Amazon Accelerate 2026 recap: Every major announcement for sellers

Amazon Accelerate is Amazon's annual conference for its selling partners, and the 2026 edition at the Seattle Convention Center was the most consequential in years. Two general sessions and more than two dozen breakouts all pointed the same direction: Amazon wants an AI agent doing the operational work of running an Amazon business, and it rebuilt Seller Central around that idea.

We went through every session Amazon published. Here is what was announced, what is live now and what is still coming, with a link to the exact moment each announcement was made.

TL;DR:

• Seller Assistant became an agent. It now tracks more than 100 metrics, monitors your business around the clock and can act on your behalf at whatever level of autonomy you set.

• Seller Central was rebuilt, which Amazon called "the biggest upgrade to Seller Central in a decade."

• Your Amazon data now works inside outside AI tools. The Amazon Selling Partner Plugin launched in beta for Claude and Amazon Quick, and every seller gets a free 12-month Amazon Quick Plus subscription.

• Account health got real protection. Listing Protection gives Account Health Assurance sellers time to fix issues before a listing comes down.

• Ads started optimizing themselves. Auto optimization launched for keywords, product targeting and seasonal moments.

• Prime came off Amazon. Prime Delivery replaces Buy with Prime on sellers' own websites, at standard Amazon MCF rates.

• Global selling got its own supply chain. Global Warehousing and Distribution opened three facilities in China, with a shared global inventory pool coming next.

Seller Assistant is now an agent

Amazon introduced Seller Assistant at Accelerate two years ago. This year it graduated from a chatbot to something closer to an operations team member. It now tracks "over a hundred" metrics, up from a handful of traffic and sales numbers, so it watches far more of the Seller Central metrics that drive your business (watch). Amazon organized the upgrade around four capabilities: selling expertise, memory, monitoring and autonomy.

Autonomy is the part sellers will notice. You choose the level: insights only, drafted plans you approve, or routine tasks handled around the clock. Amazon was emphatic on the guardrail. "Nothing happens without your say so," said Mary Beth Westmoreland, who led the keynote, "and you will always have a full record of everything it did and really importantly why" (watch).

Amazon also said sellers act on Seller Assistant's recommendations 90% of the time (watch), and that it was built with Anthropic and AWS from day one (watch). By the end of the year it will send a daily summary of what happened, what changed and what needs your attention (watch).

The new Seller Central

The rebuilt Seller Central puts Seller Assistant on every page (watch). The changes that matter most:

Faster product setup. Creating a new product used to mean filling in more than 20 fields on average. Amazon says it is now fewer than 10, and it fills in the rest (watch).

A modular homepage and workspaces. The homepage is built from modules you add and arrange. Dedicated workspaces cover supply chain and inventory, account health and customer service, promotions and ad spend, and finance. The finance workspace shows true profitability down to the product level, including fees, advertising, storage and returns (watch).

One global view. Sellers in multiple countries see their whole business in one place instead of switching between marketplaces (watch).

Talk to the page. Ask for "products with low inventory" and the page updates. Pricing guidance, bulk catalog actions and coupon creation all happen in context (watch).

Canvas. A new visual workspace for "a conversation with your data." The keynote demo compared 10%, 15% and 20% promotion scenarios side by side, with fees, net revenue, profit and units needed, then benchmarked against last Black Friday and the category before linking straight to a prefilled promotion (watch).

Automations. Pre-built automations run in the background once you turn them on. One example is a pricing automation that checks category pricing daily against your fees, margins and the last seven days of demand (watch). You can also describe a custom automation in plain language, and Seller Assistant drafts the rules for your approval. Every action is logged (watch).

Your Amazon data inside Claude and Amazon Quick

This may be the announcement with the longest tail. Amazon launched the Amazon Selling Partner Plugin for Quick and the Amazon Selling Partner Plugin for Claude in beta, available to "thousands of sellers" in the US stores, with more AI tools to follow (watch).

The plugin connects Seller Central data and curated Amazon selling skills (sales trends, inventory, listings) to third-party AI tools. You sign in once with Seller Central, with no exports and no credential management, and access is limited to your selling data under existing Seller Central permissions.

Alongside it, Amazon is giving every seller a free 12-month Amazon Quick Plus subscription, covering the primary account holder plus two additional users (watch). Amazon Quick is Amazon's AI assistant for work: it builds forecasts, cash-flow and break-even models, reports and decks, and with the plugin it can see your listings, orders, inbound shipments and reports.

