Something is shifting inside Amazon’s Seller Performance organization, and the ripples are already reaching the agency floors of Seattle, Austin, and New York. Multiple sources close to the matter — including two senior Amazon account managers who spoke on condition of anonymity — say the company is allegedly piloting a revised internal scoring framework that weights delivery promise accuracy and return dispute rate far more heavily than the current Account Health dashboard publicly reflects. If confirmed, the change could quietly disqualify tens of thousands of mid-tier FBA sellers from Buy Box rotation without a single official policy announcement.
“We started seeing anomalous Buy Box suppression on ASINs that had zero Account Health flags,” said Liz Moskovitz, director of marketplace strategy at Bobsled Marketing, a Seattle-based Amazon agency managing roughly $180M in annual seller revenue. “The listings looked clean on the surface. But something underneath changed in late April, and our reps couldn’t explain it.”
Bobsled isn’t alone. Similar reports have surfaced from Envision Horizons, Seller Labs, and at least three independent consultants active in the Amazon Seller Central Facebook groups that aggregate north of 200,000 members combined.
What Is Amazon Allegedly Changing in Its Seller Scoring System?
According to sources, the alleged new scorecard — internally referred to at Amazon as “Project Meridian” by at least one person familiar with the initiative — would introduce a composite score that aggregates signals currently siloed across Account Health, Seller Fulfilled Prime metrics, and the Buyer Experience Quality dashboard. Unconfirmed reports suggest the composite score would use a 1,000-point scale, with Buy Box eligibility allegedly gated at 740 points for competitive categories including electronics accessories, home goods, and supplements.
Critically, sources say the new model reportedly penalizes sellers whose estimated delivery date miss rate exceeds 3.2% over a rolling 60-day window — a threshold significantly tighter than the 4.5% benchmark Amazon has historically enforced under Seller Fulfilled Prime rules. For FBA sellers, the exposure would come from Amazon’s own carrier performance being attributed, at least partially, back to the merchant’s composite score — a detail that has reportedly caused internal friction between Amazon’s Fulfillment Operations and Selling Partner Services teams.
“If Amazon is baking carrier misses into a seller’s Buy Box eligibility score, that’s a structural problem. FBA sellers have zero control over last-mile. You’re being punished for UPS dropping the ball.” — Danny Carlson, founder, Kenji ROI
Which Seller Categories Are Most Exposed to the Alleged Changes?
Sources suggest the pilot is currently active in at least four category-specific seller cohorts, with particular scrutiny on:
- Home & Kitchen sellers with SKU counts above 500 — allegedly flagged for high return dispute rates driven by sizing and compatibility issues
- Electronics accessories merchants — reportedly dinged on delivery promise accuracy due to Q1 2026 carrier delays at Amazon’s MDW2 and PHX6 fulfillment nodes
- Health & Beauty private label brands — allegedly exposed to the new return dispute weighting after Amazon’s expanded no-questions-asked return window rolled out in February
- Multi-channel FBA sellers using Amazon’s own Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) service — reportedly scoring lower due to longer transit times on off-Amazon orders being folded into the composite metric
That last point has generated particular alarm among multichannel operators. If Amazon is allegedly counting MCF delivery performance in a seller’s Buy Box score on Amazon.com itself, the incentive structure becomes deeply perverse: sellers who use Amazon’s own logistics to fulfill Shopify or Walmart orders would theoretically be penalized on their Amazon listings for doing so.
“I’ve had three clients ask me this week whether they should pause MCF on their Shopify stores. That’s insane. Amazon built MCF to monetize their logistics network, and now it may be hurting the very sellers who adopted it.” — Liz Moskovitz, Bobsled Marketing
Has Amazon Officially Acknowledged Any Policy Shift?
Amazon has not made any public announcement about a scorecard overhaul, and a spokesperson declined to comment specifically on “Project Meridian” or confirm that any pilot program is underway. The company’s standard response directed sellers to the existing Account Health documentation in Seller Central.
However, at least two sellers report receiving what they describe as unusually specific “proactive outreach” emails from Amazon Selling Partner Support in May 2026, referencing metrics not currently visible in the Account Health dashboard — including a line item labeled “Buyer Promise Index” in one screenshot circulating in the Amazon Seller Central Strategies Facebook group, which has since been removed by its poster, reportedly after pressure from other members concerned about violating Amazon’s terms of service by sharing internal communications.
