Saks just shut down its “Saks on Amazon” storefront as part of its bankruptcy restructuring. The partnership, announced with fanfare as a bridge between high-end retail and the world’s largest marketplace, never really took off. Luxury brands were slow to join. Selection stayed thin. Traffic without deep inventory didn’t convert into a real luxury ecosystem. When Saks entered Chapter 11 and had to decide what was essential, the Amazon experiment didn’t make the cut. Focus shifted back to Saks.com, where the company controls brand presentation and margins. Meanwhile Amazon, which invested heavily in Saks, is now fighting over how its deal was treated in court.
What failed here was alignment.
Amazon is optimized for algorithmic commerce. Its systems are designed to compare, rank, substitute, and optimize at scale. The more structured and comparable products are, the better the machine works. Luxury brands depend on the opposite dynamic. They rely on narrative, scarcity, and insulation from direct comparison. Saks tried to build a curated island inside Amazon, but the island still lived inside an ocean governed by optimization logic. Brands sensed the mismatch and undercommitted. Without brand commitment, the storefront never reached critical mass.
AI makes this tension sharper. As shopping becomes more mediated by automated ranking and recommendation systems, marketplaces increasingly reward standardization. Clean attributes, predictable pricing, rapid iteration. That’s great for efficiency. It’s uncomfortable for brands that sell identity as much as product. The Saks experiment was an early test of whether premium retail can thrive inside AI-shaped commerce. The answer, so far, is: only if incentives line up perfectly.
The lesson isn’t that the platform is hostile to brands. It’s that platforms have personalities. They push participants toward certain behaviors. If your strategy rides those incentives, Amazon is a growth engine. You can inject traffic and capital into a channel. You cannot force alignment. In a world where commerce is increasingly run by machines, understanding that alignment may be more important than reach.
Lumian can help you get discovered on ChatGPT. Book a Free Consultation.
In this week’s issue:
Marketplace: Amazon Layoffs, Penalties and Removal Fee Changes
Seller Hacks: Lumian Negative Review Removal
Tweet Spotlight: Retail vs 3PL
Marketplace Madness
Amazon confirmed 16,000 more corporate layoffs, bringing total cuts to about 30,000 since October 2025, roughly 10% of its corporate staff and the largest reduction in company history. The cuts hit AWS, Alexa, devices, ads, and supply chain teams, and come alongside shutting Fresh stores, Go markets, and the Amazon One payment system. CEO Andy Jassy is repositioning the company around AI-driven efficiency and fewer management layers.
Why it matters:
Amazon is prioritizing margin and automation over expansion, which usually translates into stricter enforcement, more self-serve tooling, and less human exception handling. Over the next 1–2 years, sellers should expect a platform that feels more automated, faster, and less forgiving, with AI replacing manual support across core workflows.
Amazon agreed to a $309M cash settlement and more than $1B in total value after a class action covering returns from 2017 onward found systematic refund denials and retrocharges affecting millions of U.S. shoppers. Plaintiffs secured $600M+ in direct refunds plus $363M in mandated operational changes to Amazon’s returns verification and payment reconciliation systems. The company framed the issue as a “small subset” of transactions uncovered in a 2025 internal audit, but the class scope and dollar magnitude imply multi-year process leakage across fulfillment and payments.
Why it matters:
Returns infrastructure is now a litigation and regulatory surface area, not just a logistics cost center. Expect Amazon to tighten verification, extend hold periods, and push more burden onto sellers and carriers, increasing working capital friction across the ecosystem over the next 1–2 years.
From February 15, 2026, every FBA removal or disposal request will generate per-unit charges at the exact moment each unit leaves a fulfillment center, replacing the previous model where Amazon billed once after the full order closed. Fee rates are unchanged, but the accounting surface explodes: a 500-unit cleanup that used to hit as one line item will now appear as 500 timestamped debits in Payments → Transaction View.
Why it matters:
This increases fee granularity and quietly normalizes Amazon infrastructure behaving like usage-priced software, where inventory decisions translate into immediate financial signals. Over the next 1–2 years, expect more FBA cost surfaces to move to event-level metering, pushing sellers toward real-time margin monitoring instead of periodic accounting.
Seller Hacks
Lumian has launched a powerful, white-hat negative review removal tool built for Amazon sellers. We identify reviews that violate Amazon’s policies and file compliant removal cases on your behalf with guesswork and compliance risk.
Our AI agents automatically audit your ASINs and review history to find problematic ratings
We flag reviews likely to violate Amazon’s Terms of Service
We generate detailed evidence and submit removal cases directly to Amazon
Our specialists track responses and appeal as needed until eligible reviews are deleted
Everything is 100% compliant with Amazon’s guidelines.
Unlike companies that charge $200+ per review removed, Lumian charges only $50 per successful removal and you pay only for results.
Ready to clean up your ratings and reclaim sales trust? Book a demo.
Tweet Spotlight
Meme Therapy
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