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The Supreme Court just struck down the administration’s sweeping Liberation Day tariffs — and the impact on Amazon sellers is bigger than the headline suggests.

In this February 2026 edition of Selling on Giants, Mr. Will breaks down what the ruling actually means for importers, marketplace operators, and brand owners navigating volatile cost structures.

This is not political commentary. It is operational analysis.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

What Changed

• The Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that tariffs issued under IEEPA were unlawful
• The 10% baseline tariff and country-specific tariffs up to 50% lose their legal foundation
• Over $100 billion collected now sits in legal limbo

What Has NOT Changed

• Section 301 (China tariffs) remain intact
• Section 232 (national security tariffs) remain intact
• A new 10% tariff was quickly introduced under Section 122
• Trade policy volatility is still very much alive

Why This Matters for Amazon Sellers

Tariffs directly affect landed cost, and landed cost determines:

• Contribution margin
• Break-even ACOS
• Allowable TACoS
• Advertising aggression
• Inventory planning

Even a 10% shift in cost can reduce contribution margin by 20% or more.

That changes everything.

Refund Opportunities — And Complications

If you paid IEEPA-based tariffs:

• You may have exposure to potential refunds
• There is no clear federal refund framework yet
• Trade attorneys expect administrative claims and possible litigation
• Timeline uncertainty remains

Strategic question: If capital is returned months from now, do you reinvest, hedge, or stabilize?

Second-Order Effects

If tariffs normalize toward pre-tariff levels:

• Gross margins improve
• Ad auctions heat up
• Promotional intensity increases
• Price competition accelerates

Cost relief often leads to competitive aggression.

Sourcing Reality

Many brands diversified manufacturing during tariff pressure:

• Vietnam
• India
• Mexico
• Domestic options

Those shifts required new tooling, freight lanes, and working capital cycles. Even if tariffs decline, most brands will not fully reverse course.

Trade policy is now a structural operating variable.

Reverse Logistics & Margin Discipline

Returns are a growing margin leak across eCommerce.

AI is now being used to:

• Predict high-return orders
• Automate SKU-level disposition decisions
• Improve recovery rates
• Reduce idle inventory velocity

When tariffs compress margin on the front end and returns erode margin on the back end, disciplined operators win.

Strategic Takeaways

• Separate cost assumptions from strategy
• Audit IEEPA exposure cleanly
• Stress test break-even ACOS quarterly
• Maintain supplier optionality
• Assume volatility as the baseline

The headline says tariffs were struck down.

The operator takeaway: uncertainty remains.

If you sell on Amazon, Walmart, or Target, trade policy is no longer background noise. It is a core P&L driver.

Subscribe to Selling on Giants for weekly operator-level insights built for serious marketplace brands navigating complexity with discipline.

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Amazon is not slowing down. It is tightening standards while simultaneously building the next generation of retail infrastructure.

In this February seventeenth, twenty twenty six edition of Selling on Giants, we break down what is actually changing across Amazon, retail media, AI commerce, and consumer behavior and what serious operators should be watching.

This week’s episode connects the dots between fulfillment enforcement, AI driven discovery, capital investment cycles, and shifting shopper frequency. The common thread is professionalization. The margin for operational sloppiness is shrinking while the surface area for monetization expands.

Here is what we cover:

Amazon’s New Business Hour Delivery Rate Metric
• What BHDR measures and why it is now visible inside Account Health
• Why “informational” metrics rarely stay informational
• How Amazon is signaling higher B2B fulfillment expectations

OTDR Enforcement Gets Surgical on February Twenty Eighth
• How listing level deactivations replace full catalog shutdowns
• The growing importance of Shipping Settings Automation and Buy Shipping
• Why Amazon’s fulfillment stack is becoming defensive infrastructure

Amazon’s Two Hundred Billion Dollar Capex Bet
• Why short term margin pressure signals long term control
• How AI infrastructure investment will reshape search, ads, and fulfillment
• What sellers should monitor instead of stock price headlines

