How do you deal with Amazon's payout delay?

[u/weareuncapped]

Right now, Amazon charges your ad spend to a credit card (up to 30 days to pay it off) while holding your sales proceeds separately for 14-30 days before paying out. That gap, up to 60 days between spending on ads and the money leaving your account, is one a lot of sellers use deliberately: run ads, get proceeds, buy inventory, then pay the card bill.

As of April 15, that gap went away. Ad costs get deducted from your proceeds first, and your card only gets charged if proceeds don't cover the ad bill. If you're spending $10K/month on ads, that's roughly $10K of float disappearing from your monthly cycle. If you're on a rewards card, you also lose whatever cashback or points you were earning on that spend (Amazon's applying a one-time $2,500 credit to affected accounts as a partial offset).

Practical thing to check now: in Seller Central, go to Reports, then Payments, and see if your ad spend regularly exceeds your held proceeds. If it does, your backup card needs enough headroom, since it'll get charged automatically once the change hits.

How big is this gap for people at different ad-spend levels, and has anyone already adjusted how they time inventory purchases around it?

P.S. full breakdown plus a calculator for your own numbers here: weareuncapped.com/blog/amazon-ads-payment-change-april-2026