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If you want to become an Amazon Seller, there are a number of requirements and criteria that you have to fulfill.
One of the criteria is your age. Not everyone can become an Amazon seller and indeed, you have to be above a certain age before you can be validated to sell on the platform.
Quick Summary of This Guide
You need to be 18 years old in order to sell on Amazon.
Along with age, there are a number of other requirements, which you need to be aware of before you can start planning your Amazon selling journey.
In this post, we have compiled a checklist of requirements and questions to ask yourself so that you have everything ready to go when you start applying to become an Amazon seller.
Let’s get started
The Complete Checklist for Setting Up Your Amazon Seller Account
In order to make the setup process of your Amazon selling account as smooth as possible, we have compiled this guide.
This post will consist of all the information you should know before getting started with selling on Amazon.
Let’s start with the basics:
Necessary Paperwork
Before you start selling on Amazon, there’s certain information you will need to have readily available on hand.
This information includes:
1. Business Information
Your business’s legal name, address, and contact information.
2. Email Address
The email address you’ll use on Amazon and your company account.
Please note that this email address should already be set up prior to you setting up an Amazon seller account.
You will start to receive emails from Amazon almost immediately after you set up your seller account.
3. Credit Card
You need to have an operational credit with international transactions enabled and it should have a valid billing address.
If Amazon is unable to authorize your credit card, your registration will automatically be canceled.
4. Phone Number
A valid phone number that can be used by Amazon to reach during the registration process as well as afterward for any type of .
Be sure to have your phone near you during registration.
5. Tax Information
It’s important to have your tax information on hand. This includes your Social Security number or your company’s Federal Tax ID number.
In order to submit your tax identity information, you will be redirected to a brief 1099-K Tax Document Interview.
Once that’s done, you’ll be directed back to the Amazon seller account registration process.
6. State Tax Identity Information
This refers to state tax ID information regarding the states in which you have tax nexus.
This can be affected by company offices, warehouses as well as call centers.
Questions to Ask Yourself Before Setting Up Your Amazon Selling Account
Before you get started with selling on Amazon, there are a number of factors that you need to think about beforehand.
It’s important that you work these aspects out before you actually set up an account because you won’t get a lot of time to address them once the gears are rolling.
These questions are:
1. How Do You Plan to Handle Item Returns?
The first question to ask yourself is what are you going to do with the items that get returned to you from customers?
- Are you going to be handling them yourself?
- Is someone in your team going to be handling them?
- Are you going to utilize the services of a third-party company that specializes in testing and grading returned products?
This is a question you have to answer beforehand and set up accordingly.
If you’re going to be handling returns on your own, make sure you’re prepared for it.
Do you possess the expertise to polish and fix a returned item until it’s ready for sale again?
If you don’t, then you’ll have to hire a third-party company.
In this case, make sure that you’ve made some sort of arrangement with that third-party company before you set up your Amazon seller account.
2. Amazon FBA or FBM?
These two options stand for Fulfilled by Amazon and Fulfilled by Merchant respectively.
The former (FBA) means that you, as a seller, will have no involvement in the packaging and shipping process for your items to your buyers.
All you’ll have to do is send your items to an Amazon Fulfilment Center near you and Amazon will handle the rest.
We highly recommend that new Amazon sellers opt for FBA as it’s much cheaper and much less logistically complex.
On the other hand, the latter (FBM) means that you will have to handle the packaging and shipping of items to your buyers.
While this gives you a lot more freedom in terms of packaging and the courier services you use, you can see why this is a lot more costly and difficult to implement.
It will be another aspect of your business that you’ll have to constantly manage and worry about.
We highly recommend that you don’t go for the FBM option unless you already have extensive experience with it.
3. If You’re Using Amazon FBA, Will You Co-Mingle Your Products?
Courtesy: Amazon Seller Central
So, you’ve chosen to opt for the Amazon FBA program.
That’s great. However, you have something further to think about now:
Will you be opting for the stickered or non-stickered (co-mingling) option?
The latter involves your products being sent to Amazon Fulfilment Centers and getting co-mingled with the FBA inventory of other sellers who are selling the same products.
As you can probably imagine, this can result in your products getting mixed up with products with other sellers who may not be of the same quality.
In fact, many of them may even be counterfeit items.
If a case arises where a counterfeit, co-mingled unit is shipped to a buyer and that shipment is credited to you, then you’ll be left explaining to Amazon why a customer received a counterfeit item.
Naturally, this is undesirable. Hence, if you go for Amazon FBA, it’s a good idea to seek approval for the stickered option.
This would involve Amazon providing you with unique FBA labels that you can paste onto your boxes before you send them off to Amazon Fulfilment Centers.
These FBA labels will uniquely identify you as the seller of those particular items.
Hence, your items will never be confused with some other seller’s items.
We recommend that if you opt for Amazon FBA, you should seek to get your account approved for the stickered option before you fulfill any orders.
4. Do You Plan to Utilize a DBA (“Doing Business As”) Name to Run Your Amazon Seller Account?
While there are many sellers on Amazon that use their actual names for their accounts, we recommend that you use your company or business name for it.
It’s difficult for customers to identify with a person’s name as it doesn’t really tell them much about the product that they’re selling.
However, when you have a specific business name that uniquely communicates the products you’re providing, that is much more compelling for online customers.
5. Check to See if the Products You Intend to Sell are Gated or Not
There are certain categories of products on Amazon which are “gated”.
What this essentially means is that you’ll have to seek special approval from Amazon in order to sell these products.
Currently, the gated categories on Amazon are:
- Jewelry
- Music
- Video, DVD & Blu-ray
- Watches
It’s important to note that there are certain categories that become gated during certain times of the year. For example, Toys & Games become gated during the holiday season.
Before you start selling on Amazon, it’s important to check whether the items you intend to sell belong to any of the gated categories or not.
The review process to become ungated in a certain category is a long and arduous one that can take weeks or even months.
Depending on the category, you’ll have to provide certain proofs that your products fulfill certain industry standards required by Amazon.
Not only that but the process will also involve you sending products over to Amazon for inspection.
Naturally, this is all fairly tedious so, if you don’t want to go through this process, consider selling products that don’t belong to gated categories.
Wrapping Things Up…
So, you need to be 18 before you can sell on Amazon but that’s not the only thing you need.
We hope you now have a better understanding of all the requirements to become an Amazon seller.
It’s definitely not easy and you surely don’t become successful on Amazon overnight.
However, with careful planning and a well-researched approach, you can definitely make the journey a whole lot smoother for yourself.
What problems did you run into when setting up an account to sell on Amazon? Let us know in the comments below.