Retail Media Invades the Physical Aisle
• Digital end caps at CVS and Kroger
• Why in store merchandising is becoming programmable media inventory
• What this means for trade spend and performance measurement

Amazon Set to Surpass Walmart in Annual Revenue
• Why the real story is revenue mix, not headline comparison
• The structural advantage of AWS and advertising
• Ecosystem versus ecosystem competition

Shopify, Google, Bing, and the AI Commerce Layer
• Who controls checkout in an AI agent world
• Why structured product data is no longer optional
• The fragmentation of discovery and consolidation of transaction rails

Consumer Shopping Frequency Is Normalizing
• Why daily online shopping is pulling back
• How this impacts forecasting, retention, and average order value
• The shift from growth tailwinds to operational precision

Tariffs and Advertising Pressure
• How macro trade policy affects digital ad budgets
• Why margin modeling must include sourcing, pricing, and media

The big takeaway: Amazon is raising performance expectations while investing heavily in AI and infrastructure. Retailers are monetizing every high traffic surface. AI is embedding itself into discovery and checkout. And consumer behavior is stabilizing.

The brands that win in this environment will not be the loudest. They will be the most disciplined.

If you are running Amazon, Walmart, or Shopify at scale, this episode is your operator briefing for the week.

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This week’s episode of Selling on Giants feels less like a collection of updates and more like a directional shift. Across Amazon, ecommerce, and brand marketing, the signal is getting louder and clearer. Platforms are done absorbing operational sloppiness, and the cost of getting the basics wrong is showing up faster and with fewer warnings.

We start with Amazon’s updated enforcement around frequently returned items. If a vendor does not have a valid U.S. return address on file, Amazon will now dispose of high return inventory and bill the vendor for both the product and the disposal. This is not a new program and not a policy expansion. It is Amazon removing ambiguity and converting operational gaps directly into financial consequences.

That same zero tolerance posture is showing up on the seller side as well. Sellers are receiving shipping address mismatch warnings even when Account Health looks clean and nothing operationally changed. Automated detection is firing before human review, and once the clock starts, sellers are forced into reactive support loops with little clarity. Clean configurations, minimal ship-from locations, and alignment between templates and reality are now as important as performance metrics.

From there, we zoom out to brand marketing and culture. Super Bowl sixty once again proved that attention can be bought, but meaning cannot. The ads that worked trusted the audience, stayed culturally aware, and kept the brand front and center. The ones that failed relied on celebrity, spectacle, or jokes without payoff. The lesson is not about Super Bowl budgets. It is about signal efficiency. If your message is unclear at the biggest attention moment of the year, it will fail everywhere else too.

That clarity gap is also showing up in consumer behavior. Valentine’s Day spending is rising, but consumers are adapting quietly to higher prices. Smaller bundles, fewer add-ons, and delayed purchases are becoming the norm. Seasonal demand no longer hides pricing misalignment. When value is unclear, churn does not show up loudly. It simply never comes back.

We also break down Amazon’s Q4 growth, which reflects demand concentration rather than a broad retail rebound. Consumers are choosing where to buy, not necessarily buying more. Convenience and delivery reliability continue to win, making Amazon less optional during uncertain periods.

Outside marketplaces, traffic is becoming more volatile. Google Discover updates reshuffled visibility quickly and without explanation, reinforcing that recommendation-based traffic is upside, not foundation. At the same time, Amazon’s physical retail experiments are better understood as ecosystem support moves, not retail disruption.

We close with two bigger themes. Fulfillment is no longer a cost center. It is risk management. And in B2B, technology is not the blocker. Leadership and culture are.

Across every story this week, the takeaway is the same. Gray areas are disappearing. Automation is moving faster than communication. Clean execution now matters as much as performance.

If you operate inside these platforms, this episode helps you understand what is changing and how to stay ahead as the rules harden.

Follow us on Selling on Giants on LinkedIn for weekly insights.