What you need to know

Amazon puts a 7-day clock on FBM returns Starting December 18, most US returns on seller-fulfilled orders will need a prepaid return label.

You’ll have seven calendar days from the return request to upload it in Manage seller-fulfilled returns, or to issue a full refund. Miss the window and Amazon may issue a returnless refund and deduct it from your account, and the customer keeps the product.

Meaning… on a $60 order with a $20 product cost and an $11 label, one missed deadline means you also lose the $20 unit.

Amazon hasn’t said whether these returnless refunds qualify for SAFE-T claims, so don’t count on getting the money back.

🗞 News

👉 Free webinar today: where TikTok Shop is winning Today, SmartScout’s Scott Needham and Michael White will cover which categories still have room, how TikTok demand spills over onto Amazon, and what’s selling for Halloween. Everyone who attends live gets 50% off SmartScout for 3 months.

👉 SoldScope (Helium 10, but for half the price) just added review analysis to it’s Chrome Extension, MCP and API. Test it out here with a 50% discount

👉 The Amazon’s Choice badge isn’t a permanent spot, as Ritu Java tracked one search term for 30 days: 12 different listings held the badge, it changed hands 13 times, and 8 of the 14 holds lasted a single day.

The holders were usually priced at or below the median and rated above it, often had fewer reviews than the median, and never ranked lower than #4 organically.

👉 Your SERP isn’t my SERP anymore. Try searching labial lipstick using Alexa for Shopping with your Amazon user, then with your wife’s/husband user. Check the results. Deifferent, uh?

With search results this personalized, keywords alone aren’t enough. Use AMC audiences in your sponsored ads, pick one clear audience instead of selling to everyone, and build awareness before the search happens, because a solid BSR isn’t enough on its own anymore.

👉 According to internal documents obtained by Business Insider, Amazon’s first-party device business is projected to lose $612M in 2026, up from an original projection of $438M.

Rising memory costs forced “difficult trade-offs” between volume, average selling prices and gross profit.

👉 Amazon extended its Black Friday deal-sourcing window to November 13, so check in Seller Central which promotion types and ASINs qualify. The extension doesn’t move the October 28 FBA inbound deadline for Amazon-optimized shipment splits.

Meanwhile, Amazon plans to hire a record 300,000+ US seasonal workers, 20% more than its usual 250,000.

👉 Amazon could be the biggest winner of Anthropic’s IPO, as it holds $6.2B in Anthropic convertible notes, and its own filings valued them at $97.9B as of June 30. In total it has invested about $18B, and Anthropic has committed to spend at least $110B on AWS over the next 10 years.

👉 Meta’s Muse passed 10M users in the US and Canada in six weeks. Shopping is its top use, and transactions average over $200. Walmart built a Personal Agent Protocol and an Agent Gateway to support agentic shopping, while Amazon blocks Muse with an anti-bot wall and builds its own agents. If you sell on both, the agent traffic is heading to Walmart.

👉 Walmart’s sales team is offering on-site brand lift studies to brands directly, bypassing agencies, with eligibility based on ad spend. The pitch is incrementality, which is exactly what CFOs ask about in Q4.

👉 Black Friday dates outside Amazon

• TikTok Shop runs November 11-30.

• Walmart spreads promotions across November 12-15, November 23-29 and November 30-December 2.

Line up your inventory, creator content, ads and pricing across all three channels and mind the price matching.

👉 Pinterest opens its inventory to Amazon DSP in the Americas and Asia Pacific, through Amazon DVA+, Google DV360 and Yahoo DSP.

A Moroccanoil campaign bought through Amazon Ads reportedly got 15% incremental reach, 1% audience overlap and 63% more new-to-brand buyers. Those figures come from the company, though. Europe isn’t included yet.

👉 Don Ecommerce Brent put up this amazing infographic: TikTok starts it. Amazon finishes it.