Amazon’s New Liability Insurance Rules (Nov 2, 2026)

Amazon posted a short announcement on September 3 that a lot of sellers will skip right past. Don’t. The commercial liability insurance rule has been in the Business Solutions Agreement since 2021, and Amazon has done very little to enforce it. The two changes that start on November 2, 2026 are the first real sign that is going to change.

The first change makes insurance required for a whole group of product categories, even for small sellers. The second tells sellers in Mainland China exactly where they can buy their policy. Neither one raises the amount of coverage you need. Both change who has to prove they have it.

Here is how the commercial liability insurance rule has worked since September 1, 2021. Once you sell more than $10,000 in gross proceeds in any single month on Amazon.com, you have 30 days to get commercial liability insurance and submit proof to Amazon. Before 2021, it took three straight months over $10,000 to trigger the rule. Amazon cut that to one.

The policy has to meet a few specific requirements:

• At least $1 million per occurrence and $1 million in aggregate
• Covers every product you list on Amazon
• Names Amazon.com Services LLC and its affiliates as an additional insured
• General liability, umbrella, or excess liability all qualify
• Deductible no higher than $10,000
• The insured name matches the legal entity on your seller account

Two other things came out of that 2021 update. Amazon gave itself the right to ask any seller for insurance at any time, and it started paying small injury and property damage claims (under $1,000) directly through the A-to-z Guarantee instead of sending them to the seller. So for five years Amazon has been covering the small stuff itself and mostly not checking the paperwork. Now it is getting specific about where the big claims come from.

Source: Amazon Seller Central announcement, September 3, 2026, and the Commercial Liability Insurance Requirements help page.

If you have listings in a category with enhanced safety listing requirements, you now need a $1 million policy covering those products even if you have never sold $10,000 in a month. The announcement only names children’s products, cosmetic and ingestible products, and lithium-battery products as examples. The actual list is a lot longer. This covers existing listings too, not just new ones. A small seller with a few toy or supplement ASINs doing $2,000 a month is now inside the rule. So is a seller flipping air fryers from a clearance aisle.

Amazon says it will email sellers it decides need new or updated coverage, and you get 45 days from that email to submit proof. If you don’t, your listings in the enhanced-safety categories can be deactivated until you do. Your other listings aren’t touched.

Here is the complete list from Amazon’s Product categories with enhanced safety listing requirements page as of September 4, 2026 (you’ll need to be signed in to Seller Central to see it). Amazon says the list changes as it adds categories and doesn’t cover every product with these requirements, so check Account Health too.

Source: Amazon Seller Central, Product categories with enhanced safety listing requirements, retrieved September 4, 2026.

Two things stand out. First, this isn’t a private-label rule. Small kitchen appliances, tires, mattresses, and helmets are exactly what arbitrage and wholesale sellers move all the time. Second, insurance is only one of three requirements on that page. Products in these categories also need testing by an Amazon-authorized third-party lab before you can list them, and Amazon can pull units for random testing at any time. The insurance rule is the part that is new. The testing rules were already there.

The reason is simple. These are the categories where a bad product turns into a lawsuit. A toy that breaks into small pieces. A supplement with something in it that isn’t on the label. A battery pack that catches fire in someone’s garage. When that happens, it doesn’t matter to Amazon whether the seller did $3,000 that month or $300,000.

Sellers based in Mainland China must get their insurance through the Amazon Insurance Accelerator (AIA). That is the group of insurers Amazon and the insurance broker Marsh put together in 2021. Starting November 2, Amazon will reject any new policy from a China-based seller that didn’t come through AIA. If a seller already has a valid policy on file before that date, they can keep using it until it expires. Then they have to switch.

Look at how Amazon describes AIA in the announcement. It helps sellers “secure compliant coverage, avoid policy rejections, and ensure your claims are supported when they arise.” Each of those is a problem Amazon has clearly been dealing with.

This isn’t about where the sellers are. It’s about what happens when a customer gets hurt and the seller is on the other side of the world.

Start with the numbers. Marketplace Pulse reports that sellers based in China passed 50 percent of Amazon’s active seller base worldwide in 2025 and made up about 60 percent of new seller signups that year. On Amazon.com, they estimate China-based sellers bring in around $132 billion of the roughly $305 billion in third-party sales. That is a lot of product, and a lot of potential claims.

