The reported 3.5 percent Amazon seller surcharge has now circulated for seven days without a Seller Central notice, a 10-Q disclosure, or a named Amazon executive confirming the number on the record [1]. Yahoo Finance's original April 17 piece cited "people familiar" without a source document; Digital Commerce 360's April 3 version referred to a draft policy circulating internally [2]. The coverage is stacked; the artifact is not.

This is the fabrication zone the paper warned about last week. Large sellers are pricing the surcharge into Q2 models. Shopify has written a thread-of-the-week about it. Five Reddit FBA communities have built spreadsheets to predict the impact on margin. And the single piece of paper that would settle the matter — a Seller Central bulletin or a 10-Q footnote — does not exist. The paper has asked Amazon corporate communications four times in seven days; the response has not moved past the boilerplate line about routine fee-structure updates [3].

Theo Kaplan's position: the surcharge may be real and may take effect. It is also possible that internal discussions at Amazon have not produced a policy, and that the coverage has out-run the decision. The difference matters to sellers pricing Q2. The paper's rule for follow-ups on this story stays the same: no Amazon confirmation, no Seller Central bulletin, no primary artifact — no upgrade from "reported" to "confirmed." Day eight will get the same treatment unless a document lands. The consumer-facing frame (a 3.5 percent pass-through to shoppers) is third-order speculation on top of an unconfirmed first-order policy, and the paper is not doing that arithmetic until the first order shows up on paper.

-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco