On August 1, Amazon stopped letting a group of advertisers pay for ads with a cr
By Michael Erickson Facchin · September 23, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
On August 1, Amazon stopped letting a group of advertisers pay for ads with a credit card.
If that sounds like an accounting detail, stay with me, because the number at the end is larger than most people expect.
To be precise about scope, because this got reported loosely: this was not a policy change for everyone. Amazon contacted a specific group of advertisers directly, through letters in Seller Central, and retired an exception that had been grandfathered in. If you were not contacted, nothing changed for you.
If you were, you now choose between two options. Account balance deduction, which is the default, where ad costs net continuously against your seller balance. Or Pay by Invoice, which gives you monthly invoices on roughly net 30 terms.
Here is what actually left the building.
Under the old arrangement, you paid for ads on a card and received your proceeds separately. The gap between those two events was working capital. Our estimate is that roughly 45 days of float disappeared. For an advertiser spending $50,000 a month, that is about $75,000 of revolving working capital that is simply no longer revolving. It did not get spent. It stopped existing as a buffer.
Then the rewards. At 2% cash back, a $50,000 a month advertiser loses around $12,000 a year. At $10,000 a month, it is $2,400. That was real money that people had built into their margin planning, quietly, for years.
Amazon did offer compensation to affected advertisers. $2,500 a month for five months, August through December, so $12,500 in click credits. Those arrived in individual letters rather than in any public announcement.
Now do that arithmetic honestly. For a $50,000 a month advertiser, $12,500 in credits against $12,000 of annual rewards plus $75,000 of vanished working capital. The credits cover one of the three losses, for one year.
The reaction from the seller community was strong enough that Amazon deferred the change once already, after a one day ad boycott organised by Million Dollar Sellers.
My honest read: this is not a disaster, and plenty of businesses will absorb it without noticing much. But it is a genuine change in how much cash your advertising requires you to hold, and it happened to a lot of people who found out from a letter.
If you were affected, the number worth calculating is not the rewards. It is the float.