Amazon published its 2025 Small Business Empowerment Report on April 30, 2026, revealing that more than 75,000 independent sellers surpassed $1 million in annual sales through its marketplace last year – a 36% increase compared to 2024. The figures come from a report authored by Mary Beth Westmoreland, Vice President of Worldwide Selling Partner Experience, and cover the full calendar year 2025 for sellers operating in Amazon’s store.

The headline number sits within a broader set of metrics that describe a marketplace where independent sellers now account for more than 60% of total sales. U.S.-based sellers averaged more than $375,000 in annual sales in 2025, representing nearly a 30% increase from the prior year. Over 11,000 U.S.-based sellers grew their sales by more than 10 times during the same period.

Independent seller growth in 2025

The scale of those results is not uniform across the seller population. Reaching $1 million in annual sales requires consistent order volume, logistics reliability, competitive pricing, and effective product listings – conditions that differ substantially across categories, geographies, and business models. Still, the 36% year-over-year increase in the number of sellers crossing the $1 million threshold is the sharpest growth figure in the report, and it arrives against a backdrop of documented marketplace turbulence.

As PPC Land reported in August 2025, multiple sellers in Amazon’s forums described year-over-year sales declines of 60% to 80% during the May through August 2025 period, citing economic uncertainty, algorithm changes, and increased competition from internationally based merchants offering significantly lower prices. That context is worth holding alongside the empowerment report’s numbers: the aggregate growth in million-dollar sellers does not resolve the distribution question of which types of sellers benefited most, and which did not.

GEN-Y Hitch, a trailer hitch manufacturer based in Nappanee, Indiana, serves as one of the report’s named examples. The company surpassed $5 million in revenue in 2025, up 35% year-over-year. According to Carl Borkholder, founder and CEO of GEN-Y Hitch, “I know we can reach $50 million, maybe $100 million just in Amazon’s store. I remember saying to my business partner, ‘If we could sell one hitch a day, we would have it made.’ Today, we build and ship thousands a day. And with Amazon behind you, bigger starts to look a lot more possible.”

Seller Assistant: 230,000 monthly users, 90% action acceptance

Among the tools Amazon credits for seller growth, Seller Assistant draws the most specific usage data in the report. The agentic AI tool had more than 230,000 monthly users in 2025, with sellers accepting its recommended actions more than 90% of the time. That acceptance rate is a notable figure. It suggests that most users who engage with the tool’s suggestions act on them rather than dismissing them – though it does not distinguish between low-stakes actions such as adjusting a listing field and higher-stakes decisions such as changing pricing or inventory levels.

Amazon introduced agentic AI capabilities across its seller platform on September 17, 2025, transforming Seller Assistant from a passive question-answering tool into an autonomous system capable of monitoring accounts, optimizing inventory, and managing advertising campaigns. Prior to that upgrade, the tool answered seller queries on policy and account health but did not take autonomous action. The September 2025 expansion gave the tool a proactive mode, where it surfaces recommendations without waiting for a seller to ask.

Christine Krogue, founder of Smart Sheep in Kaysville, Utah, described the practical effect. According to Krogue, “Seller Assistant is like having a business expert at your fingertips. I can ask ‘How many units will I sell this week?’ Or get advice on product improvements, and it comes up with solid answers. It saves me time from researching and gives me the information I need right when I need it.”

The 230,000 monthly user figure represents a subset of the total Amazon seller population, which runs into the millions globally. Whether usage rates are concentrated among larger, more technically engaged sellers or distributed broadly across the seller base is not specified in the report. The 90% action acceptance figure also covers a range of action types not individually broken down in the published materials.

Generative AI listing tools: 12 million listings created

A second AI capability with specific metrics in the report is Amazon’s generative AI listing toolset. According to the report, independent sellers created more than 12 million sales-ready listings using generative AI in 2025. The tools allow sellers to generate product titles, bullet points, and descriptions from limited inputs, reducing the time required to prepare new listings for the marketplace.

Michael Gore, co-owner of C&M Personal Gifts in Woodland Hills, California, illustrated the time savings. According to Gore, “When you have over a thousand listings, saving a couple minutes per listing means what would take weeks to do manually was completed in hours.” For sellers managing large catalogs, the efficiency gain is structural. A listing that previously required individual manual entry across multiple fields can be generated in bulk, with human review focused on accuracy rather than composition from scratch.

Product Opportunity Explorer and demand analysis

Amazon’s Product Opportunity Explorer also receives attention in the report for its role in helping sellers identify new product opportunities. The tool analyzes billions of customer interactions to surface unmet demand signals, emerging trend patterns, and pricing data. According to Mohamad Sam, owner of Purifyou in Houston, Texas, “What used to require hours of research or paying thousands of dollars to trend consultants just to get a best guess now happens in minutes.”

