Overview

Amazon has published its annual FBA Peak Readiness Playbook for the 2025 holiday season, outlining the critical dates, inventory deadlines, and shipping best practices that sellers need to follow to maximize their performance during the busiest selling period of the year. This guide consolidates expert recommendations on inventory management, storage planning, and fulfillment timelines to help sellers ensure their products are Prime badge-ready and positioned for strong holiday sales.

Key Points / What Sellers Need to Know

• Inventory arrival deadlines are firm — Amazon sets hard cutoff dates for when FBA inventory must arrive at fulfillment centers to be eligible for Prime badging during peak shopping events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas.
• Shipment split method affects your deadline — Sellers using "minimal shipment splits" get slightly later deadlines than those using "Amazon-optimized shipment splits," which require earlier submission to allow for broader distribution across the network.
• Amazon Warehousing and Distribution (AWD) has earlier cutoffs — If you use AWD to stage inventory before transferring to FBA, those shipments need to arrive well ahead of standard FBA deadlines to allow processing and redistribution time.
• Capacity limits are published monthly — Storage capacity limits become available on the first of each month, so sellers should check their Capacity Monitor regularly to plan shipments accordingly.
• Planning should start now — The playbook emphasizes that successful peak performance requires advance preparation across inventory forecasting, shipment creation, and storage optimization.

Critical Holiday Deadlines

Amazon structures its peak season around two major shopping windows. The first window covers Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which typically fall in late November. For this window, capacity limits become available at the start of the month, and sellers need to have their AWD shipments, minimal-split FBA shipments, and optimized-split FBA shipments submitted progressively earlier to ensure arrival in time. The second window covers the Christmas and late December shopping period, with a similar staggered deadline structure but pushed later into the calendar. Sellers who miss these deadlines risk losing their Prime badge on affected inventory, which can dramatically reduce conversion rates during the highest-traffic shopping days of the year.