This is general education, not legal or insurance advice — Amazon's own current policy documentation in Seller Central is the authoritative source for your specific situation, and requirements like this can change again after this page was last reviewed.

What actually changed

Previously, Amazon's product liability insurance requirement kicked in once a seller exceeded $10,000 in gross proceeds in a single month, in a given category. As of November 2, 2026, that volume-based trigger no longer applies to a specific list of higher-risk categories — sellers in those categories must carry a compliant policy regardless of sales volume, whether they're moving one unit a month or thousands. The change applies to both new and existing listings, so an established listing that was previously exempt because it hadn't crossed the volume threshold doesn't get grandfathered in.

The 11 categories affected

Based on Amazon's announcement, the enhanced safety categories include:

  • Children's products
  • Cosmetic and ingestible products
  • Lithium battery products
  • Fire-related products
  • Home medical devices
  • Sleep products (including mattresses)
  • Transport-related products (including tires)
  • Water and marine safety products

Amazon's own current category list in Seller Central is the authoritative source — this list reflects what was publicly reported at the time of this review, and Amazon can revise category scope without necessarily re-announcing it as prominently as the original change.

The coverage requirement itself

The minimum is $1,000,000 in commercial liability insurance covering the specific products in the affected category — consistent with Amazon's long-standing general product liability minimum, just applied now without a sales-volume exemption for these categories specifically. The policy generally still needs to name Amazon as an additional insured and be submitted as a Certificate of Insurance through Seller Central, the same mechanics as Amazon's existing insurance requirement for higher-volume sellers — see Business Insurance Deep Dive for how that submission process and the additional-insured endorsement work.

A separate requirement for Mainland China-based sellers

Amazon's announcement also specifies that sellers based in Mainland China must obtain their policy through Amazon's Insurance Accelerator program specifically — a third-party policy submitted outside that program will be rejected once the new requirement takes effect. See Amazon's Insurance Accelerator: Comparing the Carriers Amazon Partners With for what that program actually is and which carriers participate in it.

What to do if this applies to you

  1. Check whether any of your current listings fall into one of the affected categories — don't rely on memory of your category from when you first listed; categorization can shift, and a listing you think of informally as "home goods" might be formally categorized under sleep products or fire-related products.
  2. Don't wait for an enforcement notice. The pattern with marketplace compliance deadlines is that enforcement (listing suspension, held funds) tends to follow the deadline fairly directly once it passes, not with an extended additional grace period.
  3. Get a quote now rather than at the deadline. Binding a policy and getting a Certificate of Insurance submitted and approved isn't always instant — see Hiscox vs. NEXT Insurance for Ecommerce Sellers for two carriers with fast online quote-to-bind processes that are also part of Amazon's own Insurance Accelerator network.
  4. Confirm the additional-insured endorsement is included, not just a generic liability policy — this is a specific, separate request to your broker/carrier, not something a standard policy automatically includes.

Common mistakes

  • Assuming low sales volume still provides an exemption in one of the 11 named categories — it doesn't, under this specific change.
  • Waiting until close to the deadline to request quotes, only to find the bind-and-certificate-submission process takes longer than expected.
  • Not realizing a listing has drifted into one of the affected categories if Amazon's own categorization changed since the listing was first created.