Overview

Amazon’s Error 99026 appears when a seller’s advertising feed tries to exclude a product from every available ad channel at once. The validation block stops the entire feed from processing, delaying campaign launch. Fixing the issue quickly restores the product’s eligibility for sponsored placements.

Key Points

• Both channels cannot be excluded — Setting the exclusion flag in both the “Sponsored Products” and “Sponsored Brands” columns triggers Error 99026 because Amazon requires at least one active channel per SKU.
• Channel values dictate placement — The values you enter in the channel columns tell Amazon whether to show the item on Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, or both.
• Feed is blocked until corrected — The error is fatal; the system rejects the whole upload until every offending row is amended.
• Preview tools catch the problem early — Using the feed‑preview feature in Seller Central highlights rows with dual exclusions before you submit the file.
• Blank cells default to inclusion — Leaving one or both channel cells empty automatically opts the product into the default advertising channel, preventing the error.

How the Validation Works

1. Upload preparation — You create a tab‑delimited or Excel feed that lists each SKU together with two channel columns (e.g., SponsoredProducts and SponsoredBrands). Example: SKU 12345 has “EXCLUDE” in both columns.
2. Row‑level evaluation — Amazon’s ingestion engine reads each row and checks the channel flags. If both flags equal the exclusion keyword, the row violates the rule that a product must appear in at least one channel. Example: The engine flags SKU 12345 as invalid because both columns read “EXCLUDE.”
3. Error aggregation — When the engine encounters any such row, it stops processing the entire file and returns Error 99026, listing the offending line numbers in the response file. Example: The error report shows “Row 27 – both channels excluded.”