to 36 inches
- Width: up to 25 inches
- Height: up to 25 inches
- Weight: up to 50 lb
Amazon confirms that any shipments already sent using these new dimensions will be accepted without penalty or defect charges.
Why this matters:
This adjustment helps sellers better align with industry packaging standards and makes it easier to consolidate fulfillment operations across Amazon, DTC, and retail. If you’ve been forced to split shipments or repackage longer items in the past, this is your green light to simplify.
Tip: If your product packaging already exceeds 25 inches in length, now’s the time to revisit your FBA prep and shipping workflows.
Prime Day Prep Resource Roundup – Your Last-Minute Checklist
Prime Day 2025 officially kicks off in the U.S. at 12:01 a.m. on July 8 and runs through July 11 at midnight. If you’re finalizing your strategy (or still catching up), Amazon’s Seller Forums have published a Prime Day Prep Series packed with best practices, deadlines, and last-minute optimization tips.
Here’s a quick rundown of the most useful content:
Final-Check Playbook
- Deal Diligence – Ensure your offers are correctly mapped and meet Prime Day criteria
- Campaign Optimization Tips – Make final adjustments to your ads to boost visibility and conversions
- Promotion Fees Overview – Understand costs tied to Lightning Deals, Best Deals, and Prime-Exclusive Discounts
- Listing Optimization – Review your titles, images, and backend keywords for peak discoverability
- Merchant Fulfilled Prep – Ready your MFN operations for increased order volume
Hidden Gems to Review
- Bulk listing management tips
- How to build reviews ethically
- Using 3D and AR content to upgrade product pages
- Deal scheduling reminders and insights
More Resources + Blog Posts
Full content and discussions can be found in Amazon’s Prime Day 2025 Forum Post
TLDR
- Verify deals are scheduled and live
- Tighten up your campaigns and spend caps
- Watch daily performance and adjust if needed
- Prep MFN and customer service teams
- Use the Amazon Seller App or Campaign Manager for real-time tracking
Make this week count. Let’s move some product.
June Seller Resource Recap: Key Updates You Might’ve Missed
As we head into the thick of Prime Day season, Amazon’s forum team shared a helpful roundup of top educational content from June — focused on brand protection, listing management, account setup, and return strategies. Here are the highlights, with direct links and what sellers can implement right away:
Topic: Account Setup
Learn which documents are needed to verify new or existing seller accounts. Includes guidance for avoiding common issues during Seller Identity Verification (SIV), like mismatched names or outdated bank statements.
Category Optimization for Prime Day
Topic: Create and Manage Listings
Quick guide to placing your products in the most relevant categories to boost search visibility and conversion during Prime Day.
Product & Food Safety Violations
Topic: Account Health
Outlines how to respond to safety violation alerts, including the documentation Amazon expects and steps for resolving the issue efficiently.
Topic: Grow Your Business
Curated checklist and tips for Prime Day success, including inventory planning, ad campaign tuning, and using promotions effectively across July 8–11.
Report Unauthorized Brand Name Changes
Topic: Manage Your Brand
Step-by-step instructions for protecting your brand when unauthorized edits are made to brand names or listings.
Returns Strategy and Customer Satisfaction
Topic: Manage Buyer Experience
Best practices to handle returns efficiently, reduce cost, and maintain positive customer experiences — especially during high-volume periods like Prime Day.
Handling “Item Not Received” Claims
Topic: Fulfill Orders
Learn how to prevent and resolve INR claims using tracking, clear documentation, and proactive customer service.
Topic: Community Connections
Recap of June’s Ask Amazon sessions on Growth, Reporting, and Ads. Includes details on upcoming events like Seller Summit and Accelerate for in-person learning and networking.
Takeaway:
Share this roundup with your team. Each link tackles a key part of the seller experience — from compliance and logistics to visibility and customer trust — and serves as a practical resource heading into Prime Day and beyond.
How to Win in ChatGPT Search: What eCommerce Sellers Need to Know
As ChatGPT rolls out product discovery features, it’s quietly becoming a new search engine for shopping—and some brands are already gaining visibility and traffic by optimizing their content accordingly.
What’s Happening
According to Peter Quadrel’s LinkedIn post, early winners in ChatGPT’s product discovery are brands that:
- Use structured, helpful content
- Answer real customer questions
- Maintain consistent brand and product naming across external pages
The supporting SEO strategy doc explains how OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT’s crawler, indexes brand content and how sellers can ensure their products are eligible to surface in AI-driven search queries.
Why It Matters
This is early-mover SEO for the next phase of eCommerce discovery. If your product shows up in response to a buyer query inside ChatGPT, it can drive traffic to your site or Amazon listings—without paid ads. Brands that optimize now may secure high-value placements while competition is still low.
