Amazon Sellers Planning to Turn Off Ads in Protest on April 15

Amazon for many years has had a pretty tense relationship with sellers. As you probably know, third-party sellers make up about 60% of all sales on Amazon. But Amazon might have just crossed a red line with sellers. So last week Amazon released an email to

many sellers telling them that they could no longer use their credit cards to pay for their advertising on Amazon. And potentially no other policy change has caused as much of an uproar as this change by Amazon. So who cares? You can't use your credit card to pay for advertising. Amazon's just going to pay for that advertising from a seller's funds. Well, here's why it's a big deal. On Amazon, it is increasingly difficult to make any money on the platform. So me personally, in my previous business that I sold a few years ago, we had margins of about 13 to 15%. Now our business is scraping by with just single-digit margins. For some of our brands, we actually have lost money for the last 2 years. But our credit card points, that's one thing that gives sellers like me a tangible benefit that I can look at and say, "Hey, you know what? Maybe selling on Amazon ain't that bad. " You see, even if selling on Amazon isn't profitable, at least getting a 4x multiple on your credit card points gives us something. E-commerce is a low-margin dirty game that has tons of operational complexities, but it also lets us travel like kings. That's because businesses like mine spend a ton of money on advertising, and that advertising on a credit card allows you to rake up four times points, which can result in a lot of first-class flights and a lot of free hotels. But Amazon effectively overnight is killing this policy, taking away that benefit, and it could potentially be one of the biggest existential risks to Amazon in years. So like I mentioned, Amazon last week announced that they were taking away the ability to use credit cards to pay for advertising on Amazon. Now for most sellers, they spend roughly 10 to 20% of their entire revenue on ads on Amazon. So it's a huge expense. After cost of goods sold, it is by far the largest expense for most sellers. And many sellers, in an environment where there's rising tariffs, there's rising logistics costs, there are fuel surcharges, credit card points were one of the few benefits that you got from running an e-commerce company, and specifically an Amazon company. And the Amazon seller backlash has been immense. Here's a good example of why this policy is causing so much anxiety in the seller community. First and foremost, taking away credit cards as a payment option has a material disadvantage to sellers who lose the ability to not only get credit card points, but also defer that advertising expense anywhere from 30 to 45 days. And if a seller's going through kind of a rough time or cash flow is low in a particular month, well, you know what? They can just pay off that credit card partially and kick the can down the road a little bit. So that's reason number one why this is causing so much friction in the seller community. And number two, Amazon has been known as killing sellers with a million paper cuts over time. So

Amazon over the course of a year will often introduce many different fees. So it might be something like a returns processing fee. low inventory fee. Each of these on their own in a vacuum is not that big of a deal, but they start compounding. This month Amazon rolled out three paper cuts all together. And those three paper cuts together make a pretty big cut. So Amazon in March introduced something called DD plus seven. What that means is that sellers now only get paid 7 days after an item gets shipped to a customer. The next thing they announced is a 3. 5% fuel surcharge because of the war with the Iran. And then, almost in the same breath, Amazon announces new credit card policy. All of these are bad, but what makes them worse is that Amazon went on a little tour last year announcing that, "Hey, great news, we're barely raising any fees for the next year. " And they announced this after introducing a ton of new fees the year previous. So bragging about putting no new fees in place in 2026, and then shortly into the year introducing three new fees, well, that's a pretty big blow to sellers. So here's where it may start to matter though for Amazon. Many

high-profile sellers are trying to organize a boycott of Amazon advertising on April 15th. April 15th is the day that Amazon's rolling out this policy for many sellers. It's basically Amazon sellers are saying, "You know what? We're going to turn off the lights for advertising. We're going to have our Amazon business running in the dark for April 15th. " Okay, why should Amazon care? So what? Ads are turned off for a day. Well, the reason why Amazon has to take notice here is that as a retail business, investors really only care about one line item when it comes to Amazon. They care about Amazon's advertising revenue. So investors over the last few years, well, they don't really care about the retail side of Amazon. All they really care about is their AWS division and AI. But the retail division is still pretty big thing for Amazon as a company, and the one thing that matters when it comes to that side of the company are those ads. So let me give you some idea just how big advertising is for Amazon. 5 years ago in Q4, Amazon collected about $7 billion in advertising revenue. In 2025, they collected $21 That's a 300% growth in advertising by Amazon. Now, that sounds pretty impressive, but you know what? If Amazon grew 300% as a company, well, you kind of expect advertising to grow that much. That is not the case. Amazon's online store revenue in Q4 2020 was about $66 billion, but that growth over the next 5 years was only about 20% as it grew to $82 billion in Q4 2025. So 20% growth in retail sales, 300% growth in advertising sales. You get the point. Advertising is a huge part of Amazon as a retail company. If sellers do follow through and actually do boycott Amazon's ads on April 15th, this could have a bit of an effect on Amazon's quarterly earnings.

The bigger danger though to Amazon isn't just the impact of one day of ads being turned off. The bigger risk for Amazon is if sellers say, "Huh, you know what? We're spending a lot on ads. Maybe we don't need to spend as much this year. " So even without this policy, sellers are going to be looking at ways to cut expenses over the next year as economic conditions worsen. And eliminating credit card points and credit card payments could just be one more motivation to cut that advertising back even more. Now if Amazon keeps the credit card policy, maybe sellers are more likely to ignore the high advertising costs that they're incurring because they want to travel nicely first class on Delta Airlines and stay in nice rooms at the Marriott. Given the risks that Amazon faces by this new policy, it's a rare example when Amazon may actually have to reverse course on a policy change that they had announced. So let me know, if you're an Amazon seller, are you turning off your ads on April 15th? I know my company will. Drop a comment down below though if you will be doing the same thing. And until the next one, happy selling.