Richard Brown of Proof Culture, who demoed it on stage, summed up the problem it solves: "The hard part was never the AI. The hard part was getting all of my selling data into it" (watch).

Amazon Ads: auto optimization and AI shopping placements

The Amazon advertising announcements all point toward less manual campaign management.

• Campaign overview page. Campaigns now open already analyzed, with a performance summary and opportunities ranked by estimated impact (watch).

• Auto optimization. Turn it on and Amazon finds similar keywords, keeps the performers, pauses the inefficient ones and holds bids under your max. It launched with three types: keyword targeting, product targeting, and seasonal moments like back to school and holiday. In early results, new campaigns with keyword auto optimization reached a first sale 40% faster (watch).

• Faster ad launches. A guided launch flow checks retail readiness and drafts Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns. In beta it cut the time from listing to advertising by 88%, from as much as 40 minutes to under five (watch).

• Ads Data Manager. A new free tool for bringing your own data, such as an email list, into Amazon Ads for prospecting and re-engagement. No developer required (watch).

• Ads inside AI shopping conversations. Existing Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns now appear inside Amazon's AI shopping conversations, with nothing new to set up (watch). Sponsored Prompts, launched in March, drove a 6% conversion lift for Sponsored Brands ads (watch).

Alexa for Shopping and AI product discovery

Amazon said more than 350 million customers have used Alexa to research, compare and buy products in the last 12 months (watch), and that US customers who use Alexa for Shopping spend 40% more per order (watch). It is available to every US customer, with no Prime membership or Echo device required.

The seller guidance was the most quotable line of Day 2. Success on Amazon "is becoming less about keyword optimization and more about clearly communicating what problem your product solves and who it's designed for" (watch). There is no program to join and no new spend. The advice: make your listing clear, honest and complete (watch). In practice that means listing content and A+ Content that answer a shopper's question, not just a keyword list.

Account health: Listing Protection

Four years after launching Account Health Assurance (AHA), Amazon added real teeth to it for sellers with an account health rating above 250 (watch):

• Time to fix. For most enforcements, you get time to fix the issue before the listing comes down (watch).

• Stay live while appealing. An appeal filed in that window keeps the listing active in most cases until a decision.

• Pricing warnings. You get a warning before a price change could deactivate a listing.

• Seller challenge. A specialized team reviews your challenge, most sellers hear back within 24 hours, and every AHA seller gets three challenges every 180 days (watch).

Listing Protection goes live in the US by the end of this year and worldwide in 2027 (watch).

Amazon also said its systems automatically confirmed compliance for more than 8 million products last year (watch), and that 99% of compliance requirements are now surfaced before a listing goes live (watch). Enforcement explanations on the Account Health Dashboard are now in plain language with step-by-step fixes, and one document can be applied across every product and store it covers (watch).

Support and returns

Amazon said it eliminated "37 million reasons for sellers to contact us" in the last year (watch). Nine out of 10 missing-from-inbound claims filed through Seller Central now resolve automatically, usually in two days or less (watch). Starting at the event, attendees could reach dedicated FBA inbound and inventory specialists through Seller Assistant (watch), and intelligent escalation to a specialist who owns your case arrives by the end of the year (watch). Brand owners also get a self-service path to appeal or update an ASIN's product type, with no support ticket (watch).

On returns, customers can now explain a return in their own words instead of choosing from a generic list (watch). Product guides uploaded to Content Hub let Alexa answer a customer considering a return, and Amazon said the concern is resolved right there in nearly half of cases (watch). FBA Grade and Resell now supports custom grading criteria (watch).

Amazon Business (B2B)

Amazon Business hit $60 billion in annual sales (watch), and more than 11 million organizations shop on Amazon (watch). Business buyers place orders nearly 2.5 times larger than consumers, convert at three times the rate and return 50% fewer items (watch).

The headline launch was Amazon Business Deals: exclusive, volume-based incentives for business buyers, set up inside Seller Central (watch). In the B2B breakout, Amazon added that these deals don't trigger consumer price matching, so your B2C pricing is untouched (watch), and that Industry Vertical Pricing can now be managed through the Listings API (watch).

Finance and Amazon Lending

• Profit Analytics alerts now surface in the Action Center, showing what each product costs you and where you could save (watch). By the end of this year you'll be able to simulate options in Profit Analytics, and by early next year Seller Assistant will model what-if scenarios for pricing and inventory decisions (watch). Until then, our Amazon take-home calculator shows what you actually keep per sale after Amazon fee changes.