Action Steps for eCommerce Sellers
- Update your robots.txt
Ensure your site allows OAI-SearchBot access. Add:
User-agent: oai-searchbot
Allow: / - Use consistent product naming
ChatGPT can struggle with brand confusion. Use the same product names and descriptions across your website, Amazon, social, and third-party content. - Add clear Q&A content to your pages
Structure blog posts and product pages to answer specific customer questions. Use H2 headers and bullet points so the bot can extract answers cleanly. - Implement structured data (JSON-LD)
Add schema markup to your site to help ChatGPT understand product attributes like price, reviews, ingredients, and use cases. - Track traffic with UTM codes
Add utm_source=chatgpt.com to your site links so you can see when ChatGPT is driving traffic. - Refresh old blog posts and landing pages
Prioritize evergreen pages that can be restructured with FAQs and buyer-friendly copy. This helps indexation and improves your chances of ranking.
Bottom Line: ChatGPT is the next frontier in organic product discovery. Brands that move now can earn top-of-funnel visibility—before the rest of the market catches on.
Sam’s Club Launches MAP: New Omni-Channel Measurement for Retail Media
Walmart just dropped a major update on the retail media front: Sam’s Club MAP (Media and Performance) is live. This new omni-channel measurement platform aims to give advertisers closed-loop visibility into how ads perform both online and in-store—across Sam’s Club’s ecosystem.
What It Is
- MAP = Measurement, Attribution, and Performance
- Built in collaboration with The Trade Desk and LiveRamp
- Connects digital media exposure to actual retail purchases
- Tracks performance across in-club, online, and app channels
MAP also integrates data from Sam’s Club Member Access Platform (MAP) and applies it to real-time optimization for programmatic ad campaigns.
Why It Matters for eCommerce Sellers
Sam’s Club MAP reflects a growing push for full-funnel, omni-channel attribution—a level of data transparency sellers are demanding from retail media. If your brand sells via Sam’s Club or Walmart Connect, this signals that Walmart is stepping up its game to compete with Amazon’s retail media stack.
For sellers on Amazon, it’s a clear indicator that closed-loop performance and attribution will become table stakes across platforms.
Action Steps for Marketplace Brands
- If you’re selling through Sam’s Club:
- Reach out to your MAP rep to learn how to integrate with the new platform
- Use MAP insights to refine creative and target based on in-club behaviors
- If you’re only on Amazon:
- Benchmark your DSP or Sponsored Display attribution strategy
- Expect similar omni-channel metrics to roll out via Amazon’s Stores + Fresh locations over time
- Monitor retail media across platforms:
- Look for tools offering cross-retailer performance visibility
- Align ad spend with where attribution data is clearest and closest to revenue
Bottom Line: Sam’s Club MAP is raising the bar for retail media accountability. Sellers that lean into performance-based ad measurement—on or off Amazon—will be better positioned to scale profitably.
Amazon Asks Advertisers to Double Ad Spend for Prime Day—What This Signals
According to Adweek, Amazon has been privately encouraging select advertisers to increase their Prime Day ad spend by 2x or more in exchange for elevated placements, improved targeting, or early access to premium inventory.
What’s Happening
- Some brands were offered enhanced visibility only if they committed to a significant spend increase.
- Amazon is also pushing for larger investments in DSP and Streaming TV inventory, hinting at a deeper full-funnel focus for Prime Day 2025.
Why It Matters for eCommerce Sellers
This marks a shift in how Amazon is managing demand during its highest-traffic event. It suggests that media buying leverage is being consolidated, favoring brands willing to pay to play.
If you’re not already investing in Amazon DSP or haven’t planned incremental budget for Prime Day, you may be crowded out of top-of-search and other key placements—even with solid performance history.
Action Steps for Sellers
- Audit your current Prime Day budget
If you’re using Sponsored Products or Brands only, explore modest DSP investment or shift budget toward higher-converting SKUs. - Reconfirm campaign placement strategy
Know where your ads are showing and whether you’re bidding competitively in Prime Day-relevant slots like Top of Search and Detail Pages. - Watch performance and pacing closely
If CPCs surge, focus on ROAS-positive ASINs and avoid aggressive bidding across low-margin products. - Plan now for Q4
This push to double spend is likely a dress rehearsal for how Amazon will handle Black Friday/Cyber Monday. Build incremental budget flexibility into your Q4 planning.
Bottom Line:
Amazon is signaling that Prime Day success isn’t just about deals and listings—it’s about aggressive ad positioning. Brands that scale smartly, not blindly, will win the visibility battle.
Amazon Tightens Compliance Standards: Only Approved Labs Accepted Starting July 13
Effective July 13, 2025, Amazon will only accept product compliance documentation from approved, validated laboratories that meet its internal safety standards. This is part of a broader effort to ensure accurate, trustworthy testing results and reduce risk to customers.
What’s Changing
- Compliance test results from unapproved labs will be rejected during document review.
