Amazon’s Ad Tax, Seller Financing & Walmart Ad Controls

Amazon’s marketplace keeps growing, but advertising is growing even faster.

This week on Selling on Giants, Will Haire breaks down what Amazon’s latest earnings reveal about the rising cost of visibility and how agentic shopping is changing product discovery.

You’ll also learn:

• Why Amazon’s August 24 Business Solutions Agreement update deserves immediate review
• What the Nike and Lululemon lawsuits mean for strikethrough and reference pricing
• How Walmart Connect’s new negative keywords can reduce wasted ad spend
• How Walmart Virtual Packs create multipacks without separate physical inventory
• Why Walmart sellers need to check Late Shipment Rate and lag-time settings
• What the Federal Reserve’s divided rate decision means for Q4 inventory and financing

The common thread is simple: marketplace growth now depends on connecting advertising, pricing, inventory, financing, and compliance before peak season exposes the gaps.

Follow Selling on Giants for weekly operator-level breakdowns on Amazon, Walmart, retail media, AI commerce, marketplace strategy, and what platform updates actually mean for sellers.

Subscribe to Selling on Giants for weekly insights that go beyond headlines and focus on what actually impacts your business.

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Amazon sales grew 20% last quarter. Amazon advertising grew 26%. That six-point gap may be the most important number in marketplace commerce this week because it tells us exactly where Amazon continues to find its growth. Sellers are moving more products, but paying for visibility is becoming an even larger part of the system. And that is only the beginning. Amazon is also tightening language that may affect how sellers finance inventory or structure a business sale. Two major apparel brands are facing lawsuits over allegedly fake discounts. Walmart finally gave advertisers a tool Amazon sellers have used for years, and the Federal Reserve just sent a warning that Q4 money may stay expensive. Welcome to Selling on Giants, the podcast for marketplace operators trying to stay ahead of Amazon, Walmart, Target, and the forces changing e-commerce. I'm Will Hare, co-founder of Bellavics, and this is your weekly e-commerce news update for the week of August 4th, 2026. Let's get into it. Amazon reported $200.6 billion in second-quarter sales, up 20% year over year. Third-party seller services reached roughly $46.8 billion, up 16%. Advertising reached $19.8 billion, up 26%. That means advertising is growing 10% points faster than the seller services revenue it sits on top of. This is not a temporary holiday bidding spike that disappears when everyone calms down in January. It is part of the business model. If your 2027 plan assumes your tacos stays flat, while Amazon's advertising business keeps compounding faster than marketplace services, the spreadsheet is doing motivational speaking. It is not forecasting. Amazon also showed us where that advertising growth may go next. Shoppers who click a sponsored prompt convert 48% more often and spend 21% more than shoppers who do not. Amazon's ads agent is producing an 8% lower cost per impression and a 6% lower cost per acquisition for advertisers using its targeting. Then there is Alexa for shopping. More than 350 million customers used it during the last 12 months. Active users nearly doubled in the second quarter, while interactions increased more than five times year over year. In the United States, these shoppers spend about 40% more per order. That matters because the shopping journey is changing from search, click, compare, and purchase into ask, recommend, and sometimes automatically purchase. Price alerts and auto-buy can now complete parts of the decision without a shopper returning to your product detail page and carefully rereading every bullet. For operators, there are two immediate moves. First, model your future margin with advertising taking a larger share of sales. Second, audit the top 20 ASINs in your catalog for complete attributes, clean variation data, competitive pricing, reliable inventory, and consistent price history. When software helps choose the product, structured data becomes part of your creative strategy. The next Amazon change moves from advertising expense to the way some sellers fund the business. Amazon published changes to its Business Solutions Agreement on May 29th. They take effect August 24th, three weeks from now. The revised language broadens the restriction around transferring rights or obligations under the agreement. It also identifies pledging as prohibited. Outside attorneys and marketplace operators read that language as potentially affecting arrangements that use future Amazon disbursements as collateral, along with transactions that assume a seller's central account can simply move to a new owner. This does not mean every loan connected to an Amazon business suddenly becomes invalid. It does mean sellers should stop guessing. If you use a merchant cash advance, revenue-based financing, or another facility tied to Amazon receivables, pull the security agreement and look for language covering Amazon disbursements. Then get the lender and your attorney on the phone before the next Q4 draw. The same caution applies to anyone buying or selling an Amazon business. An asset sale, ownership change, and account transfer are not automatically the same thing. The operating entity, bank records, and seller central registration need to line up. If you have a letter of intent in progress, confirm the compliance process now. A funds hold is a terrible way to learn that the deal and the marketplace account tell different stories. And if all of this sounds more complicated than selling a good product should be, that is because it is. At Bellovics, we have helped brands sell more than $500 million on Amazon, and we are an Amazon verified ad partner. Our job is to turn advertising, operations, content, and marketplace policy into one hands-on operating plan. You can learn more at Bellovics.com. Now