The tool’s underlying dataset spans Amazon’s full purchase and search history, giving it a scale that third-party market research tools generally cannot match for Amazon-specific demand. Whether the signals it surfaces are actionable for sellers across all categories equally – or primarily useful in specific high-turnover segments – is a question the report does not address.

In 2025, Amazon introduced a redesigned seller onboarding experience intended to reduce the time between registration and first sale. The update was tailored to reflect sellers’ prior business experience and knowledge levels, directing new entrants toward actions Amazon identified as most likely to accelerate their first sale while avoiding common early mistakes.

As part of the redesign, Amazon introduced an onboarding assistant – an AI-powered guide that answers questions, explains requirements, and walks sellers through setup steps in real time. According to the report, the enhanced onboarding experience helped new sellers generate more than $18 billion in sales in 2025. That figure represents total sales generated by sellers who came through the redesigned onboarding flow during the year.

The $18 billion figure is significant in absolute terms. It also reflects the compounding effect of onboarding efficiency: sellers who complete setup steps faster and avoid early compliance errors are more likely to remain active on the platform and to invest in advertising and additional inventory. The connection between onboarding design and downstream revenue is a well-established pattern in marketplace economics, though Amazon has not published a controlled comparison of outcomes between the old and redesigned systems.

FBA: 20 new AI tools and the logistics foundation

Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) features prominently in the report as the logistics infrastructure enabling seller scale. Amazon describes nearly 20 years of FBA history as giving independent sellers access to logistics capabilities previously available only to large retailers. In 2025, Amazon expanded that infrastructure by launching more than 20 AI-powered FBA tools designed to reduce costs, improve packaging decisions, and simplify scaling.

One specific example cited is AI-powered Packaging Recommendations, which analyzes product dimensions and shipping characteristics to suggest optimal packaging configurations. The goal is to reduce dimensional weight charges and minimize material waste, with savings applied per order across a seller’s full volume.

Kyle Yamamoto, co-founder of Vital Pet Life, described the operational impact. According to Yamamoto, “With Amazon handling the logistics and operations, my only worry is keeping up with demand. The business side is like pushing a button.” Mark McGarity, vice president of M-Clip in Savannah, Georgia, made the time-value case. According to McGarity, “With Fulfillment by Amazon, we can ship a large amount of product. Over the years, it’s saved us a ton of energy, a ton of time. Time’s money.”

That operational simplicity is not without cost complexity. As PPC Land reported in April 2026, Amazon announced a 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge on FBA, Multi-Channel Fulfillment, Buy with Prime, and Remote Fulfillment fees, taking effect April 17, 2026, adding approximately $0.17 per unit on average. For sellers moving high volumes, that surcharge represents a material cost increase layered on top of existing referral fees, storage fees, and inbound placement charges. The 2025 empowerment report covers a period before this surcharge came into force.

The report also extends beyond revenue figures to document employment and community effects. According to Amazon, independent sellers in its store supported more than 2 million jobs across the U.S. in 2025. The states with the largest concentrations of independent sellers in rural areas and small towns include Wisconsin, New York, Texas, Michigan, and Iowa.

BedJet, a sleep technology company founded in Newport, Rhode Island by Mark Aramli, a former NASA engineer, illustrates the community dimension. Since 2020, BedJet profits have funded more than $2.6 million in grants directed to local charities focused on food security, shelter, mental health, and education. According to Aramli, “One of the things I’m most proud about BedJet has been our ability to help families with children in our local community with basic human needs.”

The 2 million jobs figure is a platform-level estimate and will include both full-time employees of seller businesses and likely encompasses contracted and part-time workers. The geographic note about rural areas and small towns is relevant context for policy discussions about marketplace platforms and regional economic development, though the report does not provide state-by-state employment breakdowns.

For marketing professionals working in retail media, the 2025 empowerment report data carries several implications. The growth in million-dollar sellers expands the population of businesses with meaningful advertising budgets on Amazon. A seller crossing the $1 million annual sales threshold typically has enough margin to invest in Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Amazon DSP campaigns at a scale where optimization is commercially worthwhile.

The 12 million listings created through generative AI tools also has a search advertising dimension. Higher-quality listings – those with well-structured titles, accurate bullet points, and relevant keywords – tend to perform better in organic search ranking and convert at higher rates from paid clicks. Sellers who used generative AI tools to create listings in 2025 may have received both organic and paid search benefits from improved listing quality.

The expansion of Seller Assistant to more than 230,000 monthly users represents an increasing share of Amazon’s seller population operating with AI-assisted decision support. As PPC Land has tracked, Seller Assistant has continued to gain capabilities into 2026, including the ability to check review sharing eligibility per product variation – a function directly relevant to how star ratings display in search results, and therefore to the performance of search advertising campaigns driving traffic to those listings.

