Amazon has quietly removed the prerequisites for Premium A+ Content. No announcement, no fanfare, just a change that showed up in Seller Central accounts. If you're launching a new brand on Amazon or you've been sitting on Basic A+ for a while, this matters.
Here's what changed, why it used to be frustrating, and what it means for your listings right now.
What the Old Requirements Were
For years, Premium A+ worked like a velvet rope. To get in, you needed two things: a published Brand Story applied across your catalog, and at least five unique sets of published Basic A+ Content. Both requirements made a certain kind of sense when Amazon introduced them. The Brand Story requirement drove adoption of a new format. The five-submission requirement filtered for established sellers with real catalogs. In theory, it rewarded the sellers who'd done the work.
In practice, it created a real problem for new brands. If you were launching with two or three products, which is a perfectly reasonable way to launch, you couldn't hit five published A+ submissions without adding English and Spanish versions of each piece just to pad the count. We've done exactly that for clients: built Basic A+ content that everyone knew would be replaced within a week, in two languages, just to unlock the feature that was always the destination.
Amazon also processed Premium A+ eligibility on a weekly batch cycle, not in real time. So the flow was: create Basic A+, wait for approval, wait for the weekly eligibility check, then finally deploy Premium A+. For a new brand launch, that's a week or more just sitting on the starting line.
What Changed and What It Means for New Launches
Both requirements are now gone. You don't need a Brand Story to unlock Premium A+. You don't need five published Basic A+ submissions. If your brand is enrolled in Brand Registry, you can go straight to Premium A+ from day one.
For brands we launch, this takes at least a week out of the schedule and removes a category of temporary content that existed for no reason other than satisfying a prerequisite. That's real time and real money back in the client's pocket. If you're thinking about launching your brand on Amazon, we'd still recommend against starting with a single product, but two or three ASINs is now a clean starting point with no artificial delays on the content side.
The Brand Story is still worth building, by the way. It's good content that helps buyers understand your brand across your catalog, and it shows up prominently on your product pages. We just no longer have to build it as a tollbooth to unlock everything else.
Why Premium A+ Is Worth Upgrading To
If you're already on Amazon with Basic A+ Content and haven't made the move to Premium, the right time to do it was about two years ago. The second best time is now.
The practical differences are significant. Basic A+ gives you up to five modules with standard-width imagery and text. Premium A+ gives you up to seven modules, full-width edge-to-edge imagery at 1464 pixels wide instead of 970, and a set of module types that don't exist in the Basic tier. That includes autoplay video, interactive hotspot overlays where shoppers can hover to explore product details, carousel galleries, and enhanced comparison tables.
Amazon's own data puts the conversion lift from Premium A+ at up to 20% over Basic A+. Return rates drop 10 to 15% for products with richer content, which makes sense: buyers who understand a product before they buy it are less likely to be disappointed when it arrives. Ad efficiency improves too, typically 10 to 20%, because better-converting listings make every dollar of PPC spend go further. A sponsored product click that lands on a well-built Premium A+ page converts at a meaningfully higher rate than one that lands on a thin listing with stock imagery.
The Modules That Actually Move the Needle
Not all Premium A+ modules are created equal. The ones that tend to have the biggest impact on conversion are video, interactive hotspots, and the enhanced comparison table.
Video is the most straightforward. A 15 to 60 second autoplay video that shows the product in use answers questions that static images can't. For any product where size, texture, or function isn't obvious from a photo, video does real work. It plays automatically as buyers scroll, which means you don't have to get them to click anything.
Interactive hotspots let you layer callouts directly onto a product image. Shoppers hover over a point on the image and get a tooltip with additional information: an ingredient, a feature, a specification. It's a cleaner way to surface technical detail without cluttering the page with text blocks.
The enhanced comparison table in Premium A+ supports more columns and richer formatting than the Basic version, which makes it genuinely useful for brands with a product lineup that benefits from side-by-side comparison. Used well, it keeps buyers in your catalog rather than sending them to search for alternatives.
How to Make the Move
If you're already in Seller Central, go to the A+ Content Manager under Advertising. If the prerequisite gate has been lifted for your account, you'll see Premium A+ available to create directly. Start with your highest-traffic ASINs: those get the most immediate return, and they let you build a template you can roll out across the rest of your catalog.
One note on the transition: you don't have to take down your Basic A+ Content before creating Premium A+. You create the Premium version, apply it to your ASINs, and it replaces the Basic content. There's no gap in coverage if you plan it correctly.
Our Amazon account management work includes A+ Content strategy and production, and we've already started building Premium A+ into new launch timelines now that the prerequisites are gone. If you want to talk through what Premium A+ would look like for your specific catalog, schedule a call with us. We can tell you which modules make sense for your product type, what a realistic conversion lift looks like based on your category, and how quickly we can get it live.