back to the show. That Amazon agreement is one reminder that platform language matters. Two lawsuits filed within 10 days of each other are a reminder that pricing language matters too. Nike and Lululemon are facing separate lawsuits alleging deceptive strike-through pricing. The complaints argue that products appeared to be discounted from reference prices that were not genuine recent selling prices. These are allegations, not court findings, but the theory behind them is very easy to understand. If the product never meaningfully sells at the WAS price, the sale may be fictional. California law makes this especially relevant because a former price generally needs to reflect a genuine price offered within the previous three months, unless the seller clearly states when that former price was in effect. Public price history also makes these claims relatively easy for a plaintiff to investigate. This is not only an issue for national apparel brands, it applies to Amazon list prices, Walmart was pricing, direct-to-consumer sale badges, and the promotion that somehow celebrates its third consecutive birthday. Pull the last 90 days of actual selling prices across your priority catalog. Compare those transactions with every reference price customers currently see. If you can substantiate the higher price, keep the documentation. If you cannot, remove it. Amazon already suppresses list price displays when its systems do not support the reference price. These lawsuits give every platform another reason to tighten enforcement. While Amazon and the courts are creating more homework, Walmart just handed advertisers a useful tool. On July 29th, Walmart Connect began rolling out negative keywords for sponsored products. Advertisers can now block unwanted searches at the campaign or ad group level. Negative exact blocks, the specific search. Negative phrase blocks, searches containing the full phrase. The feature applies to manual campaigns and automatic campaigns using fixed bidding. Amazon advertisers may hear this and wonder what year Walmart thinks it is. Fair question, but the practical impact matters more than the late arrival. Until now, Walmart advertisers had limited control when automatic campaigns spent against branded searches, weak adjacent categories, or queries that produce clicks without orders. The main levers were bids and budgets. Negative keywords give operators a cleaner way to remove waste without cutting productive traffic. Walmart sponsored product spending is already rising. Second quarter benchmarks show average daily brand spending up 25% year over year, with click-through rate up 23%. As more dollars enter the auction, bad search terms become more expensive mistakes. Pull your Walmart search term reports this week. Start with high spend, zero order terms, then look for branded cannibalization and irrelevant phrase patterns. Add negatives carefully. Do not celebrate the new tool by blocking half the internet before lunch. The objective is to remove proven waste while preserving Discovery. Walmart also released two operational updates worth moving on quickly. First, eligible United States sellers using the application programming interface can now create virtual packs. These are offers for two to six units of the same item without manufacturing a separate physical multi-pack. Each pack receives its own item ID, bundle SQ, content and price, while inventory and lag time come from the component item. That lets brands test two packs and three packs, raise average order value, and create value options without another physical inventory pool. When the component restocks, every pack restocks. Walmart also says sellers using WFS can receive fulfillment fee savings when a pack offers at least a 5% discount. Second, Walmart's late shipment rate is now an accountable seller performance standard. Sellers need to remain at 5% or lower. Walmart also changed how expected ship dates are calculated for seller-fulfilled orders with lag time above zero for orders placed after the cutoff that can move the ship date one day earlier. If you self-fulfill, review your lag time settings, first carrier scans, and actual handoff times now. A label created on time does not help if the package waits until tomorrow to meet the carrier. Virtual packs create a merchandising opportunity. The shipment rule makes sure operations can support the demand. That brings us to the broader Q4 backdrop. The Federal Reserve held its target rate at 3.5% to 3.3 quarters percent. It was the fifth straight hold, but three policymakers voted to raise rates by a quarter point. That is the first time in nearly 10 years that three policymakers dissented in the same hawkish direction. Inflation is cooling, but it is not cool. June headline PCE inflation came in at 3.7%, with core inflation at 3.3%. Second quarter economic growth was only 1.5% below expectations, yet real consumer spending accelerated to 3.2%. That combination matters for marketplace brands. Consumers are still buying, but borrowing costs and landed cost pressure may not ease before peak season. This is not a reason to slash the Q4 inventory plan. It is a reason to make the plan more precise. Buy by SQ and price tier, not by one blanket growth assumption. Watch value items, multi-packs, and replenishable products closely, because shoppers can keep spending while trading down. Premium products need a clearer reason to earn the difference. And that connects the entire week. Amazon is taking a larger share through advertising. Its contract language may affect how some sellers fund inventory. Courts are questioning whether displayed discounts are real. Walmart is giving advertisers new ways to cut waste and new pack sizes to create value. The winners are not the brands that react to each headline separately. They are the operators who connect margin, pricing, advertising, inventory, and compliance before Q4 exposes the gaps. Thanks for listening to Selling on Giants. Follow the show, subscribe, and leave a review if this helped. I'm Mr. Will, and I'll see you next week.