Top Seller News This Week

This week’s retail news shows Amazon moving decisively toward unified advertising, smarter AI, and more intuitive shopping experiences. The company is rebuilding core systems to make advertising simpler, creative production faster, and product discovery more seamless.

• unBoxed 2025 sets the tone: Amazon Ads revamps Campaign Manager, introduces agentic AI tools, and rolls out next-gen creative automation.
• Ad benchmarks for clearer insights: Amazon Ads now offers self-serve category-specific performance benchmarks for smarter optimization and investment decisions.
• Expanded AI shopping with Lens Live and Rufus growth: Lens Live offers camera-based product discovery as Rufus surges 149% to 250M+ customers this year.

Let’s dive in to understand how these changes will reshape opportunities and expectations for advertisers and sellers.

Amazon UnBoxed 2025: Rebuilding the Ad Machine and Unifying Full-Funnel

For years, Amazon’s ads business expanded in layers. First, Sponsored Products, then Demand Side Platform (DSP), then streaming TV. But at UnBoxed 2025, Amazon rebuilt its entire advertising ecosystem into a unified, AI-powered platform built for simplicity, scale, and broad accessibility rather than iterating around the edges.

The new system is anchored by a cohesive vision:

• A single Campaign Manager for all media buying.
• Agentic AI tools that plan, build, launch, and optimize ads.
• Integrated streaming TV and premium video supply.
• Authenticated reach across 90% of US households.
• Creative automation capable of producing broadcast-ready video in hours.

This overhaul democratizes full-funnel advertising, bringing enterprise-level capabilities to mid-market advertisers and even marketplace sellers. This comes at a time as Amazon Ads posts 24% YoY growth in Q3 2025.

Amazon Unifies the Ad Experience

At the heart of the transformation is the unified Campaign Manager, which merges Sponsored Ads and DSP into one workflow. Advertisers can now run Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, display, audio, and streaming TV from one login, supported by centralized reporting, standardized metrics, and AI-powered natural language insights.

Navigation is simpler, setup is faster, and routine tasks are automated. Existing Sponsored Ads advertisers can adopt the new workflow without paying DSP fees unless they choose DSP-only placements.

This consolidation removes one of the biggest barriers to Amazon Ads adoption: operational complexity. As VP Kelly MacLean noted, advertisers finally get a consolidated view into how campaigns are performing right across the funnel.

AI Takes the Wheel: Full-Funnel Campaigns, Ads Agent & Creative Agent

Amazon’s agentic AI tools represent the most disruptive evolution unveiled at UnBoxed.

• Full-Funnel Campaigns create multi-format strategies from a single prompt, recommending budgets, audiences, and placements, automatically optimizing across Sponsored Ads, display, and streaming TV. Full-funnel execution becomes possible even to advertisers with limited experience.
• Ads Agent serves as an AI co-pilot, drafting media plans, building campaigns,and helping to retrieve and analyze Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) data. It also constructs audiences, and automates optimization and bidding, dramatically reducing manual work.
• Creative Agent is the biggest creative breakthrough. It researches products, generates concepts, produces storyboards, builds static, audio, and multi-scene video ads, and even creates streaming TV spots in hours. It can transform existing creative into new formats (e.g., video ad to audio ad) and generate seasonal variants instantly. Several brands already have live TV campaigns built entirely with Creative Agent, highlighting how quickly AI is changing production workflows.

A New Era for Streaming TV

Amazon also cemented streaming TV as a core component of its ad strategy. Prime Video now reaches 315M global ad-supported viewers (including 130M in the US) and anchors Amazon’s premium video ecosystem across sports, entertainment, and creator-led content.

Through DSP Inventory Hub, advertisers can negotiate Prime Video, third-party apps, Twitch, Amazon Music, and live sports ad inventory in one place. With Complete TV and AMC integrations, brands can unify linear and streaming reach, reduce frequency waste, and measure full-funnel performance. Case studies show major lifts, from Lay’s (+133% purchase rates) to H&R Block (+144% conversions).

Data-Driven Decisions with New Benchmarks

Adding to the power of AI and unified tools, Amazon Ads now offers category-specific benchmarks. These self-service insights provide:

• Peer brand comparisons across ad formats and campaign goals.
• Daily, weekly, or monthly performance tracking.
• Integration directly in Campaign Manager, Report Center, and via API.

Benchmarks allow advertisers to evaluate current performance, identify optimization opportunities, and plan strategic investments with confidence. By combining AI-driven campaign management with clear category standards, brands can make smarter, data-backed decisions across their advertising portfolio.

