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Amazon will now switch off one bad FBM offer instead of putting your whole account at risk. The hard part is working out which offer. Since August 31, 2026, when one of your Fulfilled by Merchant (FBM) offers on Amazon.com puts your Account Health at risk, Amazon warns you by email and then temporarily deactivates that one offer. Account Health is the Seller Central page that grades your performance, and Amazon says the rest of your listings and your overall Account Health are not affected.
Once an offer has been deactivated, Amazon tells you where to find it: the Other Policy Violations row on the Account Health dashboard. Before that point the numbers do not point at a listing. The panels and their View details pages give you a rate, a target and the counts underneath, and the reading is yours. Amazon says the warning email carries details of the issue and the steps to resolve it; we have not seen one of those emails yet. So the skill this change actually asks for is working backwards from four numbers to one listing, and that is what the five checks below are for.
If you ship any orders yourself, this applies to you.
Verified inside Seller Central on September 4, 5 and 7, 2026.
What changed for FBM Account Health on August 31
Amazon now handles four performance policies offer by offer instead of account-wide. An offer is your listing of one product at one price with one way of shipping it. Fulfilled by Merchant, or FBM, means you store and ship the order yourself instead of sending stock to Amazon’s warehouses, which is Fulfillment by Amazon, or FBA.
The four policies are Cancellation Rate, Late Shipment Rate, Order Defect Rate, and On-Time Delivery Rate. When an FBM offer puts your Account Health at risk under one of them, Amazon deactivates that offer. In Amazon’s words, your other active listings and your overall Account Health are not impacted.
What the old rule did
Until August 31, a listing that missed a required metric put your entire account at risk. The rates are measured across your seller-fulfilled orders as a whole, so a small offer with a few late shipments could tip an account-wide number past its target. Everything else you sold could be fine and the account was still exposed to an account-level deactivation.
What happens to an FBM offer now
Three things happen, in order:
- Amazon emails you a warning first. The email names the issue and lists the steps to fix it.
- Amazon then temporarily deactivates that one offer. Everything else keeps selling.
- You reactivate it from Account Health. Open your Account Health dashboard, select Other Policy Violations, and follow the instructions shown against the offer.
Amazon calls the deactivation temporary but has not said how long it lasts.
Who this applies to
- You ship some or all of your orders yourself: this applies to you.
- Everything you sell is FBA: the announcement is about FBM offers, so it does not change how your FBA offers are handled.
- You run an FBM backup offer on an FBA listing. A backup offer is one you ship yourself so the listing keeps selling when Amazon’s warehouse runs out. This is the case that benefits most, because a problem on the backup offer no longer threatens the FBA listing.
Amazon published this announcement for the US store, Amazon.com.
Where the change shows up in Account Health
Your Account Health dashboard has three panels: Customer Service Performance on the left, the policy issues list headed All Issues in the middle, and Shipping Performance on the right. Three of the four policies in this announcement live in Shipping Performance, each with its target printed underneath.
Two labels need a bridge. The announcement’s Cancellation Rate is the dashboard’s Pre-fulfillment Cancel Rate, meaning orders you cancel before they ship. Valid Tracking Rate is printed in the same panel but is not one of the four policies in the announcement.
The fourth policy, Order Defect Rate, sits in the Customer Service Performance panel. Its target is under 1%, and the panel lists what goes into it: negative feedback (low seller ratings), A-to-z Guarantee claims (refund claims a buyer files with Amazon) and chargeback claims (a buyer disputing the charge with their bank).
A deactivated FBM offer appears in the middle column, in the Other Policy Violations row, and the announcement itself sits a little lower in the Account Health News box. Watch that row after a deactivation.
Seller Central is being redesigned through this year, so Performance may sit somewhere else on your screen. The search bar at the top of any page finds Account Health by name.
Five checks to run this week
- Open Account Health. In Seller Central, go to Menu, then Performance, then Account Health. You should see the three panels, each metric with its target.
- Read your four numbers against their targets. View details, at the foot of each panel, opens Amazon’s page for those metrics, with the time window and the counts behind the rate you select. The rate alone does not name an offer.
The View details page behind On-Time Delivery Rate. The target Amazon publishes here is over 90 percent, and the two counts underneath are what the rate is built from; this account has shipped nothing in the window, so both read 0. Captured September 7, 2026. To get from a number to a listing, open Reports in the Account Health menu and choose Orders with Defects. Amazon’s description of that report names the three rates it feeds: Pre-fulfillment Cancel Rate, Late Shipment Rate and Order Defect Rate. The walk from there is short, but it is not one click. We have only ever seen this report empty, on an account with no defects, so what follows is the route rather than a tour of rows we watched.