• Amazon Lending opens to every seller by the end of the year, with no invitation required (watch).

• New financing options include lines of credit through Slope and SBA 7(a) loans of up to $5 million (watch), and sellers can now carry more than one loan at a time (watch).

Launching new products

New product launches made up 16% of all third-party sales in the US store last year (watch), and Amazon built three tools around that:

• Bring your own idea to Opportunity Explorer. Describe a product and a price point and Opportunity Explorer compares it against the top products in the category, using search, purchase and review signals. Available now (watch).

• Ideas delivered to you. In the coming months, Opportunity Explorer will start pushing product ideas to sellers, with the features customers want and a recommended price (watch).

• A 90-day launch plan in Seller Central, covering listing quality, inventory, prefilled advertising recommendations and launch incentives (watch). Amazon said sellers who follow these steps are five times more likely to reach 10 sales in 30 days (watch).

For the steps the plan won't cover, see our Amazon product launch guide.

FBA at 20: speed and inventory

FBA turned 20 this year (watch), and the FBA fees question now comes with a speed argument attached. Amazon delivered 8 billion items same day or next day in the US last year, and said speed directly drives conversion: dropping a delivery promise from four days to two lifts conversion more than 20%, and from two days to hours adds another 15% or more (watch).

• Sub-same-day placement reservations. Choose which products go into the fastest network and set what you're willing to pay per unit, charged only when a unit ships that way. Launched with 15,000 sellers, expanding later this year (watch).

• End-to-end inventory visibility tracks a shipment from factory to Prime-eligible bin, launching in the coming months (watch).

• Time to Prime tracking shows when inbound inventory will carry the Prime badge, for all US sellers in October (watch).

• Seller Assistant as supply chain expert. It builds inbound plans (which SKUs, how many units, which locations, at what cost) within receiving windows, capacity and carrier schedules, and books the shipment once you approve. Beta began the week of the event, scaling to all US sellers in the coming months (watch).

Amazon Global Logistics (AGL) and AWD

Amazon said AGL is now the number one freight forwarder between Asia and North America, with container volumes up more than 50% year to date (watch).

• Premium Ocean cuts transit between China and Europe by 11 days on average (watch).

• Amazon Managed Placement at Origin lets you drop goods at one location in China while Amazon splits and routes them to the right US regions for one all-inclusive price, replacing five separate bookings (watch).

• SMP Express gets inventory from the factory floor to in-stock and sellable within 45 days (watch).

• AGL beyond Amazon. Starting next year, US sellers can use AGL for shipments to other retailers or their own warehouses (watch).

• Partnered Carrier Program now handles dangerous goods, so 100% of FBA products can ship through it, and multiple orders can consolidate into one shipment (watch).

• Amazon AWD went global, with new warehouses in Australia, the UK and the EU, plus two new facilities in Southern California (watch).

Global from Day One

Amazon said sellers in multiple countries earn 70% more revenue on average, but only 30% of sellers sell in more than one country (watch). Its answer was a set of investments under the banner "Global from Day One":

• Global Warehousing and Distribution (GWD). Ship once to a facility near your factory. Three are live in Shenzhen, Shanghai and Ningbo, and seven more destinations are coming, connecting one facility to eight countries. Storage is up to 45% cheaper than US destination storage, and replenishment to FBA is up to 5 days faster (watch).

• Global Inventory Pool, launching soon: one pool of inventory at origin that serves every connected store, with no pre-committing stock to a country (watch).

• Sell Globally matches worldwide demand to your catalog, then translates, compliance-checks and prices listings for each country (watch).

• Test once, sell globally. Test a product once and sell it in every connected store. It is live for toys, with testing savings of up to 60%; electronics follow by the end of the year and baby products next year (watch).

• Localized account health. A score drop in one store does not affect your ability to sell in the others (watch).

Amazon MCF and Prime Delivery: Buy with Prime is replaced

"Many of you tried Buy with Prime. We learned a lot from that," Amazon said (watch). The replacement, Prime Delivery, lets Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) merchants offer Prime shipping on their own websites with no Prime sign-in, no checkout redirect and no cost beyond standard MCF rates. It is live now in the MCF Shopify app, and early adopters see more than 40% of eligible orders ship with Prime Delivery (watch).

• MCF Preferred Pricing. Up to 25% off total fulfillment costs through fee discounts and FBA credits, applied automatically, with no contracts. TikTok Shop sellers save up to 35% on MCF fees (watch), which changes the math on selling on TikTok Shop from Amazon inventory.

