News from Amazon 1 11/2025
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All relevant Amazon news and developments at a glance – understandable and compact.
Amazon Continues on Its Growth Path
Amazon’s third quarter of 2025 once again shows where the strategic journey is heading: the focus keeps shifting away from classic first-party retail toward higher-margin service and advertising revenues.
The segment figures make this especially clear. Classic retail (first-party/Vendor) generated 67.4 billion USD and grew 10 percent year over year. After a weaker start to the year, the business clearly rebounded over the summer, but it remains the segment with the lowest growth and limited momentum.
The Amazon Marketplace is growing even faster: With 42.5 billion USD in revenue, the Seller segment is up 12 percent year over year. After a slight dip at the start of the year, the seller business stabilized from the second quarter onward and now shows solid growth momentum.
Advertising remains the strongest growth driver
Amazon still records its fastest revenue growth in advertising: Ads generated 17.7 billion USD and increased by 24 percent – the highest value Amazon has ever achieved in this segment. Since the beginning of the year, the ads business has even grown faster than all other segments and, after a dip in the first quarter, accelerated massively from Q2 onward.
A strong outlook for Q4
For the fourth quarter of 2025, Amazon expects net sales of up to 260 billion USD and operating income of up to 21.2 billion USD – the outlook remains optimistic despite competitive pressure and high investments.
You can find more details in the official Amazon earnings report.
OpenAI and Amazon Announce Partnership
OpenAI has signed a 38 billion USD multiyear agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS). OpenAI secures access to hundreds of thousands of state-of-the-art NVIDIA GPUs and several million CPUs to significantly expand compute capacity for AI models like ChatGPT. The collaboration starts immediately, and the full capacity is slated to be available by the end of 2026, with an optional extension into 2027 and beyond.
Amazon Lays Off 14,000 Employees
Amazon is cutting 14,000 positions across the company. The goal: streamline operations, reduce bureaucracy, and focus resources even more on key areas and customer needs.
Affected employees receive support such as 90 days to seek internal transfers, severance packages, and additional assistance.
Hiring continues in strategically important areas. The move is driven by the need to respond more flexibly and quickly to major technological shifts – especially through AI.
This workforce reduction affects not only organizational roles but, as we’ve seen, also Sales and Vendor Managers, though it currently mainly impacts positions in the United States.
Amazon’s stock responded positively to the news
The Amazon share price rose at times and triggered a positive trend that was reinforced further by the quarterly results.
Amazon Plans to Save up to 600,000 Jobs and Add New Hires
According to the New York Times, Amazon plans a long-term shift toward greater automation using robotics. The Times obtained internal Amazon documents detailing a target to automate 75% of processes, potentially saving up to 600,000 positions.
Amazon expects among other things to save more than 12 billion USD between 2025 and 2027. The company emphasizes that these are efficiency gains rather than layoffs.
It remains to be seen how the topic will develop in the coming years and whether Amazon will become a job killer in the United States.
Want to learn more about robotics at Amazon?
You can find exciting insights on the topic in the Amazon Blog. We also covered it in our roundtable last Thursday.
Updated Return Policies Active as of November 1
Amazon is extending the return window for holiday purchases: Items bought between November 1 and December 25, 2025 can be returned until January 31, 2026, or within 30 days after delivery, whichever is later.
This rule applies across all EU stores, with only a few country-specific exceptions.
All other return conditions remain unchanged.
More information is available in the official Amazon notice on Seller Central.
Relaxed Prime Eligibility Requirements for the Holiday Season
To ensure merchants retain their Prime eligibility, Amazon has temporarily adjusted the requirements for Prime offers from November 2, 2025, to January 10, 2026.
The change applies to Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Belgium, and Ireland, and covers both “Fulfilled by Amazon” and “Seller Fulfilled Prime,” as well as Amazon Retail.
During this period, the new targets for delivery speed and on-time delivery rates must be met to keep products Prime eligible.
Low-priced items and standard size
- Domestic: Deliver 25% of offers in a maximum of 2 days, 65% in a maximum of 4 days.
- Cross-border: Deliver 5% of offers in a maximum of 3 days, 15% in a maximum of 4 days, and 35% in a maximum of 6 days.
- On-time delivery rate above 92%.
Oversize
- Domestic: Deliver 10% of offers in a maximum of 3 days, 30% in a maximum of 4 days, and 45% in a maximum of 6 days.
- Cross-border: Deliver 5% of offers in a maximum of 5 days, 10% in a maximum of 6 days.
- On-time delivery rate above 90%.
Extra large
- Domestic: Deliver 5% of offers in a maximum of 5 days, 15% in a maximum of 6 days.
- Cross-border: Deliver 5% of offers in a maximum of 5 days, 10% in a maximum of 6 days.
- On-time delivery rate above 90%.
Regular Prime eligibility requirements and the Prime badge rules described in the Prime programs for sellers will apply again starting January 11, 2026.
More information is available on Seller Central.
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News Snippets
Amazon’s new “Add to delivery” feature aims to make ordering even easier.
Delivery times were adjusted by Amazon without further communication.
Amazon has introduced new holiday season surcharges in the US.
AWS launched Project Rainier: one of the world’s largest AI compute clusters is going live.
Canva has unveiled an Amazon Ads app.
Amazon Now has launched in the UAE – deliveries within 15 minutes.
Amazon already deploys more than 1 million robots.
