Amazon rejected your video
and will not say why.

Amazon video rejections fall into two families. Specification failures are mechanical: wrong aspect ratio, oversized file, unsupported frame rate, letterboxing. Content failures are policy: seller or contact details, price or promotional language, external links, and content you do not hold the rights to. A specification failure is fixed by re-encoding. A content failure is fixed by re-editing or re-scripting, and resubmitting the same file will fail again.

Family one: specification failures

These are the cheapest to fix and the most common. Check them first, in this order, because each one alone is sufficient to fail the asset.

• Aspect ratio. Sponsored Brands Video accepts 16:9 (square pixel) only. A 9:16 or 1:1 master will fail no matter how good it is.
• Letterboxing. Amazon asks you to avoid using videos with horizontal or vertical black, color, or blurred bars. This catches almost every asset repurposed from a vertical social cut, because the usual fix for the ratio problem is to pad it. Padding is itself a rejection.
• File size. 500MB or less for Sponsored Brands Video.
• Frame rate. A discrete list, not a range: 23.976, 23.98, 24, 25, 29.97, 29.98 or 30fps. A 50fps or 60fps export fails.
• Audio. Minimum 96 kbps and 44.1 kHz. A silent track can also trip review.
• Text placement. Amazon asks you to avoid placing text and other important information in the lower right corner, because the interface overlays it.
• Language. The video must match the marketplace language. The same asset cannot serve amazon.de and amazon.it.

Family two: content failures

These are the ones that cost time, because the notice looks identical and the file is technically perfect. The reasons documented across Seller Central discussions are consistent:

• Seller or distributor identity. Naming your store or your distributor.
• Contact details. Any phone number, email or address.
• Price or promotion. A figure on screen, or language like "cheap", "on sale", "best price". Amazon controls price display; your creative may not.
• External links or calls to leave Amazon. Including a URL burned into the end card.
• Rights you do not hold. This is the frequent and expensive one. A video supplied by your manufacturer, or a clip licensed for your own site, is not automatically cleared for Amazon.

The trap: an end card that fails two rules at once

Sponsored Brands Video asks for an end card showing brand name and logo. A great many rejected assets carry an end card that also shows a website URL and a promotional line, which breaches the external-link rule and the promotion rule in the same three seconds. The asset is not rejected for having an end card. It is rejected for what is on it.

Before you resubmit

Resubmitting an unchanged file is the most common wasted cycle we see. Run the mechanical list first, because it is objective and takes minutes. If every specification is correct, the failure is a content rule, and you need to change the edit rather than the export.

If the asset came from a third party, resolve the rights question before anything else. It is the one cause that no amount of re-encoding will fix.

A note on what we do not claim

We deliberately do not publish a rejection-rate percentage on this page. We would have to either use our own sample, which is not yet large enough to be honest about, or repeat a figure from a vendor blog with no method behind it. When we have a defensible number, it will appear here with the sample size next to it.

Amazon revises its specifications periodically. Verified against the sources below on 2 September 2026. We encode to the published specification and re-encode at our cost, once, if an asset we delivered is rejected on spec.

Sources

Every figure on this page links to a primary source. Where no primary source exists, we say so rather than repeat a number we cannot stand behind.

• Amazon Ads, Sponsored Brands video ad specs
• Amazon Seller Central forums, product video rejection discussion

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