ANavigator Weekly Amazon Digest — Week 26

Week 26 brought nine updates across ads, vendor analytics, promotions, marketplace regulation, and catalog management. Here is everything that moved this week.

📌 Contents:

1. Amazon May Be Testing a New Points-Based Promotion in the U.S.
2. Amazon Adds Multi-Touch Attribution to Sponsored Products
3. Amazon Buying Ads on ChatGPT
4. Amazon Under UK Regulatory Spotlight for UI Self-Preferencing
5. Amazon AVS Insights Hub Launches for 1P Vendors
6. New Seller Incentives Expanding July 30
7. Variation Wizard Being Replaced in Seller Central
8. FBM Return Protection Now Live Across European Marketplaces
9. Amazon Tests Mobile Product Comparison Feature

1. Amazon May Be Testing a New Points-Based Promotion in the U.S.

Amazon appears to be testing a new promotion type called a Points Deal, with a “Create Points Deal” interface now visible inside promotional tools. The feature includes budget controls, scheduling options, and a product-level badge — structured similarly to existing Coupons and Deals. Nothing has been officially confirmed, but the interface detail suggests this is closer to a real rollout than a rough internal test. If launched widely, brands would have another lever to drive conversion and visibility without relying entirely on price reductions. Monitoring this over the next few weeks is worth doing, particularly for brands that have found Coupons and Deals expensive relative to their margins.

Read more here by Juan Talavera

2. Amazon Adds Multi-Touch Attribution to Sponsored Products

Amazon has introduced an Attribution toggle in the Sponsored Products reporting console. Switching it on unlocks multi-touch attribution columns alongside the traditional last-click view. Sales credit can now be distributed across every ad that contributed to a purchase — not just the one that captured the final click. This matters most for broad match keywords and upper-funnel campaigns that typically look underperforming in last-click reports. Path-to-conversion analysis becomes possible for the first time inside native Sponsored Products data. Pull a 30-day report, compare the two attribution models, and look at the gap — that is where most accounts are making cut decisions they should not be making.

Read more here by Hitesh Aswani

3. Amazon Buying Ads on ChatGPT

Amazon has started running ads on ChatGPT. The context matters here: Amazon actively blocks AI scrapers from accessing its catalog and turned off Google Shopping ads last year — including pulling the product feed that powers organic Google Shopping results. Buying ad placements on ChatGPT fits the same logic. Amazon does not want to be aggregated or surfaced through third-party AI tools. It will, however, pay to drive traffic directly from those platforms back to Amazon.com. OpenAI’s Instant Checkout experiment failed to gain traction, and the company has since shifted toward building an ad business. Amazon’s position is consistent: own the destination, buy reach elsewhere.

Read more here by Juozas Kaziukėnas

4. Amazon Under UK Regulatory Spotlight for UI Self-Preferencing

Amazon’s own-brand product pages — such as Blink Outdoor 4 — include UI elements and merchandising real estate that third-party sellers do not have access to. The UK Competition and Markets Authority secured binding commitments from Amazon in 2023 over Buy Box manipulation. The new Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act now gives regulators significantly broader authority to act on UI-level self-preferencing. A £2.7 billion class-action lawsuit approved last year, representing 200,000 third-party sellers, specifically targets Amazon’s anti-competitive platform practices. For 3P sellers operating in categories where Amazon competes with its own hardware, margin competition is structurally unfavorable. Use AMC to map conversion paths not visible through standard PPC reporting, and build off-platform traffic sources to reduce dependence on Amazon-controlled discovery surfaces.

Read more here by Sebastian Joseph

5. Amazon AVS Insights Hub Launches for 1P Vendors

Amazon has begun inviting AVS-enrolled vendors to its new Insights Hub — a six-dashboard analytics platform built on Amazon Quick. The dashboards cover business performance, deal performance, operational performance, weeks of cover, category benchmarking, and peer performance comparison. The peer comparison dashboard is the most notable addition: it allows vendors to benchmark their revenue, ad spend, glance views, and conversion rate against other AVS vendors — data that was previously only accessible through direct communication with internal Amazon contacts. The platform is currently US-only, with international rollout expected in the coming months. With Prime Day approaching, AVS vendors should check for invitations now.

Read more here by Martin Heubel

6. New Seller Incentives Expanding July 30

Amazon is updating its New Seller Incentives Program starting July 30, adding fee credits, free storage, free returns, and Vine support for eligible new FBA products. The existing program already offers more than $50,000 in potential benefits: 10% back on the first $50,000 in branded sales, 5% back on the next $950,000, and credits for Vine, Sponsored Ads, coupons, and FBA shipping. The practical issue is that most sellers either overlook these benefits entirely or do not structure their launch to capture them. If a new brand launch is planned for the second half of this year, build the launch plan around these incentives explicitly before spending begins.

Read more here by Tanveer Ahmed

7. Variation Wizard Being Replaced in Seller Central

Amazon is gradually phasing out the Variation Wizard and integrating variation management into the “List Your Products” dashboard. The updated workflow allows sellers to search products, view variation families, access existing variants, add offers to child ASINs, and download pre-filled variation templates — all without leaving the listing workspace. Bulk uploads and flat files remain functional for complex or large-scale catalog operations. For day-to-day variation management, the new flow removes several steps that previously required navigating between tools. Sellers managing large variation catalogs should test the new interface now rather than waiting for the legacy tool to be removed.

Read more here by Khadija Mir

8. FBM Return Protection Now Live Across European Marketplaces

Amazon has introduced a product condition questionnaire for FBM orders in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, and Sweden. Buyers must now complete it before initiating a return. If a shopper opens a sealed product and wants to return it due to buyer’s remorse, the return can no longer be processed through Amazon’s self-service flow. Sellers have always had the legal right under EU consumer protection law to decline such returns — Amazon has now built the process to enforce it. Sellers must still accept returns for sealed products returned for any reason other than buyer’s remorse, and for any defective or damaged item. Expect an increase in direct Buyer-Seller Messaging in the near term as buyers adjust. Update return handling procedures now if you operate FBM across any of these markets.

Read more here by Donald Murray

9. Amazon Tests Mobile Product Comparison Feature

A product comparison feature briefly appeared in Amazon’s mobile app, allowing shoppers to browse, select, and compare products side by side. It disappeared within a day of being spotted. Whether it returns in the same form is unclear. The direction, however, is consistent with how Amazon has been building out its shopping experience — making it easier for shoppers to quickly evaluate differences between competing products. Listings that do not clearly address common purchase questions are structurally disadvantaged on any comparison surface. Review listing content against the questions your category’s shoppers ask most frequently.

Read more here by Charlie Banks

Week 26 covered a wide range — from new attribution data that changes how campaigns should be evaluated, to a potential new promotion type, to regulatory pressure building around Amazon’s own-brand practices. Subscribe to the ANavigator Weekly Amazon Digest to get this every week, and visit anavigator.co/blog for deeper analysis on the updates that matter most.

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Author: Oleksandr Kovalov
Role: Founder & CEO @ ANavigator

— The ANavigator Team