The broader picture at Amazon reflects a company deploying AI across both the seller-facing and shopper-facing sides of its marketplace simultaneously. Amazon’s AI shopping assistant Rufus drove $12 billion in incremental sales in 2025, reaching more than 300 million users. On the advertiser side, Amazon introduced a unified Campaign Manager and Ads Agent at its unBoxed 2025 conference in November, consolidating the Amazon DSP and Ads Console into a single interface. The seller tools described in the empowerment report sit within this same infrastructure build.

Not all signals from 2025 pointed in the same direction as the empowerment report. An analysis published by an Amazon agency CEO in April 2026 argued that generic products in competitive categories face structural disadvantages against internationally sourced sellers with 40% lower prices and thousands of accumulated reviews – regardless of the AI tools available. That tension between platform-level aggregate growth and category-level competitive reality is one that the empowerment report, focused on success stories, does not resolve.

• February 2025 – Amazon removes partial shipment splits for standard-size FBA products, changing how sellers distribute inventory across fulfillment centers (PPC Land)
• May 2025 – Amazon introduces a redesigned seller onboarding experience tailored to sellers’ experience levels, including an AI-powered onboarding assistant
• July 8-11, 2025 – Amazon Prime Day 2025 runs as a four-day event; independent sellers account for more than 60% of sales in Amazon’s store
• August 2025 – Multiple Amazon sellers report sales declines of 60% to 80% year-over-year in marketplace forums during May-August period, citing economic pressures and algorithm changes
• September 17, 2025 – Amazon introduces agentic AI capabilities for Seller Assistant, transforming it from a passive tool into an autonomous business management system; Seller Assistant reaches 230,000 monthly users by year-end
• October 11, 2025 – Amazon introduces the Seller Challenge mechanism for Account Health Assurance sellers, providing three dispute challenges per six-month period
• November 11-12, 2025 – Amazon unveils unified Campaign Manager, Ads Agent, and Creative Agent expansionsat unBoxed 2025; Rufus AI shopping assistant surpasses 300 million users and is credited with $12 billion in incremental sales
• January 8, 2026 – Amazon announces mandatory prepaid return labels for all US seller-fulfilled orders, effective February 8, 2026
• February 22, 2026 – Amazon posts updated Business Solutions Agreement to Seller Central forums, introducing formal Agent Policy for automated software and AI agents, effective March 4, 2026
• March 31, 2026 – Amazon ends FBA commingling, requiring all resellers to apply FNSKU barcodes on newly inbound units
• April 4, 2026 – Amazon announces 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge on FBA, MCF, Buy with Prime, and Remote Fulfillment fees, taking effect April 17, 2026
• April 30, 2026 – Amazon publishes the 2025 Small Business Empowerment Report, authored by Mary Beth Westmoreland, VP of Worldwide Selling Partner Experience, documenting record seller growth metrics for the full calendar year 2025

Summary

Who: Amazon and its independent third-party seller community, with the report authored by Mary Beth Westmoreland, Vice President of Worldwide Selling Partner Experience. Named sellers include Carl Borkholder of GEN-Y Hitch, Christine Krogue of Smart Sheep, Michael Gore of C&M Personal Gifts, Mohamad Sam of Purifyou, Kyle Yamamoto of Vital Pet Life, Mark McGarity of M-Clip, and Mark Aramli of BedJet.

What: Amazon’s 2025 Small Business Empowerment Report documents that more than 75,000 independent sellers surpassed $1 million in annual sales during 2025 – a 36% increase from 2024. U.S. sellers averaged more than $375,000 in annual sales, nearly 30% more than the prior year. Over 11,000 U.S.-based sellers grew sales by more than 10 times. Seller Assistant reached 230,000 monthly users with a 90% action acceptance rate. Generative AI listing tools produced more than 12 million listings. New seller onboarding drove more than $18 billion in new seller sales. Independent sellers supported more than 2 million U.S. jobs.

When: The report was published on April 30, 2026, covering seller performance data for the full calendar year 2025.

Where: Amazon’s global marketplace, with a primary focus on U.S.-based sellers. Jobs supported are documented across U.S. states, with Wisconsin, New York, Texas, Michigan, and Iowa noted as having the largest concentrations of independent sellers in rural areas and small towns.

Why: Amazon publishes the annual Small Business Empowerment Report to document the scale and impact of its third-party seller ecosystem. The 2025 edition highlights AI-powered tools and FBA logistics as key infrastructure supporting seller growth, and frames independent sellers as a central component of Amazon’s overall store – both commercially, accounting for more than 60% of sales, and economically, through job creation and community investment.