Amazon’s New Business Hour Delivery Rate Requirement: What Seller-Fulfilled Brands Need to Know Before September 30.

Starting September 30, 2026, Amazon is enforcing a new delivery standard for seller-fulfilled shipments going to B2B buyers. If you fulfill your own orders and sell to Amazon Business customers, this applies to you. What the Requirement Is The Business Hour Delivery Rate measures the percentage of your seller-fulfilled shipments delivered to Amazon Business customers within their operating hours, tracked over a rolling 14-day period. You will need to maintain a rate of 90% or higher. The enforcement is two-stage. If your rate is below 90% on September 30, Amazon notifies you and provides recommendations. If it does not improve by October 30, your seller-fulfilled offers may be deactivated for Amazon Business customers. FBA and retail offers are not affected. The Real Problem With This Metric Seller reaction has been pointed out, and not without reason. Once a package is handed to UPS or FedEx, delivery timing is entirely in the carrier's hands. Many commercial customers now close at 3pm or 4pm, or have variable hours, compressing the delivery window further. Sellers document cases where using all three of Amazon's recommended tools still produces a BHDR below 90%. What Amazon Says Guarantees Compliance Shipments fulfilled using Automated Handling Time, Shipping Settings Automation, and Amazon Buy Shipping together are guaranteed to meet the Business Hour Delivery Rate requirement. If you are using all three and still miss the threshold, you have documented protection. In the US, Amazon recommends UPS Ground, UPS Ground Saver, and FedEx Ground for reliable BHDR performance. Carrier selection is the most direct variable available to brands currently running below threshold. What to Do Now Check your current BHDR in the Eligibilities section of Account Health in Seller Central. If you are below 90%, you have twelve weeks before the assessment date to move it. The 14-day rolling calculation means changes to carrier selection and shipping settings take time to flow through to measured outcomes — starting adjustments in late September is too late. This is the third seller-fulfilled delivery metric Amazon has enforced or tightened in 2026, after the On-Time Delivery Rate update in February and the handling time accuracy requirement in June. Amazon's direction is clear: faster, more reliable self-fulfillment, enforced automatically. September 30 is twelve weeks away. Check your Account Health dashboard today. If you want to stay updated on Amazon changes, subscribe to our blog. If you need support with PPC, DSP, AMC, analytics, or a long-term growth strategy, contact the ANavigator team at info@anavigator.co  Book a call to get a FREE AUDIT by the link below:     Book a call – FREE AUDIT   Follow my Weekly Newsletter on LinkedIn:  / amazon-digest-for-brands-7232361008185372672   Follow me on LinkedIn:  / ookovalov  Follow ANavigator on social media:  / anavigator    /@anavigator_official  / anavigator7    / @anavigators     LinkedIn page to contact us:   Author: Oleksandr Kovalov Role: Founder & CEO @ ANavigator — The ANavigator Team

This week's Amazon updates cover new automatic listings, ad format changes, and a couple of deadlines sellers shouldn't ignore. Sponsored Brands gets two new ad types, Amazon is rolling out Virtual Multipacks automatically, and a new delivery rule affects sellers shipping to Amazon Business customers. There's also a possible change to how star ratings display, plus updates to creative tools and visual search. 📌 Contents Virtual Multipacks Are Coming to Eligible ASINs Sponsored Brands Bulksheets Add Manual and Automatic Collection Ads New Business Hour Delivery Rate for FBM Sellers Sponsored Brands API Retires Product Collection Ads Old Sponsored Ads Reports Page Is Shutting Down Amazon May Be Rounding Some Star Ratings Up Responsive eCommerce Creative Adds Rich Media and AI Video New Visual Search Features Land on Amazon's App ChatGPT Ads Keep Changing Format Hector AI Webinar on Using Claude for Amazon PPC   1. Virtual Multipacks Are Coming to Eligible ASINs Amazon has started notifying sellers inside Seller Central about a new Virtual Multipack pilot. Eligible ASINs will automatically receive a Virtual Multipack listing, which appears as a variation linked to the original single-pack ASIN. All of these listings are expected to be created by July 27, and they're scheduled to go live for customers on August 10. Sellers get a window to review, edit, or delete these listings from the Manage All Inventory page before they appear to shoppers. This fits a pattern of Amazon building features that push customers toward buying more units without adding listing work for sellers. If you carry single-unit products, check your inventory dashboard before the end of the month so you're not surprised by a new listing you didn't ask for. Read more here by Will Haire   2. Sponsored Brands Bulksheets Add Manual and Automatic Collection Ads Amazon has scheduled a July 6 update to Sponsored Brands bulk sheets that adds two new ad entity types. Manual Collection ads let you select 3 to 10 products from your catalog and add a custom title of up to 32 characters, or leave it blank for Amazon to generate one. Automatic Collection ads have Amazon's system select and group your most relevant products based on your keyword targets and shopper search queries, with the option to exclude up to 1,000 ASINs. Two new bulk sheet columns come with this update: Ad Title for manual campaigns and Product Exclusions for automatic ones. The older Product Collection ad type is now deprecated, though existing campaigns keep running and can still be edited. For new campaigns, Amazon recommends building with one of the two new formats instead. Agencies managing Sponsored Brands at scale should add these to their bulk sheet templates once the update lands. Read more here by Oleksandr Kovalov   3. New Business Hour Delivery Rate for FBM Sellers Amazon is introducing a new performance metric for seller-fulfilled shipments sent to Amazon Business customers in the US, called Business Hour Delivery Rate. Starting September 30, 2026, sellers must maintain a 90% or higher rate, meaning orders should arrive during the customer's normal business hours. Amazon tracks this over a rolling 14-day period rather than a fixed monthly window. If a seller's rate falls below 90% on September 30, Amazon sends a notification along with recommendations. If the rate hasn't recovered by October 30, 