A week-old post on Amazon Seller Central has triggered a wider dispute about how far the company's brand protection policies can lawfully extend - and whether they are being used, in practice, to enforce private distribution agreements that Amazon has historically said it does not police.

The post, published by Michelle_Amazon on Amazon's Seller Central forums and recorded as having gathered 428 views and 6 replies as of this week, outlines three compliance practices the company says sellers in the US marketplace must follow. The timing matters. The guidance arrives after a sequence of structural changes Amazon has made since late 2024 that have progressively shifted the operational balance between brand owners and third-party resellers.

What the guidance says

According to the Amazon Seller Central post, sellers must take three steps before listing a product. First, check whether a product, brand, or category requires prior approval through the "Add a Product" flow in Seller Central. If the interface displays a "Listing limitations apply" message, sellers must click through, select "Request Approval," submit the required documents, and wait for a decision. If declined, the seller must check the case log for the stated reason before reapplying.

Second, resellers of branded products may need a Letter of Authorization (LOA) from the brand owner. According to the post, a valid LOA must carry official letterhead from the brand or licensor, identify both parties - the licensor and the licensee - define the scope of the grant, state the geographic scope such as the United States, specify a term or duration, and bear an authorized signature. The guidance advises sellers to retain the LOA at all times because, according to the post, Amazon may request it at any time, even after the seller is already selling.

Third, sellers are told to source products only from manufacturers or authorized distributors. The invoices submitted for approval must name the seller's business, the supplier, and the product, must be dated within the last 180 days, and must not be altered in any way except to cover pricing if the seller chooses to do so. According to the post, sourcing from unauthorized suppliers is one of the most common pitfalls for US sellers.

The reaction

The guidance landed quietly on Seller Central but amplified rapidly after Ephraim Rosenberg, founder of the Amazon Sellers Group (ASGTG.com) and a figure with a broad following among marketplace operators, shared it on LinkedIn along with a pointed commentary. Rosenberg noted an apparent contradiction: the new framing of brand protection stands in tension with what Amazon told sellers for years - that the platform "does not enforce distribution agreements" and that authentic products backed by verifiable invoices are generally sufficient to establish the right to resell.

"Is Amazon now indirectly enforcing private distribution systems through gating, LOAs, and approval restrictions?" Rosenberg asked in his post. "Because if authentic inventory plus valid invoices are no longer enough, then sellers deserve a clear explanation of where the line is. At what point does 'brand protection' become de facto control over lawful resale?"

He invited input specifically from policy teams, IP attorneys, and experienced sellers, framing the question around the first-sale doctrine - the legal principle that, under US copyright and trademark law, the authorized first sale of a product exhausts the brand owner's right to control subsequent resales of that specific item.

The comment thread attracted several practitioners with direct experience. Adam Engel, an attorney at The Engel Law Group who specializes in Amazon seller representation, said he had "a few new matters for clients who have gotten unexplained notices for lack of brand authorization on products they have been selling for years." He described the pattern as Amazon "starting to get into 'brand protection' and enforcing the brands' desire to stifle competition."

Ben Arbiv, identified as a Compliance Manager at iBuy operating in e-commerce, described a more aggressive enforcement posture: "Amazon started to attack even when you're on the brand registry and making false allegations that we as sellers need to figure out a way to prove wrong." Arbiv described allegations ranging from claims that legitimate invoices were "digitally manipulated" to assertions that inventory is being acquired through illicit means.

Eric Moore, a self-described Amazon FBA business owner, cited thousands of brands gated over the past two years that he had sold for seven years previously. "Amazon does NOT care about 3rd party sellers - PERIOD," he wrote. Jon Elder, described in his profile as an Amazon and Walmart Advisor who has founded three companies with more than $5 million in combined revenue, called the news "fantastic" - a reaction that reflects how the seller community is divided on this issue. Brands that own their products view tighter gating as protection. Resellers who built businesses on grey-area sourcing view it as an existential threat.

Joel Loeb, founder and CEO of AbacusRefunds, offered one of the more measured assessments in the thread. "There's a meaningful difference between protecting consumers from counterfeits and operationalising a brand's private distribution preferences through platform gating," Loeb wrote, "and Amazon hasn't been transparent about which one is actually driving these decisions. If authentic inventory and valid invoices are no longer sufficient, sellers..." - the visible portion of the comment cuts off there.

