Amazon has rolled out a dense set of policy and feature changes for its India marketplace through 2025. If you sell on Amazon.in, several of these changes directly affect your margins, listing compliance, and ad spend efficiency. Here’s a practical breakdown of what changed and what to do about it.
1. Fee Structure Changes
Amazon revised referral fee slabs across several categories in 2025, with adjustments to closing fees for lower-priced items and updated weight-handling fee bands for FBA. The net effect varies by category, so it’s worth re-running your unit economics rather than assuming your margins are unchanged.
Action Step
Pull your last quarter’s settlement reports and recalculate contribution margin per SKU under the new fee schedule. Categories near the boundary of a weight or price slab are where the changes bite hardest.
2. FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) Updates
FBA storage fee calculations now weight inventory age more heavily, penalizing slow-moving stock faster than before. Amazon also expanded regional fulfillment center capacity in India, which has modestly improved delivery speed in tier-2 and tier-3 cities.
Sellers should audit aged inventory more frequently now — monthly rather than quarterly — to avoid storage fee creep on slow sellers.
3. Sponsored Products Ads: New Targeting Options
Sponsored Products added AI-assisted bid recommendations and more granular negative keyword controls in 2025. Campaign structure best practices haven’t fundamentally changed, but the automated bidding is now good enough to serve as a reasonable default for sellers who don’t have time for manual bid management.
Practical Tip
Let automated bidding run for two weeks to establish a baseline, then manually override bids only on your highest-margin, highest-converting keywords.
4. Brand Registry Enhancements
Brand Registry now includes faster counterfeit reporting turnaround and expanded A+ Content template options, including comparison charts and enhanced brand story modules. If you’re registered, updating your A+ Content with the new templates is a low-effort way to lift conversion rate on existing listings.
5. Global Selling Expansion
Amazon Global Selling added streamlined onboarding for Indian sellers targeting the US, UAE, and Australian marketplaces, including simplified tax documentation and consolidated shipping options. This pairs naturally with cross-border tools like Shopify Markets Pro if you’re running a hybrid marketplace-plus-DTC strategy.
6. Listing Requirement Changes
New mandatory attributes were added for several categories (electronics, personal care, and food-adjacent products) around safety certifications and country-of-origin declarations. Listings missing these attributes risk suppression, so it’s worth auditing your active catalog against the updated category requirements.
7. Easy Ship Improvements
Easy Ship now offers more pickup slot flexibility and better real-time tracking visibility for sellers who fulfill orders themselves rather than using FBA. Pickup reliability in metro areas has also improved following logistics partner expansion.
8. Returns Policy Adjustments
Return windows and eligibility rules were tightened for a few categories prone to misuse (apparel, electronics accessories), while Amazon also introduced better seller visibility into return reason codes. Reviewing return reason data monthly can surface product quality or listing-description issues before they escalate into account health problems.
9. Performance Metrics: What Changed
Account health scoring now factors in a broader set of signals, including response time to buyer-seller messages and voice-of-the-customer trends, not just order defect rate and cancellation rate alone. Sellers should treat buyer messaging response time as a metric worth actively managing, not an afterthought.
10. Amazon Launchpad Program Updates
Launchpad, Amazon’s program for new and innovative brands, expanded eligibility criteria and added marketing support tiers for sellers with strong early traction. For genuinely new-to-market products, applying to Launchpad can unlock promotional placement that’s otherwise hard to access as a small seller.
Comparing Amazon to Other Marketplaces
Amazon isn’t the only marketplace evolving quickly — Indian sellers running a multi-channel strategy should also track Meesho’s 2025 seller updates and Flipkart’s new seller hub and fee changes, since fee structures and ad platforms across all three shift independently and a strategy tuned for one can quietly underperform on another if you’re not watching all three.
Building a Monthly Compliance Habit
Given how many of these 2025 changes touch fees, listing requirements, and account health simultaneously, sellers benefit from treating Seller Central compliance as a recurring monthly task rather than something reviewed only when a problem surfaces. A simple monthly checklist — review fee schedule notifications, audit any new mandatory listing attributes for your top categories, check account health trends, and scan for new Brand Registry or A+ Content features — takes under an hour and catches most issues before they affect visibility or payouts.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did Amazon’s 2025 fee changes increase or decrease costs overall?
It varies by category — some categories saw referral fee reductions while others saw increases in closing or weight-handling fees. There’s no single across-the-board direction, which is exactly why recalculating margins per SKU matters more than trusting a general impression.
Is Brand Registry worth pursuing if I’m not yet trademark-registered?
You’ll need at least a filed trademark application in most cases to begin the Brand Registry process, so if brand protection and A+ Content access matter to your growth plan, starting the trademark filing process early is worthwhile even before you’re fully approved.
How often should I check my account health score now?
Weekly is reasonable given the broader set of signals now factored in, including buyer-seller messaging response time, which can shift faster than the order-defect and cancellation metrics that used to dominate the score.
Does Global Selling require a separate seller account?
Typically you can manage multiple marketplaces from a unified seller account with linked regional storefronts, though tax registration and compliance documentation requirements differ by destination country.
Final Thoughts
Most of these updates reward sellers who actively monitor Seller Central rather than sellers who “set and forget” their listings. Block time monthly to review fee schedule changes, account health metrics, and A+ Content opportunities. If organic discovery matters to your overall strategy, pairing marketplace optimization with strong e-commerce SEO fundamentals on your own site gives you a acquisition channel that isn’t subject to marketplace fee changes at all.
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