Amazon This Week: 9 Changes to Seller Central

Nine changes landed on Amazon sellers in the same week, most of them inside Seller Central itself. Some need action before a deadline, most need none. Here is what changed and what it actually asks of you.

Login is moving to passkeys, and someone else is probably using yours

On 15 September, Amazon emailed sellers that passkey sign-in is becoming mandatory. The switch rolls out account by account starting roughly two weeks after that email, with no single date for everyone, and it covers both Seller Central and buyer accounts. Once an account is converted, the password still exists for account recovery, but ordinary sign-in only works with a passkey: a device fingerprint, face scan or PIN.

The passkey itself is not the problem. The problem is everyone who currently signs into your Seller Central under your own login: staff, an agency, an assistant, or a session running on a VDS. A passkey is tied to one physical device. Before your account converts, work out who actually needs their own Seller Central user (User Permissions supports this already) rather than a shared login, because the shared login is what stops working.

Seller Assistant gained memory and a permanent job, and it now runs inside Claude

At Accelerate 2026 on 23 September, Amazon's own in-house Seller Central assistant, Seller Assistant, picked up persistent memory: it now carries your pricing patterns, inventory cycles and stated goals across sessions instead of resetting each time. It also gained workflows, plain-language automations ("alert me if any of my top 10 products drops below four stars") that keep running while you are logged out, with guardrails you set and a full action log. Amazon now calls it, specifically, a supply chain expert.

Separately, a new Selling Partner plugin connects your account data (listings, performance, inventory, sales) to outside AI tools, starting with Amazon's own Quick and, in beta, Anthropic's Claude. It can act, not just read, and every action needs a human confirmation and leaves an audit trail. US sellers only for now, other stores later.

Third, every primary account holder gets a free 12-month Amazon Quick Plus subscription (normally $20 per user per month), plus two more free seats for co-workers. Sign-up closes 31 December 2026.

What to actually do: claim the free Quick Plus year before it closes, it costs nothing. If you already work inside Claude, the plugin is a controlled way to hand it your account data without a second login.

Amazon let competing marketplaces into Seller Central

US sellers can now connect eBay, Shopify, TikTok Shop and Walmart accounts inside Seller Central itself: listings, orders and per-channel profitability in one place, free, rolling out gradually. Edit a product description once and Amazon reformats and republishes it to the connected listings on the other three. Shopify and Walmart orders sit next to Amazon orders and can ship through Amazon in a few clicks, and a separate screen shows what each SKU earns on each channel.

For scale: five years ago Amazon actively discouraged selling elsewhere, charging more to ship outside orders through FBA, and, per Marketplace Pulse, may still be capable of surfacing a product's listing less favorably when it is cheaper on another channel. Amazon already tracks competitor pricing across other marketplaces; connecting your channels also hands it your sales volume there, something it did not have before. Amazon states it will not use this data in its own retail business. If Walmart is already one of your channels, the two platforms behave differently enough in advertising and reporting that a shared dashboard does not make them one account to run.

Payouts land in a day, and financial reporting moved to one screen

Since 21 September, Express Payout is on by default for eligible US sellers, free, no signup. Once Amazon initiates a payout, it now reaches your bank within 24 hours, weekends and holidays included, instead of the previous 3 to 5 business days. The one requirement is that your US bank supports instant transfers; check yours at The Clearing House. Debit-card payouts of $50,000 or less land within 24 hours too; larger amounts and payouts over $10 million route to standard delivery instead.

The same week, new Seller Central's Finance Workspace went live: net proceeds, earnings, fees and deductions by month on one overview screen, with a click-through to the detail behind every number, next to a summary of your next payout.

Four new categories get compliance questions before listing, starting 26 October

From 26 October, creating or editing a listing in four categories requires answering new compliance questions: refrigerators, air conditioners, freezers and similar products (refrigerant gas properties); shock absorbers and suspension lift supports (the shock-absorbing mechanism); markers and writing instruments (ink properties); and pool and spa water-treatment products (chemical composition and packaging). Amazon's stated reason is identifying dangerous goods more precisely, opening up more shipping methods, and cutting unnecessary disposal fees. Existing listings in these categories need no action before the date; the questions appear the next time you create or edit one.

FBA Export adds more than 175 destinations

Amazon is expanding FBA Export to over 175 new destinations, rolling out across accounts over 30 days. If you already use FBA Export, the new destinations activate automatically within eight days, unless you have previously restricted specific countries or products, in which case they stay off. Check your Restricted Countries list now, before the first order arrives somewhere you did not mean to ship.

AGL now ships battery electronics as ordinary cargo

Amazon Global Logistics expanded what counts as general cargo: electronics built around nickel-cadmium, alkaline, zinc-based or silver-oxide batteries, small mechanical devices, and new equipment shipped without fuel or hazardous residue. Amazon's own examples include Bluetooth speakers, smartwatches and portable power banks, which can now ship by air or sea alongside ordinary inventory instead of as a separate, restricted shipment. If any of your SKUs previously had to ship separately for this reason, they may now consolidate with the rest of your freight through AGL.

The main listing photo gets checked before you submit, not after

Creating a listing one at a time, on desktop or in the mobile app, now triggers an immediate check on the main image: non-white background, text, logos, graphics or watermarks. A defect shows as "Issue detected" on the photo tile; Fix Image lets you accept a corrected version where Amazon can generate one, upload your own, or acknowledge the defect and continue. Small change, real difference: previously this kind of rejection only surfaced after submission, once the listing had already failed review. It only catches the main image, not the rest of the listing; our free listing audit tool checks content and discoverability beyond that one photo.

Amazon shut Meta's shopping agent out. Shopify let it in and gets paid on every checkout

In September, Meta launched Muse, a personal AI agent that browses sites, fills in forms and completes purchases with a user's consent. Amazon blocked Muse from its marketplace on 21 September, saying Meta never disclosed that Muse would access Amazon, that the agent does not identify itself while browsing, and that it appears to capture and store customer credentials. Shopify took the opposite position: it added Meta as a channel in its Agentic Storefronts program the day Muse launched, sharing merchant products with it by default, and on 21 September extended that to full Shop Pay checkout.

The logic differs by business model. Shopify earns when its merchants sell, regardless of which door the buyer came through, an AI agent included. The AI layer on Amazon belongs to Amazon, and letting a rival's agent transact inside it would hand a competitor a read on Amazon's own shoppers.

Between the AI agent now living inside Seller Central and the one Amazon just shut out of its storefront, the pattern is consistent: Amazon wants AI transacting on its accounts, on its terms, inside its own walls. Seller Assistant recommends and, with permission, acts, but it is still Amazon's own system reading Amazon's own data, which is a different thing from handing account management to software outright.