Amazon's insurance rule changed on 2 November: some categories now need $1M cover whatever your sales are

What Amazon changed on 2 November

Amazon's commercial liability insurance requirement has been around for years, and most sellers learned it as a single number: once your Amazon.com sales pass USD 10,000 of gross proceeds in a month, you have 30 days to get insured. Below that line, nothing was asked of you.

That is no longer the whole rule. Amazon's announcement in the US seller forums opens with "Effective November 2, 2026, we're updating our commercial liability insurance requirements", and the substance of the update is a second trigger that has nothing to do with how much you sell. If you have products in categories that carry enhanced safety listing requirements, you must maintain a policy covering those products "regardless of whether they meet the USD 10,000 gross proceeds in a month threshold".

The sentence that decides whether this is your problem is the next one: "This change applies to both new and existing listings." This is not a rule for things you list from now on. It reaches a catalogue you built three years ago and have not touched since, and it reaches sellers who have never been asked for an insurance certificate because they never crossed the proceeds line.

The old threshold has not gone away either. It still applies on its own terms — Amazon's standing requirements page describes obtaining cover within 30 days after exceeding "USD 10,000 in gross proceeds in sales in one month on Amazon.com". What changed is that passing that threshold is now one of two ways to be in scope rather than the only one.

Which products Amazon actually named

Amazon's announcement names three groups as examples: children's products, cosmetic and ingestible products, and lithium battery products. It then describes the list as not limited to those, and links to a Seller Central help page for the full set of categories with enhanced safety listing requirements.

That help page requires a sign-in, which is the honest limit of what any outside write-up can tell you — including this one. Several seller blogs have published their own category counts and lists this autumn, and they do not agree with each other. We are not going to repeat a list we could not read on Amazon's own page, because getting this wrong in either direction is expensive: one way you buy a policy you did not need, the other way you find out from a suppressed listing.

So treat the three named groups as a strong signal rather than the boundary. If you sell anything a child uses, anything that goes on or in a body, or anything with a lithium cell in it — including an accessory whose battery you never think about, like a rechargeable light or a toy with a built-in pack — assume you are in scope until you have read the category page inside your own account and confirmed otherwise.

A policy that exists is not the same as a policy Amazon accepts

The commonest way to fail this is to buy insurance, upload the certificate and get rejected on a detail, then burn two weeks going back and forth with a broker. Amazon's requirements are specific, and they are worth reading against your certificate line by line before you submit anything.

The amount is at least USD 1 million per occurrence and in the aggregate. The policy has to be commercial general, umbrella or excess liability, written on an occurrence basis, with Amazon noting exceptions for certain product categories. It must cover all of the products you list on Amazon.com, not just the ones that triggered the requirement. Any deductible has to be USD 10,000 or less, and it has to be visible on the certificate of insurance rather than only in the policy documents.

Three more details catch people. Amazon.com Services LLC, together with its affiliates and assignees, has to be named as an additional insured. The insured name on the certificate has to match the legal entity name in your Seller Central account information — a certificate in your own name when the account is held by an LLC is a rejection, with a narrow exception for single-member LLCs trading under a different name. And the insurer itself has to qualify: global claim handling, and an S&P or AM Best rating of A- or better, or a local equivalent. The policy must also be fully completed and signed, and the insurer must agree to give Amazon at least 30 days' notice before cancelling, modifying or not renewing it.

None of that is new as of 2 November. It is just that a much larger group of sellers now has to satisfy it, many of them for the first time, in the middle of Q4.

Why this is an advertising problem, not only a compliance one

Amazon's announcement does not say what happens if you do not comply, and we are not going to guess at a suppression mechanic Amazon has not published. What can be said with certainty is what happens downstream of any listing problem, because that part is documented on the advertising side.

Amazon Ads states that listings advertised on Sponsored Products "must be eligible for the Featured Offer", that a product "must be in stock and priced competitively in order to become the Featured Offer", and that if it is not the Featured Offer or is out of stock, "your ad will not display". Ads for ineligible listings, Amazon adds, "will not display to Amazon customers" and are flagged in the campaign manager.

That is the quiet failure mode. Anything that makes an offer unbuyable — a compliance block, a suppression, a stock-out — switches off the Sponsored Products ads pointing at it, without the campaign changing state. The campaign is still enabled, the budget is still set, the bids are still where you left them, and impressions on that ASIN simply stop. If it happens to one ASIN inside a campaign that advertises several, the budget quietly redistributes to the others and the top-line numbers barely move, which is exactly how a problem survives a weekly check.

The ranking cost runs on a longer clock than the ad cost. A week of zero sales on a term you were ranking for does not reverse in a week, and the rebuild lands in the most expensive fortnight of the year. That is the real argument for dealing with an insurance certificate in November rather than in December: not the fine, the recovery time.

If your business is based in Mainland China, the route changed too

There is a second change in the same announcement, aimed at a specific group. Sellers based in Mainland China have to obtain insurance through the Amazon Insurance Accelerator, and Amazon is explicit about the cut-off: "Starting November 2, 2026, we will reject newly submitted insurance policies that are not obtained through AIA." A valid third-party policy that was already submitted before 2 November can be used until it expires.

For everyone else the Accelerator stays what it has been since Amazon introduced it — a network of vetted providers you may use, not one you have to. Amazon's own description of the programme says sellers "are not required to use a provider within Amazon Insurance Accelerator" and can obtain cover from any qualified insurer they choose. It is worth getting a quote there anyway if you are buying for the first time, simply because the providers in it already know what Amazon's certificate requirements look like.

Why Amazon cares at all is in the same place. Its A-to-z Guarantee covers customers when a defective product sold through Amazon.com causes "property damage or personal injury", and Amazon pays claims under USD 1,000 itself. Insurance on the seller side is what sits behind that promise, which is a reasonable guess at why the trigger has moved from a sales number to a risk category.

What to do on Monday

Start with scope, not with insurance. Open the enhanced safety listing requirements category page inside your own Seller Central account, and check it against your active ASINs rather than against your mental model of what you sell. Children's items, anything ingestible or applied to skin, and anything containing a lithium cell are the named examples; the accessory with a rechargeable battery is the one people miss.

Then check what Amazon already holds for you. The Business Insurance page in Seller Central shows your current insurance status and is where a certificate goes; if you have a policy on file, look at its expiry date before you look at anything else, because a policy that lapses in January is a January problem you can solve now. If you need to buy, get the quote moving this week — a broker turnaround plus Amazon's review of the certificate is not a same-day process, and the second half of December is the worst time to discover that.

When the certificate arrives, check it against the list in the previous section before uploading: USD 1 million per occurrence and in aggregate, deductible of USD 10,000 or less shown on the certificate itself, Amazon.com Services LLC and affiliates named as additional insured, insured name matching the legal entity in your account, and an A- or better rated insurer. Most rejections are one of those five, and each one costs days.

On the advertising side, build the cheap safeguard while you are in there. Pull the product status or advertised-product view in your campaigns and confirm every ASIN you are paying for is actually eligible to serve, then make that a weekly habit rather than a one-off. A campaign whose spend quietly drops on one ASIN and holds steady overall is the signal to look for, and it is invisible in an account-level ACOS figure. If you run Amazon PPC management through an agency or a tool, this is a reasonable thing to ask them to add to the weekly check.

Finally, put the policy expiry date and the renewal date in a calendar with the account name attached. Insurance is the kind of obligation that fails silently a year later, when the person who dealt with it has forgotten it existed.