- Amazon has published a Suspended Validation Labs list—you should avoid using any lab listed there.
- To remain compliant, testing must be performed by a lab within Amazon’s Service Provider Network (SPN) or an otherwise approved facility.
Why It Matters for eCommerce Sellers
Sellers that use low-cost or non-accredited testing labs—especially international ones—risk delays, compliance rejections, or ASIN suspensions. This change particularly affects toys, electronics, beauty, supplements, and any regulated product category.
Action Steps
- Check the Suspended Validation Labs list before you request new compliance testing
- Use only approved labs found in the Amazon Service Provider Network
- Audit existing test reports in your compliance documentation. If any came from a now-suspended lab, prepare to retest
- Communicate this change to your compliance partners, factories, and sourcing teams to avoid last-minute disruptions
Bottom Line:
Amazon is raising the bar on product testing. Sellers who use non-compliant labs may see listing delays, rejections, or even account risk. Get ahead of this now—verify your lab before you test.
New Battery Compliance Questions Required for Vendor-Fulfilled Listings Starting July 28
Amazon is rolling out an important compliance update: starting July 28, 2025, all vendor-fulfilled listings that include batteries or battery-powered products must include updated safety information during listing creation or edits.
What’s Changing
You’ll be required to answer the following questions when listing applicable products:
- Are batteries required?
- Are batteries included?
- What is the battery cell composition? (e.g., alkaline, lithium-ion)
If your battery type isn’t listed in the dropdown, you’ll need to manually enter it using “other than listed.”
Incorrect or missing responses may lead to listing deactivation, even for previously active ASINs.
Why It Matters for eCommerce Sellers
This policy brings vendor-fulfilled listings in line with FBA hazmat standards and is part of Amazon’s broader push to improve product safety compliance. It will impact any category that includes electronics, toys, grooming tools, home devices, or anything battery-powered.
Action Steps
- Audit your catalog now for any listings with batteries or battery-powered functionality
- Gather accurate battery data from manufacturer specs, packaging, or product documentation
- Train listing teams to complete this field accurately when editing or uploading new products
- Bookmark the Dangerous Goods (Hazmat) Help Page for reference
Bottom Line:
Incorrect or incomplete answers could cost you the Buy Box or get listings suppressed. Get ahead of this by building compliance into your listing workflows before the July 28 deadline.
Amazon Launches High Return Rate Policy for Vendor Central – Effective June 18
Amazon has rolled out a High Return Rate (HRR) policy for U.S. Vendor Central accounts, targeting products marked with the “frequently returned item” badge. The move is part of a broader effort to improve catalog quality and reduce customer dissatisfaction.
What’s Changing
If your product receives this badge, Amazon may return unsold inventory to you at your expense. Here’s how it works:
- Products flagged as “frequently returned” have the highest return rates in their category
- Amazon will assess unsold inventory and may initiate a return
- Vendors must refund 100% of the item cost and pay a 10% shipping/handling fee
- If the vendor doesn’t accept the return, Amazon may dispose of the inventory, charging the vendor for disposal
Where to Review Products
- Check product detail pages directly for the badge
- Visit the Concessions Hub to review specific return rates
- Review Amazon’s full policy and FAQ
Impact on eCommerce Sellers
This is a cost-control and quality-control measure that shifts financial risk back to vendors. It could impact any brand in high-return categories like apparel, home, electronics, or beauty—especially if your listings are unclear or overpromise.
Action Steps for Vendors
- Audit your catalog for listings with the “frequently returned” badge
- Update product detail pages with clear, accurate descriptions, specs, dimensions, images, and compatibility details
- Monitor your return rates and review return reasons in the Concessions Hub
- Engage your product teams to address quality or fulfillment issues contributing to returns
- Prepare for cost recovery by budgeting for potential shipping, return, or disposal fees
Bottom Line:
Amazon is signaling that high return rates will no longer be passively absorbed. Brands that want to stay on shelf (and off the returns truck) will need to tighten product quality, listing accuracy, and post-purchase experience.
Amazon Makes It Easier to Manage Variations Using Bulk Spreadsheets
Amazon has announced a long-awaited improvement to variation management: you can now add new standalone ASINs to existing variation families—even if you didn’t create them. This update, live now for Vendor Central users, significantly reduces reliance on Amazon Support.
What You Can Do Now
Using bulk listing spreadsheets, vendors can:
- Create new variation families from scratch
- Group existing standalone ASINs into a new variation
- Add new standalone ASINs to any existing variation family, regardless of who originally created it
This is especially useful if:
- You have color, size, or pack count extensions to add to an existing parent
- Your listings were previously separated and need to be grouped for better customer experience
- You’re inheriting a catalog built by another vendor or Amazon itself
Why It Matters for eCommerce Sellers
This change removes one of the most frustrating bottlenecks in catalog management. Previously, many sellers had to open cases and wait days to merge or extend variations—not ideal during high-traffic periods like Prime Day or Q4.