The real problem is collecting. When a product from a U.S. seller hurts a customer, the customer sues the seller, the seller’s insurance company pays, and Amazon is protected because it is listed on the policy. When the seller is a small company in Shenzhen with a policy from an insurer nobody in the U.S. has heard of, none of that works. The customer can’t serve them, can’t collect from them, and the insurer may never answer a U.S. claim. That leaves Amazon as the only one left to sue. And over the last few years, courts and regulators have been saying that is exactly who should pay.

In 2020, a California appeals court ruled in Bolger v. Amazon that Amazon was liable for a defective laptop battery sold by a third party. In July 2024, the Consumer Product Safety Commission voted unanimously that Amazon is a “distributor” of products sold through FBA and is responsible for recalling them. That case involved more than 400,000 hazardous products, mostly children’s sleepwear, hair dryers, and carbon monoxide detectors, and most of them came from overseas sellers. Amazon is suing the CPSC to fight that ruling. But you can see where this is going.

Then there is the paperwork itself. A certificate of insurance is only as good as the company behind it. You don’t have to guess at the problems here, because Amazon spelled them out. Alongside this change it published a help page called Commercial liability insurance best practices for sellers based in mainland China. Read it as a list of everything that has been going wrong:

• Coverage gaps. Policies that don’t cover every product the seller sells.
• Sunset clauses. Policies that won’t accept a claim reported after the policy expires, even if the injury happened while it was active. Amazon’s own example: sell a product in January 2025, policy ends in December, customer files in March 2026, claim denied.
• Invalid coverage dates. The loss happens outside the policy period.
• No U.S. claims handling. Amazon asks for English-speaking adjusters, claims staff in U.S. time zones, and a track record of paying U.S. product liability claims. If it has to ask, it hasn’t been getting that.
• Deductibles that stall claims. Amazon wants the insurer to pay the full claim up front and collect the deductible from the seller later, instead of waiting on the seller to pay first.
• Insurers that won’t answer. Amazon asks that providers respond to its verification requests and give 30 days’ notice before canceling a policy.

Every item on that list is something a U.S. carrier does as a matter of course. Forcing every China-based seller through AIA means every policy comes from a carrier Amazon and Marsh already checked out, with automatic verification and standard claims handling. Chubb, Hiscox, Liberty Mutual, and Travelers have all been part of the program.

Notice what Amazon didn’t do. It didn’t raise the coverage minimum. It didn’t lower the $10,000 trigger for everyone. It didn’t make U.S. or European sellers use AIA. This is a targeted fix. If you are a U.S. seller who has ever felt like you were competing with overseas sellers who just skip the insurance bill, this is the first move that closes some of that gap. Not all of it. But some.

• Check your listings against the category list. Go through the 11 categories above and look up your ASINs. Small kitchen appliances and lithium batteries are the ones that will surprise people. A coffee maker or a rechargeable gadget can put you inside the rule without a single toy in your store.
• If you are under $10,000 a month and in a listed category, get a quote now. A compliant liability policy for a small ecommerce seller usually runs somewhere around $50 to $200 a month, depending on what you sell and how much. The other option is getting the 45-day email and having those listings deactivated.
• If you already have a policy, check it. Make sure it covers the specific enhanced-safety products, names Amazon.com Services LLC and its affiliates as additional insured, meets $1M/$1M, keeps the deductible at $10,000 or less, and matches your legal entity name exactly. Those details are where Amazon rejects certificates.
• If you buy from a Chinese supplier, this rule doesn’t apply to you. Your own coverage still does. The rule is about where the seller is based, not where the product is made. If you private-label goods from an overseas factory you could never realistically sue, your policy is the only thing between a product claim and your business.
• Expect enforcement to follow. Amazon now has a category-by-category definition of who needs insurance and a hard rule on which insurers count for its biggest group of sellers. Amazon doesn’t build that kind of thing and then leave it sitting there.

None of this is a big deal for a seller who has carried proper coverage since 2021. You won’t notice anything on November 2. But Amazon has now put in writing which products it thinks are risky enough to insure from the first unit, and which sellers it no longer trusts to pick their own insurer. That tells you more about where this marketplace is headed than most of the fee changes that get all the attention.