Amazon Seller Account Setup: A Comprehensive Checklist for Success

The moment you sign up for an Amazon seller account, the clock starts.

With your first monthly account charge coming through after 30 days, you are expected to meet all Amazon performance metrics from day one.

Before you jump in headfirst and start selling on Amazon, there are several steps we encourage any prospective seller to take before formalizing the seller account registration process.

Necessary Paperwork (Amazon Seller Account Checklist)

To get through the full registration process for an Amazon seller account, you will need a bunch of information readily available, including:

1. Business Information.

Your legal business name, address and contact information

2. Email Address.

An email address that can be used for this company account. This email account should be set up already, as you will start receiving important emails from Amazon almost immediately.

3. Credit Card.

An internationally chargeable credit card with a valid billing address. If the credit card number isn’t valid, Amazon will cancel your registration.

4. Phone Number.

A phone number where you can be reached during this registration process. Also, have your phone nearby during registration.

5. Tax ID.

Your tax identity information, including your Social Security number or your company’s Federal Tax ID number. To submit your tax identity information, the registration process will take a brief detour to a “1099-K Tax Document Interview.”

6. State Tax ID.

State tax ID information for states in which you have tax nexus. This physical presence is typically impacted by company offices, warehouses/3PLs, and call centers. In June 2018, the US Supreme Court changed the law regarding the responsibility that ecommerce sellers have to remit sales tax for online purchases.

I encourage you to speak with a tax attorney or tax accountant who specializes in online seller tax nexus issues (e.g., salestaxandmore.com, catchingclouds.net, peisnerjohnson.com) or one of the tax remittance companies that can give you the most current Amazon tax nexus information (e.g., taxjar.com, avalara.com, taxify.co, vertexsmb.com).

Print The Checklist and Take it With You

We’ve designed out the checklist as a worksheet to print out and take with you.

Questions to Work Through Before Registering Your Seller Account

Some of the logistics of being a successful seller should be worked out before you set up the seller account, as you likely won’t have as much time to address these after you get started.

1. Where do you plan to send Amazon order returns?

As an Amazon seller, it is imperative that you think about your return process.

• Are you going to handle the Amazon returns yourself, or send them to a company that specializes in testing/grading returns and making the product available for sale again (e.g., tradeport.com, openedboxreturns.com)?
• Who on your team will handle Amazon customer inquiries?

The key is not just having all of the answers, but also respecting Amazon’s requirements to respond to all customer inquiries within 24 hours, any day of the year.

Hence, figuring out who is on point (with possible backup) is one critical operational issue that should be addressed before opening your Amazon seller account.

2. If you plan to use Amazon’s Fulfillment by Amazon program, will you co-mingle your products?

I very much recommend using FBA, given its potential visibility to 100MM+ Amazon Prime customers.

If you decide to go that route, you’ll need to decide whether you plan to co-mingle your products with FBA inventory of other sellers of the same products.

Amazon gives FBA sellers this potentially lethal option of sending product into Amazon’s Fulfillment Centers, where they might get co-mingled with other FBA sellers’ product.

This may result in your products getting mixed up with counterfeit or low-grade versions of what you purport to be selling.

Unfortunately, if a co-mingled unit gets picked to fulfill an order on your account, you are left explaining to Amazon why a customer complained about getting a counterfeit item.

You need to work through this issue very early on because if you decide to use FBA but not use the co-mingled (“stickerless”) option, you need to activate your account to become a “stickered” FBA account before ever creating your first FBA shipment into Amazon.

While it is possible to become a stickered account later on, it can quickly become very complicated if you have already sent some product into FBA as a stickerless product.

3. Do you plan to use a DBA (doing business as) name to operate your Amazon seller account?

While some companies have legitimate reasons to use a different customer-facing name, Amazon is also a place where many sellers purposefully conceal their identity.

Reasons for doing this include not wanting brands to know that they are selling online, or the brand is actually the reseller and doesn’t want its other retail partners to know that it is selling product online direct to consumer.

4. Have you checked to see if the products you plan to list are in categories that Amazon has gated?

Amazon has restrictions on who can sell in certain categories, and while the ungating process is usually surmountable, it’s important to recognize that if your desired categories are gated, you will have to apply to get ungated.

Review Amazon’s approval category page before you decide to register on Amazon to learn more about the ungating process and whether it applies to your product categories.

5. Amazon has already started gating specific brands and SKUs.

During your first 30 days with a seller account, we encourage you to add all of your intended catalog to your Amazon seller account.

It won’t take long to establish whether you will have problems with specific brands and SKUs.

You may need to change your catalog or close your account if Amazon is restricting the products you intended to sell.