Technical details of the approval process

The mechanics of the approval system are worth setting out precisely, because their operational effect depends on the specific steps involved.

A seller who encounters a "Listing limitations apply" message when adding a product must initiate an approval request through Seller Central. The outcome depends on what Amazon determines about the seller's authorization to carry that product. If the request is declined, the seller is directed to a case log that states the reason. The seller can reapply once the stated issue is addressed - but there is no published standard for what constitutes a sufficient remedy, nor any defined timeline for processing.

The LOA requirement introduces a dependency on the brand owner that does not exist under first-sale doctrine analysis. Under traditional US trademark law, a party that purchases genuine goods in a lawful transaction can resell them without needing permission from the brand owner - provided the goods are not materially different from authorized versions and no consumer confusion arises. The LOA system effectively creates a parallel permission layer that exists independently of whether the seller legally acquired the products. Brands that refuse to issue LOAs can thereby block legitimate resellers from the platform even when those resellers hold authentic, properly sourced inventory.

The authorized distributor requirement adds a further layer. Invoices must come from manufacturers or authorized distributors - not from authorized retailers, liquidators, or other downstream participants in legitimate supply chains. This distinction matters because a significant portion of third-party sellers acquire inventory through retail arbitrage or from liquidation channels, both of which can produce authentic products with traceable purchase documentation that still fails the authorized-distributor test.

What happens to a new seller who does not yet have supplier relationships? According to the Seller Central forum thread, one reply from a user who had just created an account asked for guidance on how to start selling without harming account health - suggesting the approval requirements create a steep entry barrier that disproportionately affects newer marketplace participants.

Another forum user who identified themselves as manufacturing more than 10,000 different products reported that Amazon had told them they were "not authorized" to sell certain of their own products. "That is why we only list 400 of them on Amazon and all of them on other platforms that do NOT abuse 3P sellers," the user wrote. A separate user running a business called Axio Supply, which both owns brands and manufactures those brands' products under the same parent company, asked whether LOAs would be required to document the relationship between a brand and its own manufacturer when both are under common ownership. None of these questions received a definitive answer in the forum thread.

Context: a pattern of structural changes

This guidance does not arrive in isolation. Amazon ended FBA commingling on March 31, 2026, separating inventory by seller and requiring resellers to apply FNSKU barcodes on all units sent to fulfillment centers. That change drew a sharp operational line between brand owners enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry and the broader population of marketplace resellers.

Preceding that, Amazon forced resellers to abandon manufacturer barcodes in March, announcing that starting March 31, 2026, only sellers with the Brand Representative selling role in Amazon Brand Registry would retain eligibility to use manufacturer barcodes such as ISBN, UPC, EAN, or JAN for products sent to fulfillment centers.

The cumulative picture is one of steadily tightening conditions for third-party resellers. As PPC Land documented in April 2026, Amazon has been engineering its infrastructure to reward brand owners and penalize commodity resellers at multiple layers simultaneously - search algorithm dynamics, brand store quality scoring, barcode requirements, return policies, and advertising auction mechanics all create compounding advantages for differentiated brands with strong cost-of-goods structures.

Amazon introduced the Seller Challenge mechanism in October 2025, giving Account Health Assurance sellers three challenge allocations per six-month period for disputing enforcement decisions - a development that acknowledged automated enforcement systems require human oversight. But the challenge process applies to listed enforcements rather than to the upstream access-gate decisions that prevent sellers from listing in the first place. A seller blocked at the approval stage has no equivalent mechanism to contest that outcome.

The enforcement posture described in the Seller Central post is explicit. According to the guidance, "Amazon actively enforces brand protection policies - and the consequences of non-compliance can be costly and time-consuming to resolve." The framing treats non-compliance as a seller failing rather than as a contested area of marketplace policy.

The first-sale doctrine question

The legal question at the center of the Rosenberg thread is whether what Amazon describes as brand protection is, in functional terms, something closer to vertical distribution control exercised through a private platform.

The first-sale doctrine, codified under 17 U.S.C. Section 109 for copyrighted works and applied in trademark contexts through Ninth Circuit and Supreme Court precedent, generally allows purchasers of genuine goods to resell them without brand-owner authorization. Courts have carved out exceptions - notably for goods that are materially different from those authorized for a particular market - but the baseline rule is that authenticity plus lawful acquisition equals the right to resell.

