Amazon sellers began sharing an email on April 6 about a change to payments for Amazon Ads accounts that set off confusion and a threatened boycott of Amazon advertising. The email informed sellers that, “Beginning April 15, 2026, your advertising costs will be automatically deducted from your retail proceeds. If your Amazon retail proceeds are insufficient to cover your advertising costs, we will charge your existing payment method (such as a credit or debit card) as a backup.”
But on April 14, Amazon published the following update on its website:
“At Amazon, we’re always listening to feedback to improve our tools and better understand where we can do more for advertisers. We recently let a small number of advertisers know that we’d be updating their available payment methods to pay with their seller or vendor account balance or Pay by Invoice. Based on feedback we heard, we’re deferring this change until August 1, 2026 to give this group of advertisers more time to prepare.
“With account balance payments, debits and credits are handled automatically. This is the payment method used by the overwhelming majority of our advertisers. “With Pay by Invoice, we send an invoice at the end of each month, and payment is due 30 days later. To select Pay by Invoice, advertisers should update payment settings in the Billing section of the Ads Console. If an advertiser doesn’t select a preference before the change takes effect, we’ll automatically update their default payment method to deduction from available seller or vendor account balance. The existing payment method (such as a credit or debit card) will be retained as a backup payment method to ensure uninterrupted service in case of insufficient funds.
“This update applies only to the small group of advertisers who have been contacted directly.
“Visit our Support Center to learn more.”
The change would have been devastating for sellers who already face a cashflow crunch from other new Amazon policies. One seller who runs a forum for over 700 high-volume sellers, Eugene Khayman, told CNBC that many small sellers live off the 3% off credit card points they earn from Amazon ad spend.
In its coverage of the boycott on April 15, CNBC reported: “Amazon spokesperson Ashley Vanicek said the recent changes to advertising payment methods and disbursements align “a small subset of sellers” with practices already used by most of its merchants.”
When some sellers reported getting an email from Amazon that delayed implementation of the policy until August 1st, Amazon consultant Chris McCabe, who previously worked for Amazon, posted the message on LinkedIn and opined, “On its face, it is just kicking the can down the road till summer.”
Amazon published FAQs about the new ad-payments policy on this page, including the following.
Why is Amazon making this change?
We commonly review advertiser payment methods as part of our normal course of business. Notified advertisers continue to have credit or debit cards as a backup payment method and also have the option to pay by invoice (issued at month end with payment due 30 days later).
Does this apply to all advertisers?
No, this applies to a small number of sponsored ads advertisers who are being notified directly via email and banners on the campaign manager and billing pages in ads console.
The FAQs also said that sellers who advertise and were uncertain if the new policy applied to them could check by navigating to the Billing > Payment settings in their ads console to view available payment methods for their account.
