Amazon continues to be the largest online marketplace for Indian sellers, and 2025 brought a wave of policy and feature changes that directly affect how much you pay, how you fulfill orders, and how visible your listings are. This guide breaks down every major update and what practical steps sellers should take to stay compliant and competitive.
Updated Fee Structure
Amazon revised its referral fee slabs for several categories in 2025, alongside changes to closing fees for lower-priced items. Categories like electronics accessories and home essentials saw the most noticeable adjustments, while apparel and beauty fees stayed largely stable.
What Sellers Should Do
Recalculate your unit economics for every SKU rather than assuming last year’s margins still hold. A product that was profitable at a 15% referral fee may need a price adjustment if it now falls into a higher fee slab.
FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) Updates
FBA storage fee calculations now factor in inventory turnover more heavily, rewarding sellers who move stock quickly and penalizing long-term storage more aggressively than before. Amazon also expanded regional fulfillment centers, which can reduce shipping distances and delivery times.
What Sellers Should Do
Run an inventory age report monthly and consider running discounts on slow-moving stock before it crosses into long-term storage fee territory.
Sponsored Products Advertising Changes
The ads platform introduced more granular bidding controls and AI-suggested bid adjustments based on real-time competition data. Placement reporting also became more detailed, breaking down performance by top-of-search, product page, and rest-of-search placements.
What Sellers Should Do
Review placement-level data before assuming a campaign is underperforming; a campaign that looks weak overall might simply need its top-of-search bid adjusted while other placements are working fine.
Brand Registry Enhancements
Brand Registry added improved counterfeit detection tools and faster takedown processing for registered brands, along with expanded A+ Content template options for product pages.
What Sellers Should Do
If you haven’t enrolled in Brand Registry yet, this is the year to do it. The protection against counterfeit listings alone often justifies the trademark registration cost for growing brands.
Global Selling Program Expansion
Amazon Global Selling added new marketplace destinations for Indian exporters and simplified the documentation required for cross-border shipments, making it more realistic for mid-sized sellers to test international demand.
What Sellers Should Do
Start with one additional marketplace rather than expanding to five at once, and monitor your return rates closely since international logistics can behave very differently from domestic fulfillment. If you’re also considering platforms like Shopify for direct international sales, our Shopify 2025 updates guide covers Markets Pro, which handles similar cross-border complexity.
Stricter Listing Requirements
Amazon tightened image quality standards and mandatory attribute fields for several categories, with automated flagging for listings missing required safety or compliance information.
What Sellers Should Do
Audit your existing listings against the current category requirements rather than waiting for a suppression notice. Missing attributes are one of the most common and easily avoidable causes of listing deactivation.
Easy Ship Improvements
Easy Ship pickup windows became more flexible in most metro areas, and tracking visibility for both sellers and customers improved with more frequent status updates.
What Sellers Should Do
Reassess whether Easy Ship or FBA makes more sense for your current order volume; the improved pickup flexibility narrows the convenience gap that previously favored FBA for many sellers.
Updated Returns Policy
Return windows and eligibility rules were adjusted for specific categories, with Amazon placing more weight on seller-reported return reason data when calculating account health metrics.
What Sellers Should Do
Tag your return reasons accurately rather than defaulting to a generic reason code, since this data increasingly feeds into your account performance standing.
Performance Metrics Recalibration
Order defect rate and late shipment rate thresholds were recalibrated, and Amazon added a new “listing quality score” that factors into organic search ranking alongside traditional metrics like conversion rate.
What Sellers Should Do
Treat listing quality score the way you would treat SEO for your own website; complete every field, use high-resolution images, and keep your bullet points benefit-focused. For a broader approach to product page optimization, our e-commerce SEO guide covers many of the same principles that apply across marketplaces.
Amazon Launchpad Program Updates
Launchpad, Amazon’s program for innovative and new-to-market products, expanded its eligibility criteria and added dedicated marketing support packages for approved brands, particularly in the D2C and startup space.
What Sellers Should Do
If you’re launching a genuinely new product category rather than a variation of an existing one, apply for Launchpad early since the marketing support can meaningfully accelerate initial visibility.
Staying Ahead as an Amazon Seller in 2025
The common theme across all of this year’s changes is that Amazon is rewarding sellers who actively manage their accounts rather than setting listings and forgetting them. Fee structures, ad placements, and listing quality all now feed into a more interconnected performance system. Sellers who also diversify across platforms like Flipkart and Meesho tend to weather individual marketplace policy shifts better than those relying on a single channel.
Set aside time each month to review these policy areas specifically, since Amazon rolls out incremental updates throughout the year rather than in one single announcement. Staying current is now a genuine competitive advantage rather than routine housekeeping.