The Bigger Story

According to DigiDay, Amazon is intentionally lowering barriers across its ad stack, for example expanding AMC access, reducing DSP thresholds, and introducing tools that require fewer specialists. The effect is a powerful flywheel: lowering complexity means more advertisers use Amazon’s tools. More advertisers create more data. More data makes Amazon’s system smarter. A smarter system gets better results, which encourages advertisers to spend even more.

Amazon isn’t just adding tools. It’s building an ecosystem designed to scale by attracting, not just large brands and agencies, but a broader range of smaller advertisers, much like Google and Meta did in their breakout years. So, those who embrace Amazon’s AI stack will gain the advantage across discovery, demand, and conversion, long before this becomes the new industry norm.

From Camera to Cart: Amazon’s Lens Live Makes Shopping Instant

Amazon is taking visual search and AI-assisted shopping to a new level with the launch of Lens Live, the latest evolution of Amazon Lens, now fully integrated with its AI shopping assistant, Rufus. The feature allows customers to scan products in real time, discover matches instantly, and access contextual insights, streamlining product discovery and driving purchases more efficiently.

For instance, a shopper spots a stylish sofa on Instagram. Lens Live scans it instantly, displays similar options, and Amazon Rufus suggests materials, dimensions, and comparable price ranges. The customer adds the ideal sofa to the cart, all without leaving the camera view.

Amazon Lens Live Features

Lens Live transforms your phone into a smart shopping tool:

• Instant scanning: Open Lens Live, and the camera automatically detects primary objects in the frame.
• Swipeable carousel: Top matching products appear instantly at the bottom of the screen for quick comparisons.
• Interactive actions: Tap an item to focus on it, add directly to your cart (+), or save to your wishlist (♥) without leaving the camera view.
• AI insights: Rufus provides summaries, suggested questions, and answers on the fly, such as product dimensions or compatibility queries (“Will this sofa fit through a 30-inch doorway?”).

Powered by AWS OpenSearch, SageMaker, and deep learning visual embeddings, Lens Live matches the image against billions of Amazon products, while Rufus enhances discovery with over 50 recent updates in product knowledge, search, and recommendation capabilities. With monthly users up 149% and interactions up 210% in 2025, Rufus is shaping the way customers shop online.

Pros for Sellers

• Higher conversion potential: Shoppers using Amazon Rufus AI are over 60% more likely to make a purchase, according to PYMNTS.
• Increased product visibility: Instant matches and swipeable carousels highlight multiple listings.
• Reduced friction: Customers can add to cart or wishlist without navigating away from the camera view. 

Cons

• Competitive pressure: Instant matching may divert attention to similar products from other sellers.
• Listing quality matters more: Poor images or incomplete descriptions may reduce chances of appearing in Lens Live.
• Limited control over AI suggestions: Rufus curates summaries and answers automatically.

Lens Live highlights Amazon’s strategy to modernize customer interactions using AI-driven functionality, competing with tools like Google Lens, eBay’s “Shop the Look” feature, and Pinterest’s AI shopping assistant. And with Rufus reaching over 250 million users in 2025 and enhanced technical capabilities, Amazon is positioning AI-driven visual search as one of the most efficient ways for customers to explore, evaluate, and purchase products. Sellers who adapt quickly can turn this new discovery tool into a conversion engine.

Other Retail News This Week

1. Holiday Returns Are Shaping Up

As the 2025 holiday season approaches, retailers are working to balance customer satisfaction with operational efficiency. Returns remain costly, and return fraud continues to grow, with the National Retail Federation projecting $849.9 billion in returns for 2025 and 19.3% of online sales expected to be returned. While free returns remain a major draw for shoppers, retailers are taking more nuanced steps to curb abuse and manage these rising costs.

Amazon, Walmart, and Kohl’s extend most holiday return windows through January  31, 2026, Target varies by item, and other retailers like Sephora, Macy’s, Best Buy, TJX, and Ulta also offer extended periods, often with fees or restrictions.

2. Amazon Jewelry Listing Updates

Amazon now requires all jewelry listings to be classified as either “fine” or “fashion.” In addition, mandatory attributes for pearls, metals, and materials have been updated to align with industry standards and improve search visibility. New listings that do not include these updates will be suppressed, so sellers are strongly encouraged to update existing catalogs to stay current and avoid potential listing issues.

3. FBA Enrollment Tool Enhancements

Amazon’s FBA Enrollment Opportunities tool now includes the “Why this ASIN?” feature, letting sellers compare FBA and seller-fulfilled performance. It provides insights on delivery speed, Prime metrics, and sales, helping sellers identify which ASINs benefit most from FBA and optimize their inventory strategy.