2026, Amazon may deactivate that seller's offers for Amazon Business customers specifically. FBA and retail offers aren't part of this requirement, so the risk applies only to sellers handling their own fulfillment. Anyone selling into the Amazon Business channel through self-fulfillment should review current delivery times now rather than waiting for the deadline. Read more here by Ed Rosenberg   4. Sponsored Brands API Retires Product Collection Ads Amazon is phasing out the Product Collection ad type from the Sponsored Brands Ads API, shifting advertisers toward the newer Sponsored Brands Collections structure. From September 2026, API requests built for the old format will still be processed, but Amazon will create a Manual Collection ad in its place. Any custom image submitted through those older requests is accepted but won't display anywhere on the ad. Starting in January 2027, the legacy endpoints will shut down entirely, and any tool still calling them will return an error with no fallback. This affects PPC teams, agencies, and software providers who built automation directly on the Ads API rather than through the Ads Console. The migration window gives roughly six months of overlap before the hard cutoff, so integrations should be updated well before the new year. Read more here by Oleksandr Kovalov   5. Old Sponsored Ads Reports Page Is Shutting Down Amazon announced on June 8, 2026, the same day Unified Reporting launched in Ads Console, that the older Sponsored Ads reports page is being retired. Starting December 17, 2026, sellers and agencies will no longer be able to create new reports on the old page. On December 31, 2026, the page is removed entirely. All reporting consolidates into Unified Reporting, which combines ad products, accounts, and countries in a single view. Anyone with saved reports, scheduled exports, or scripts pointed at the old page should confirm that those still work correctly under the new system. Six months sounds like plenty of time, but teams managing reporting across multiple accounts shouldn't leave this until December. Read more here by Kate Pavlenko   6. Amazon May Be Rounding Some Star Ratings Up A seller reported noticing that Amazon appears to round some listings with a 4.2-star average up to 4.5 stars, whereas the rounding threshold used to be closer to 4.3. In the same post, a listing at 4.1 stars was rounded down to 4 stars instead. The difference between showing 4.2 and 4.5 stars is small mathematically, but can be noticeable to a shopper scanning search results quickly. Amazon hasn't publicly confirmed any change to its rounding logic, so this is currently an observation rather than a documented policy update. Sellers near these thresholds may want to monitor how their ratings appear over the coming weeks. If the pattern holds across more accounts, it could shift how sellers think about the value of small improvements in review scores. Read more here by Steven Pope   7. Responsive eCommerce Creative Adds Rich Media and AI Video Amazon updated Responsive eCommerce Creative, its automated display ad format, with a set of rich media upgrades. Video, lifestyle imagery, and logos now adapt to the placement where the ad appears, rendering full screen on Fire TV or in a more editorial style on a news site. Video-in-banner ads are now live in the US, with options to upload existing video, reuse footage from past campaigns, or generate a clip with AI, and Amazon tests multiple versions before favoring the best performer. A newer capability can animate a single static product photo, adding effects like steam rising from a cup or seasonal details. Amazon is also expanding the conversational prompt feature, which lets shoppers ask questions directly within an ad, to sites outside Amazon.com for the first time. Advertisers running display or DSP campaigns should check whether these new creative options are available in their accounts. Read more here by Kozachuk Vita   8. New Visual Search Features Land on Amazon's App Amazon rolled out a group of new visual search features to its US app. Shop by Style presents real, purchasable products in curated collages under themes like "Urban Luxe," letting shoppers tap through to a dedicated page. Lens Live lets a shopper point their camera at a physical item and instantly see a scrollable list of matching Amazon products and prices without leaving the camera view. Shoppers can also ask Alexa specific questions about an item through the camera, or upload a photo and refine the search with text. The feature generating the most discussion is AI-generated "Ghost" product thumbnails, which appear while typing a search and represent products that don't actually exist, meant only as a visual guide toward similar real items. The disclaimer marking these as AI-generated is small, which has raised questions about whether shoppers will understand they aren't looking at a real product. Sellers should watch how this affects search behavior, particularly in visually driven categories like apparel and home goods. Read more here by Marketing4Ecommerce English Edition   9. ChatGPT Ads Keep Changing Format Ad placements inside ChatGPT are now on their third design iteration. The format is shifting toward larger images that take up less horizontal space, which appears to be preparation for showing multiple ads side by side, though currently only one ad displays at a time. More ad formats are expected soon, built specifically for shopping use cases. For now, these placements still resemble standard banner ads. Brands testing channels outside Amazon's own advertising may want to watch how this format develops before committing budget. Read more here by Juozas Kaziukėnas That's the full rundown for Week 27. New ad formats, a couple of deadlines worth calendaring, and a few AI-driven changes to how shoppers search on Amazon. Subscribe to the blog to get next week's digest as soon as it's published.   If you want to stay updated on Amazon changes, subscribe to our blog. If you need support with PPC, DSP, AMC, analytics, or a long-term growth strategy, contact the ANavigator team at info@anavigator.co  Book a call to get a FREE AUDIT by the link below:     Book a call – FREE AUDIT   Follow my Weekly Newsletter on LinkedIn:  / amazon-digest-for-brands-7232361008185372672   Follow me on LinkedIn:  / ookovalov Follow ANavigator on social media:  / anavigator    /@anavigator_official  / anavigator7    / @anavigators     LinkedIn page to contact us:   Author: Oleksandr Kovalov Role: Founder & CEO @ ANavigator — The ANavigator Team