Amazon's LOA requirement sits outside this framework entirely. It does not ask whether the goods are authentic or lawfully sourced. It asks whether the brand owner has granted permission. A brand owner who has enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry and requested gating for their products can effectively deny LOAs to all independent resellers, regardless of those resellers' legal entitlements under first-sale principles. The practical result is that platform-level enforcement can override the legal baseline without any judicial determination.

Whether Amazon's gating system amounts to unlawful facilitation of distribution control - or whether it falls within Amazon's rights as a private platform to set its own marketplace terms - is a question that IP attorneys such as Adam Engel appear to be testing in active client matters. There is no settled legal consensus on this point. One forum participant asked directly: who validates that the LOAs provided to Amazon by sellers are authentic - solely Amazon, or does Amazon forward the LOA to the brand owner to confirm it is genuine? That question also went unanswered in the thread.

Implications for the marketing and e-commerce community

For performance marketers who manage Amazon Advertising for reseller accounts, the approval and gating landscape has direct implications for campaign viability. PPC Land has tracked how Amazon sellers reported sales declines of 60 to 80 percent year-over-year between May and August 2025, citing algorithm changes and increased competition from internationally based merchants. A reseller who is gated out of a category cannot advertise within that category regardless of bid strategy or budget.

Brands that have invested in Amazon Brand Registry can now use gating as a tool to remove competitors from their listings, consolidate the buy box, and reduce price competition - which generally improves advertising efficiency but reduces marketplace diversity. For brands, this tightening creates a more controllable channel. For resellers and performance marketers who serve reseller accounts, it compresses the catalog of advertisable products.

Amazon's 2025 Small Business Empowerment Report, published April 30, 2026, documented that more than 75,000 independent sellers surpassed $1 million in annual sales in 2025 - a 36% increase compared to 2024. Independent sellers now account for more than 60% of total sales on the platform. The headline numbers describe a marketplace that is, in aggregate, expanding. But the distribution of those gains - and whether resellers or brand owners are capturing the growth - is not broken down in the report.

The seller authorization guidance from Michelle_Amazon does not introduce new rules. What it does is codify existing practice in a format that makes clear where Amazon stands on disputed categories. For resellers who have operated in grey zones between authentic sourcing and strict authorized-distributor requirements, the message is a clarification of risk. For brand owners seeking to consolidate distribution, it is an endorsement of tools they already have access to.

The question Rosenberg posed - at what point does brand protection become de facto control over lawful resale - remains unanswered in the official guidance. Amazon's post does not address first-sale doctrine, does not acknowledge the distinction between counterfeit prevention and distribution control, and does not provide a mechanism for sellers to contest a brand's LOA refusal on legal grounds.

Timeline

Summary

Who - Amazon, through its Seller Central forums via a post by Michelle_Amazon, addressed third-party marketplace sellers in the US. The debate drew responses from Ephraim Rosenberg (founder of ASGTG.com), attorney Adam Engel (The Engel Law Group), compliance manager Ben Arbiv (iBuy), Amazon FBA seller Eric Moore, advisor Jon Elder, and Joel Loeb (AbacusRefunds).

What - Amazon published guidance stating that US marketplace sellers must check for approval requirements before listing, obtain a Letter of Authorization from brand owners when reselling branded products, and source products exclusively from manufacturers or authorized distributors. The guidance triggered a public debate about whether the approval and gating infrastructure amounts to indirect enforcement of private distribution agreements beyond what trademark or copyright law requires.

When - The Amazon Seller Central post was published approximately one week before this article, around April 30, 2026. Ephraim Rosenberg shared it on LinkedIn in early May 2026.

Where - The original post appeared on Amazon's Seller Central forums for the United States marketplace. The subsequent debate took place publicly on LinkedIn.

Why - The guidance matters because it codifies conditions - LOA requirements, authorized-distributor invoicing, and approval gates - that can function to exclude legitimate resellers who hold authentic products but lack brand-owner permission. The legal basis for that exclusion sits in tension with the first-sale doctrine's baseline entitlement to resell lawfully purchased genuine goods. The debate reflects a broader shift in Amazon's marketplace structure: a series of changes since 2025 has progressively favored brand owners over independent resellers, raising unresolved questions about the boundary between consumer protection and distribution control.

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