Now, variation control is back in your hands, enabling faster merchandising, stronger product discovery, and a cleaner brand presentation.
Action Steps
- Download the bulk listing spreadsheet template
Use it to update or extend variation families efficiently - Audit your catalog
Identify ASINs that should be grouped for better customer navigation (e.g., sizes, colors, flavors) - Read the Variation Overview Help Guide
Understand rules for valid variation themes by category - Standardize variation titles and bullet points
Align formatting to improve relevance and clarity across the family
Bottom Line:
You no longer need Amazon’s help to manage most variation families. This update gives you more control over catalog structure—helping customers browse and buy more confidently.
The New Semester of Influence: How Back-to-School is Shaping the Creator Economy
In a recent post from Future Commerce, the team explores how Back-to-School season is evolving into a cultural and economic force that blends FOMO, family decision-making, and creator-led commerce.
Key Insights
- “New Semester” is the new “New Year”: Parents and kids alike view back-to-school as a reset moment—sparking spending across tech, apparel, and self-improvement categories.
- Influencer parents are shaping product discovery: TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts are filled with “what’s in my kid’s backpack” and “family back-to-school hauls,” driving real purchase intent.
- FOMO is fueling urgency: The feeling of missing out on must-haves—whether it’s a specific lunchbox or the right brand of earbuds—is driving families to spend more, sooner.
- Spending power is shared: Kids influence purchase decisions more than ever, while parents want to feel informed and aligned with trends.
Why It Matters for eCommerce Sellers
The back-to-school moment has morphed into a content-first shopping season, where trust is earned via relatability, not polished ads. For brands selling in relevant categories (stationery, electronics, fashion, health), this is a prime opportunity to leverage creators and lean into family-first narratives.
Action Steps
- Test creator partnerships now
Activate influencers who resonate with moms, dads, and Gen Alpha—especially across TikTok and Instagram Reels. - Position products around transformation
Focus on “fresh start” messaging—how your product helps kids or parents reset, prep, or thrive in the school year ahead. - Bundle for family economics
Consider family-value bundles, multi-packs, or loyalty pricing that addresses inflation-sensitive buying behaviors. - Build social proof into your listings
Incorporate UGC (user-generated content) and real-life use cases into A+ content and ads to echo what shoppers are seeing on social.
Bottom Line:
Back-to-school is no longer just a sales window—it’s a cultural moment driven by creators, shared values, and digital influence. Brands that meet this energy with relevant content and products can win not just the cart, but the customer long-term.
How to Identify Your Competitive Edge in the AI Era – Insights from Intentwise
In a recent LinkedIn post by Intentwise, the team outlines a clear framework for eCommerce brands to sharpen their edge in a world where AI is rapidly leveling the playing field.
Core Argument
AI tools like ChatGPT and automation platforms are making it easier for everyone to access market data, run ads, and generate content. That means the brands that win won’t just rely on AI—they’ll differentiate with strategy, structure, and judgment.
3 Competitive Moats Identified
- Data Infrastructure
Brands that organize and activate their data (think clean attribution, SKU-level P&Ls, and multi-source insights) will always outperform those guessing. - People and Process
The right team, paired with systems that scale, will execute faster and with better decision-making—especially when AI is part of the workflow. - Strategic Judgment
Knowing which levers to pull (and when) is what separates top operators. AI can generate options, but humans decide direction.
Why It Matters for eCommerce Sellers
As AI becomes ubiquitous, competitive advantage shifts from access to execution. Sellers can’t afford to rely on tools alone. They need to invest in building internal capabilities that allow them to act on AI-powered insights with clarity and confidence.
Action Steps
- Audit your data stack
Are you centralizing ad, sales, and margin data across platforms? If not, start building that infrastructure now. - Document your playbooks
Create SOPs for SEO, advertising, launch plans, and catalog updates. AI supports scale when the foundation is standardized. - Cultivate operator intuition
Train your team to ask better questions—not just get faster answers. The best sellers are becoming part-strategist, part-analyst.
Bottom Line:
AI won’t replace brands—it will amplify the ones that already know who they are and how they win. Sellers that build strong data, people, and decision-making processes will thrive in the next phase of marketplace competition.
Keep up with the latest Amazon and Walmart news updates and subscribe to our BellaVix newsletter 👇👇👇
Tired of scrolling?
Give your eyes a break and tune in to the latest episode of Selling on Giants: Weekly eCommerce News & Updates.
In this episode, we dive into the mounting pressure around Prime Day, new updates on longer FBA box limits, and the growing impact of ChatGPT-powered product search.
Stay informed and ahead of the curve in under 10 minutes.
🎧 Now streaming on Buzzsprout and YouTube