- The dashboard rate tells you which policy slipped.
- Orders with Defects lists the orders that rate was calculated from.
- It is an order-level report. Amazon’s line above the table says it holds orders that were cancelled, shipped late, or received negative feedback, an A-to-z Guarantee claim, or a chargeback claim.
- So the last step is yours: open the orders it lists and read off the offer each one belongs to. On an account with no defects in the last twelve months the report reads No information available, which is its own answer.
On-Time Delivery Rate is the exception. It is not one of those three, and the Shipping Performance page points you instead to the Fulfillment Insight Dashboard for the detail behind it. An empty report means nothing in the last twelve months has been counted against the three rates it does cover.
- Check the Other Policy Violations row in the middle column. Anything sitting there needs attention today.
- Make sure the warning email reaches a person. Amazon sends it before it deactivates an offer. Open Settings, then Notification Preferences: the page lists the address used for each kind of notice, starting with your Merchant Default Contact. Every one of those inboxes needs a reader.
Settings, then Notification Preferences, on the Email and SMS tab. Merchant Default Contact is the address Amazon writes to unless you give it an alternative. The email field is redacted; the PHONE UNVERIFIED badge is this account’s real state, and it is the kind of thing worth clearing before a warning lands. Captured September 5, 2026. - If a third-party warehouse ships for you, confirm that every order is marked shipped in Seller Central, with its tracking number, by its expected ship date. Late Shipment Rate and On-Time Delivery Rate are two of the four policies, and your warehouse’s habits feed both.
A worked example
This is a scenario, not a client case. Say you sell a $24.99 supplement through FBA and added one FBM backup offer on a slow flavor so the listing never shows out of stock. The offer ships about 40 orders in the period Amazon measures. Your warehouse confirms two of them late, which is 5%, past the 4% Late Shipment Rate line. On a bigger account those same two orders would disappear into the average; on a small backup offer they are the whole number.
Here is where the number turns into a listing. You open Reports in the Account Health menu and choose Orders with Defects. Two rows sit in the last twelve months, both late shipments. You open those two orders, and both turn out to be the backup offer. That is the whole walk: a rate, then the orders it was calculated from, then the one listing they belong to. Change the scenario so it is On-Time Delivery Rate that slipped instead, and those rows are not there to find, because that policy is not one of the three this report is built from.
Before August 31, that could pull your whole account toward deactivation, FBA listings included. Now Amazon emails you the issue and then deactivates the backup offer that caused it. Your FBA listings keep selling while you fix the shipping problem and reactivate the offer from Account Health.
Still true, and still unanswered
The targets did not get gentler: Amazon published no new numbers, so the ones printed on your dashboard still stand. A deactivated offer is still lost sales until you reactivate it. Intellectual property, product safety and restricted product violations sit outside this announcement.
Amazon has also left four questions open:
- how it decides that a single offer puts your Account Health at risk;
- how many orders an offer needs before it is judged;
- how long you have between the warning email and the deactivation;
- whether the Other Policy Violations entry for a deactivated offer counts toward the Account Health Rating.
Source and effective date
Amazon published “Review Account Health updates for FBM offers” on August 31, 2026, in Seller News inside Seller Central and, publicly, in the News and Announcements section of Seller Forums. The change took effect the same day.
The targets quoted above were read from the Account Health dashboard on September 4, 2026. Amazon’s public overview of the same performance policies is Amazon seller policies to know on sell.amazon.com.
What to do next
If an offer of yours has already been deactivated and the instructions against it are unclear, EHP’s listing reinstatement page explains how we handle those cases. If any of your four numbers sits close to its target, fix the shipping or service problem behind it now. Amazon has not said how long you get between the warning email and the deactivation, so treat the email as the deadline.
Frequently asked questions
Is Valid Tracking Rate part of this change?
No. It is printed on the same dashboard with a target over 95%, but the announcement names only Cancellation Rate, Late Shipment Rate, Order Defect Rate, and On-Time Delivery Rate.
Does one deactivated offer hurt my Account Health Rating?
Amazon says your overall Account Health is not impacted when a single FBM offer is deactivated. What it has not said is whether the Other Policy Violations entry that records the deactivation counts toward the rating itself, so check that row rather than assuming either way.
Will the warning email tell me which offer is affected?
The announcement promises details on the issue and the steps to resolve it. We have not seen one of these emails yet, so check the dashboard too rather than waiting on the inbox.
Written by the EHP Consulting Group team, who read Account Health dashboards for brands every day. If you want a second pair of eyes on your four numbers before the next Seller News change lands, book an Amazon account audit.