What Amazon DIDN’T Tell You at unBoxed 2026 | Upside #107

Strategy

14 Oct

Amazon Accelerate and Unboxed: The Announcements Sellers Should Actually Care About

Fresh back from two weeks in the US, Al and Leon pick the most important announcements from Amazon Accelerate in Seattle and Unboxed in San Francisco, with 30 or more announcements across the two events to choose from. For each one, they give their view on whether it’s worth testing and where it’s heading.

In this episode: A curated rundown of the announcements that matter most, from Amazon’s AI Seller Assistant and sponsored prompts to Amazon warehouses in China, multichannel logistics, and new all in one ad campaigns.

Key takeaways

Seller Assistant will help beginner and intermediate sellers most, but treat its recommendations with caution because Amazon’s agenda is to earn more from you, and the new Selling Partner plugin lets you pull the same data into your own AI instead.
Sponsored prompts are already live in the US and you are already paying for them, so check the prompts report in your ads console.
The new all in one ad campaigns (DVA plus and full funnel) can open up channels you haven’t tried, with a built in warning if returns drop, but early testing suggests Amazon is ignoring core campaign structure principles.

Timestamps

00:00 Back from two weeks in the US
00:36 What Amazon Accelerate and Unboxed were, and how we picked our favourites
05:52 Seller Assistant: Amazon’s AI inside Seller Central
08:37 Two big caveats: Amazon’s agenda, and the Selling Partner plugin
12:44 The useful parts: the FBA inbound and inventory specialist team
13:55 Sponsored prompts
16:58 Global warehousing and distribution: Amazon warehouses in China
19:51 Amazon global logistics beyond Amazon, and the one inventory pool risk
22:06 Listing protection and automations
23:15 Unboxed: DVA plus campaigns
26:43 Full funnel campaigns
28:16 Honourable mentions: AMC improvements

The detail

Seller Assistant is the headline announcement from Accelerate: an AI inside Seller Central that tracks hundreds of metrics across sales, inventory, ads, profitability, compliance and account health, gives recommendations with reasoning, can act in one tap and remembers your preferences. Experienced sellers already use most of this data, so it is mainly a better way to organise it, while beginners will gain the most. The caveats: Amazon’s recommendations have always served its own agenda of earning more, as seen in the FTC case over how Amazon charges for ads, and the quality of any AI depends on the practices it is trained on. Amazon also announced a Selling Partner plugin that lets you pull your live data through an API into your own AI, where you can set your own context and build your own AI operating system for less biased decisions.

Sponsored prompts are the new advertising format appearing under listing images on desktop, guided by Alexa for Shopping. They are live in the US, you pay for them today, and you can see which prompts were shown in the search term dropdown of your sponsored ads reports. Sponsored products and sponsored brands also appear inside Alexa for Shopping conversations without any separate campaign. The concern is that heavy advertising inside what feels like an organic conversation could erode the trust that makes AI shopping appealing, and Amazon says it will roll out globally.

On the ads side, Amazon launched DVA plus campaigns, which combine sponsored display, TV and audio in one campaign where you set an objective, budget and goal and Amazon allocates the spend, with a built in warning when returns or TACOS go wrong. A useful tip: even if you don’t run the campaign, you can use its higher quality AI creative tool to produce video for your sponsored brand campaigns. Full funnel campaigns go further by adding sponsored products and brands, but early testing suggests Amazon is ignoring the foundational structure of broad, exact and phrase campaigns, so test carefully and keep control of the spend.