First Q4 with ad costs coming out of payouts. Anyone run the numbers on November?

Since April 15 Amazon takes ad spend out of your proceeds before paying out, and only charges your card if proceeds don't cover it. Sellers have had five months to get used to that, but Q4 is when it's going to bite, since ad spend usually climbs hardest in the same weeks you're paying for restocks.

For a rough example, say you normally spend $10K a month on ads and plan to double that for November. Under the old setup that $20K went on a card with up to 30 days to pay, so November's ads effectively got paid out of December's sales. Now the $20K comes straight out of November payouts. If your November payouts would normally be $60K, you'd see about $40K land instead, in the same month you're probably placing a January reorder. The one-time $2,500 credit Amazon gave affected accounts doesn't help much at that scale either.

Two things I'd check before Black Friday:

- In Seller Central, go to Reports > Payments and compare a normal month's ad spend against what's in your balance at settlement. If they're close, a Q4 ramp could push you onto the backup card.

- Make sure that backup card has room for the overflow, because it gets charged automatically.

How are people planning for this? Smaller ad ramp, moving reorder dates, covering it some other way?