• Multi-Channel Distribution (live now) fulfills retail purchase orders for retailers including Target, Walmart, Home Depot, Chewy, CVS and TJ Maxx from the same inventory pool (watch).

• A multi-channel selling hub in Seller Central connects Amazon, Shopify, eBay, TikTok Shop and Walmart orders, analytics and products under one login. It is in pilot now, with a broad invite coming (watch).

Seller-fulfilled, Veeqo and heavy and bulky

These updates matter most if you're weighing FBM vs FBA.

• Seller Assistant in Veeqo runs warehouse tasks around the clock from rules you give it in conversation, like batching orders at 6 a.m. or drafting purchase orders for low-stock SKUs (watch). Veeqo also added more than 20 new channel integrations, including TikTok Shop, SHEIN and Temu (watch).

• Seller Fulfilled Prime sellers can upload their own carrier transit times, including weekend availability and cutoffs by zip code (watch).

• Automated delivery dates for FBM are now 45% more accurate than seller-set transit times (watch). Amazon said every day of faster delivery means 5.5% more sales for FBM sellers (watch).

• Heavy and bulky: LTL labels through Amazon Buy Shipping start in October (watch), regional delivery pricing arrives in early 2027 (watch), and SellerFlex lets you ship from your own warehouse while Amazon handles pickup, in-home delivery, installation and returns. Amazon said sellers using SellerFlex for heavy and bulky items see more than 2.5 times the sales of those shipping on their own (watch).

Prime Air also delivered a live order on stage from Phoenix. Amazon plans to reach more than 500 US cities and towns by the end of the year, a sixfold increase, with expansion beyond the US and Europe in 2027 and 2028 (watch).

From the breakout sessions

• Brand protection: a predictive model watches signals on social media for brands that are taking off and puts protections on them before bad actors move in (watch), and a new AI reporter assistant guides you through Report a Violation complaints (watch). If unauthorized resellers are already a problem, Brand Registry and Transparency remain the foundation.

• Compliance: a new automatic compliance validation section on the Account Health Dashboard shows how many listings Amazon validated on your behalf (watch), and sellers can now compare quotes from multiple testing providers at once (watch).

• Inventory planning: a downloadable demand forecast running 26 weeks ahead, refreshed weekly (watch), and automatic capacity relief, with no forms, for low or out-of-stock items, products in a deal or promotion, and products new to FBA during a 90-day grace period (watch).

• Post-purchase: real-time chat in the buyer-seller messaging inbox (watch), AI-suggested replies and case summaries (watch), plus an investigation assistant for delivery and shipping inquiries (watch).

• Listings: an upload preview for spreadsheet templates flags errors before you submit (watch).

Amazon Accelerate 2026 by the numbers

For more of the numbers that drive an Amazon business, see our Amazon acronym glossary and Seller Central guide.

Frequently asked questions

What is Amazon Accelerate?
Amazon Accelerate is Amazon's annual conference for third-party sellers and brands. It is where Amazon announces new Seller Central features, fulfillment programs, advertising tools and policy changes for the year ahead. The 2026 event was held at the Seattle Convention Center.

Who attends Amazon Accelerate?
Amazon's selling partners: independent sellers, brand owners, and the agencies and service providers who work with them, along with the Amazon teams behind Seller Central, FBA, Amazon Ads and Amazon Business.

Is Amazon Accelerate worth it?
The keynotes and breakouts are free on YouTube after the event, so the content alone doesn't require a ticket. Attending in person bought access the videos can't: in 2026, attendees got on-the-spot access to FBA inbound and inventory specialists and an attendee-only bonus that doubled Amazon Quick usage through December.

What was the biggest announcement at Amazon Accelerate 2026?
The agentic Seller Assistant and the rebuilt Seller Central it powers. Nearly every other announcement, from inbound planning to account health monitoring to automations, runs through it.

When does Listing Protection launch?
In the US by the end of 2026 and worldwide in 2027, for sellers in Account Health Assurance.

Is Buy with Prime going away?
Amazon presented Prime Delivery as the simpler successor to Buy with Prime. It is available now in the MCF Shopify app, with more integrations coming.

Can I watch the Amazon Accelerate 2026 sessions?
Yes. Amazon published the general sessions and breakouts in its Amazon Accelerate 2026 YouTube playlist. Amazon's own coverage lives on the Amazon Accelerate blog.