You can't sell it. Amazon can.

Happy Friday,

Somewhere in Seattle, a lawyer opened the assignment language buried in the Miscellaneous section of the Business Solutions Agreement, read it carefully, and made exactly one side of it stricter.

Amazon updated the BSA on May 29. The change lands August 24.

Two words got wider, and one word got added.

The old restriction covered assigning "this Agreement." The new one covers your rights or obligations under it. And pledging those rights or obligations as collateral is now separately, explicitly prohibited.

That sounds like a small edit because it is one. It's also the entire story.

You could never freely sell an Amazon account. Assignment without Amazon's written consent was already void, and any attempt to do it was already a nullity. That's been true for years.

What dealmakers had was a sentence. We're not transferring the contract. We're transferring the business. Or the store. Or the entity. The account just comes along with it.

That sentence stopped working on August 24.

Amazon didn't ban the exit. It patched the wording people were using to route around the ban.

Now read the rest of the same paragraph — the part nobody touched.

Amazon may assign or transfer its rights and obligations in connection with a merger, a consolidation, an acquisition, or a sale of substantially all of its assets. Or to any affiliate, as part of a corporate reorganization. On assignment, the assignee is deemed substituted for Amazon as the party to the agreement.

That language has been sitting there the entire time. It didn't get tightened. It didn't need to be.

So Amazon can hand you to a different Amazon. You cannot hand your account to a different you — and as of August 24, there's no longer a clever way to describe doing it.

The practical version is funnier than the legal version. A change of control routes through Amazon's own process: open a Seller Central case, document the corporate change, submit the business records. You will sell your company by filing a ticket.

The lending side is the quiet one. Revenue-based financing and merchant cash advances were underwritten against the Amazon disbursement stream. That was the security. It now sits in the prohibited column, on top of DD+7 already stretching the gap between a sale and a payout.

And the penalty isn't a contract dispute. Where the registered operator doesn't match Amazon's records, or a prohibited transfer or pledge turns up, the consequence is account-level. Suspension. Or a funds freeze.

Nobody's account got worse this week. The exit did.

The metric that grew teeth. The Business Hour Delivery Rate has sat on your Account Health dashboard for about two years, informational, no penalty. Starting September 30 it needs to be 90% or better on seller-fulfilled Amazon Business orders, measured on a rolling 14 days. Miss it by October 30 and those offers get deactivated. It measures whether a package arrived while the buyer's office was open. You are being graded on a UPS driver's afternoon. FBA is exempt.

Your inventory aged three months early. The storage schedule reset July 1. The aged-inventory surcharge used to wait until day 271. It now triggers at 180. The low-inventory-level fee still bites under 28 days of cover and did not move. Both walls of the hallway are billed, and one of them just walked ninety days toward you.

Be early, lose the wheel. If a SKU repeatedly ships at least a day sooner than its stated handling time, you get 30 days to fix the setting before Amazon may take over managing handling time for you. Shipping faster than promised is now a correctable defect.

Pull every financing document that touches Amazon revenue. Hand someone one job: build a single page listing each instrument, the lender, whether the security description references Amazon disbursements or the Seller Central account, and the maturity date. Anything maturing after August 24 goes to your attorney this week — not after.

Add one line at the bottom while you're in there: confirm the registered operator on the account is the entity that actually controls it today. That mismatch is the trigger that turns a paperwork problem into a frozen disbursement.

Artifact: a one-page financing exposure sheet.

If the answer is "we don't have anything like that," you're done in ten minutes and you know it for certain. That's still worth the ten minutes.

Amazon didn't take anything away from your business this week.

It just made the business harder to hand to anybody else.

See you Tuesday.

Any questions? Book a meeting with me here.

Dan Head

Founder, AMZ Elite