Fahim Naim, founder of eShopportunity and a former Amazon category manager, told Ecommerce Times he found the alleged “Buyer Promise Index” language consistent with internal frameworks he encountered during his tenure. “That kind of composite index language is very much how Amazon’s internal teams think about seller quality,” he said. “Whether it’s being externalized into Buy Box logic right now, I can’t confirm. But it wouldn’t surprise me.”
Are Third-Party PPC and Repricing Tools Flying Blind?
If the alleged scoring model is real and active, the downstream consequences for the Amazon tooling ecosystem could be significant. Platforms like Teikametrics, Helium 10 Adtomic, and Perpetua build their bid optimization logic partly on Buy Box share signals. A sudden, opaque shift in Buy Box eligibility criteria — one not reflected in any public API change — would effectively introduce noise into every automated campaign running against affected ASINs.
“If a seller loses Buy Box share because of a hidden scoring variable, our system reads it as a competitive pricing problem and starts adjusting bids accordingly,” said one senior product manager at a major Amazon ad tech platform who asked not to be identified. “We’re chasing a ghost. The real fix is on the account health side, not the campaign side.”
Repricing tools face an analogous problem. Feedvisor‘s algorithmic repricing engine, for instance, uses Buy Box win probability as a core input. Sources at two Feedvisor agency partners say they’ve already flagged anomalous repricing behavior on affected ASINs to their Feedvisor account reps, and that Feedvisor is “aware of irregular Buy Box signals” in certain categories — though the company has not issued any formal advisory to customers as of press time.
What Are Sellers and Agencies Doing Right Now to Protect Themselves?
Absent confirmation from Amazon, the operational response across the seller community has been predictably fragmented. Some agencies are taking a wait-and-see posture. Others are moving aggressively on the metrics most likely implicated in any composite scoring model.
Practical steps reportedly being implemented by Bobsled, eShopportunity, and several independent operators include:
- Auditing all FBA listings for return dispute rates above 2.5% — proactively updating listing copy and imagery to reduce expectation mismatches before any scoring event
- Temporarily suspending MCF integrations on Shopify and Walmart storefronts for high-revenue ASINs until the situation clarifies
- Pulling 60-day delivery date miss reports from Seller Central’s Voice of the Customer tool and cross-referencing against Buy Box share data in Brand Analytics
- Escalating directly to Amazon Strategic Account Services (SAS) reps — paid account management tiers — for any ASIN showing unexplained Buy Box suppression above 15%
- Filing SAFE-T claims preemptively on any FBA-fulfilled order with a carrier-caused delivery miss, to create a paper trail separating merchant fault from Amazon logistics fault
“The sellers who are going to get hurt are the ones who assume their clean Account Health dashboard means they’re safe. This situation is a reminder that Amazon’s internal scoring and what they show you in Seller Central are not always the same thing.” — Fahim Naim, eShopportunity
Could This Be a Prelude to a Larger Amazon Seller Policy Overhaul?
Context matters here. This alleged pilot comes at a moment when Amazon is under sustained regulatory scrutiny from the FTC over its Buy Box practices — a lawsuit filed in 2023 that remains in active litigation. Any internal framework that makes Buy Box suppression less transparent, not more, would seem to carry legal risk for the company. That tension has led at least one seller attorney, CJ Rosenbaum of Amazon Sellers Lawyer, to reportedly begin collecting seller data on unexplained Buy Box losses for potential use in ongoing regulatory proceedings.
Meanwhile, Walmart Marketplace is watching. Walmart Connect and Walmart’s fulfillment services team have been aggressively recruiting Amazon sellers displaced by policy friction in 2026, and several agency sources say the alleged scoring changes have already come up in Walmart’s seller acquisition conversations as a competitive talking point.
Whether “Project Meridian” is real, already live, or still theoretical, the operational lesson is the same one experienced Amazon sellers have internalized over a decade of platform dependency: the rules you can see are never the only rules that matter. And right now, a growing number of sellers believe there are rules they can’t see at all.
Ecommerce Times has reached out to Amazon, Feedvisor, Teikametrics, and Bobsled Marketing for comment. This story will be updated as additional information becomes available.
