How do you become an Amazon seller?

Before you register: what you need ready

Amazon verifies sellers harder than most marketplaces, which is worth knowing before you open an Amazon seller account. eBay and Etsy will have you listing the same afternoon with little more than an email address and a bank account. Amazon wants documents, a tax interview, and sometimes a video call. That friction is a feature if you're building something durable, since it keeps casual competition off the platform, but it means the calendar matters: start registration before your inventory is ready, not after.

Amazon verifies sellers, so registration goes smoothly only if your documents are in order first. At minimum you'll need a business or personal legal name and address, a government-issued ID, a bank account and routing details for payouts, a chargeable credit card, and your tax information. US sellers provide their tax identity through Amazon's tax interview; if you're operating as a business entity, have your EIN and formation details available.

It's worth deciding your business structure before you register rather than after. Many sellers start as a sole proprietor and form an LLC later, while others form the LLC first for liability separation and cleaner books. There's no single right answer, but registering under the structure you intend to keep saves you the friction of changing legal and tax details on the account down the line. For a deeper walkthrough of the exact fields and verification flow, see our Amazon seller account guide.

One document detail that trips people up: everything has to match. The name on your ID, the name on your bank account, and the legal name you register under should agree, and your address should match what's on your bank statement or utility bill. Mismatches are the most common reason verification stalls for days. Ten minutes of checking before you start beats a week of back-and-forth with Seller Support.

• •Legal name and business address
• •Government-issued photo ID for identity verification
• •Bank account and routing number for payouts
• •A chargeable credit card
• •Tax identity (SSN or EIN) for Amazon's tax interview
• •A decision on your business structure (sole prop vs LLC)

Choosing your selling plan

Amazon offers two selling plans, and the choice is mostly about volume. The Individual plan charges a per-item fee on each sale with no monthly subscription, which suits people testing the waters or selling a handful of items a month. The Professional plan charges a flat monthly subscription instead of the per-item fee, and it unlocks tools you'll need to run a real business: bulk listing, advanced reports, advertising eligibility, and the ability to win the featured offer placement.

The math is straightforward: once your monthly sales volume is high enough that the per-item fees would exceed the Professional subscription, the Professional plan is cheaper and gives you more. Most sellers who intend to build a business start on or quickly move to Professional. You can switch plans later, so this isn't a permanent decision, but verify the current per-item fee and subscription price in Seller Central, since Amazon adjusts them.

Register, verify, and choose how you'll fulfill

Registration happens at Amazon Seller Central, which is the marketplace side of Amazon. It's not Vendor Central, the invite-only program where Amazon buys your goods wholesale and sets the retail price itself. If you're weighing Amazon Vendor Central vs Seller Central as an open choice, you aren't: Vendor Central arrives as an invitation or not at all. You'll create the account, select your plan, complete the tax interview, and submit your identity and business documents. Amazon then runs verification, which can include a video call or document review. This is normal and is why having clean, matching documents matters. Once verified, your account is live and you can begin listing.

The defining operational choice is your fulfillment model. With Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), you ship inventory to Amazon's warehouses and Amazon handles storage, picking, packing, shipping, and customer service. You gain Prime eligibility and scale, but you pay fulfillment and storage fees and hand physical custody of your inventory to Amazon. With Fulfillment by Merchant (FBM), you store and ship orders yourself, keeping control and avoiding FBA fees but taking on the logistics. Many sellers run a mix. One consequence of choosing FBA that beginners rarely anticipate: because Amazon holds your inventory, it will sometimes lose or damage it, and it owes you reimbursements when it does, which is a recurring line of money you'll need to track.

• •FBA: Amazon stores and ships; you get Prime and scale, pay storage/fulfillment fees
• •FBM: you store and ship; you keep control and avoid FBA fees, but own logistics
• •Verification may include document review or a video call, so have docs ready
• •You can list once verified; plans and fulfillment can be changed later

Pick a product with the math done first

Registration is the easy part; choosing what to sell is where new sellers make or lose their first year. Whatever sourcing model you pick (private label, wholesale, or arbitrage), the discipline is the same: run the complete fee stack against a realistic selling price before you spend a dollar on inventory. Check whether the category is gated (some require approval or invoices before you can list), check whether the product needs certifications, and check how many established sellers already dominate the page you'd be joining.

Here's a quick hypothetical to show the shape of the vetting. Say you find a garlic press you can land for $4.50 a unit and comparable listings sell around $18. Suppose the referral fee runs 15% ($2.70) and the FBA fulfillment fee for that size is $4.90 (both made-up numbers; pull real ones for your product). That leaves $5.90 before storage, ads, and returns. Spend $2 per unit on launch advertising and provision $0.50 for returns, and you're netting roughly $3.40, about 19%. Workable. But if the landed cost were $6.50 instead, the same product barely breaks even. Run your own candidates through our free FBA fee calculator and kill anything that only works under best-case assumptions.

Two sourcing routes need a caveat. Amazon FBA vs dropshipping is a real fork: dropshipping needs almost no capital because a supplier ships each order, but Amazon requires you to be the seller of record on every packing slip and holds you accountable for a delivery you don't control, so margin and account health both live in someone else's hands. Publishing is the other low-capital route. Kindle Direct Publishing lets you sell Kindle books or print-on-demand paperbacks with no stock at all, and it runs on separate economics (royalty rates rather than referral plus fulfillment fees), so treat it as its own business rather than a variation of FBA.

A note on expectations: your first product probably won't be a home run, and that's fine. The goal of product one is to learn the full loop (source, ship, list, advertise, reconcile a settlement) with money you can afford to lose. Sellers who treat the first SKU as tuition tend to pick the second one much better.

List your first product, and set up your books from day one

To sell, you either match your product to an existing listing or create a new one with your own ASIN. A listing needs a title, images, bullet points, a description, a price, and inventory. If you're FBA, you then create an inbound shipment and send units to Amazon's fulfillment centers; if you're FBM, you simply mark the item available and fulfill orders as they come. Your first sale can happen within days of going live.

The step that separates durable sellers from struggling ones is accounting, and it should be in place before the orders start. Amazon doesn't pay you per sale. It pays you a net settlement every couple of weeks that nets together sales, refunds, and a stack of fees, with sales tax and reserves mixed in. If you only record the net deposit that hits your bank, you'll never know your real gross sales, your true fee load, or your profit per product. Setting up amazon bookkeeping that breaks each settlement into its components, tracks landed cost per SKU, and recovers the reimbursements Amazon owes you means your numbers are trustworthy from the first dollar instead of a tax-season reconstruction. Becoming an Amazon seller takes an afternoon; staying a profitable one takes knowing your numbers, so build that habit at the start, not after the mess.

Taxes for Amazon sellers split into two piles, and new sellers tend to worry about the wrong one. Sales tax is mostly handled for you: marketplace facilitator laws make Amazon collect and remit it on marketplace orders in nearly every state that charges it. Income tax is entirely yours. Amazon reports your gross sales on a 1099-K (check the current reporting threshold rather than trusting an old figure), and that gross number includes fees and refunds you never actually received. If your books don't show cost of goods sold and fees against it, you'll be taxed on a profit figure that never existed. That's the practical reason to track landed cost per SKU from the first shipment.

Mistakes first-year sellers make (so you can skip them)

Most first-year failures aren't dramatic. They're a few predictable mistakes that compound quietly until the seller concludes "Amazon doesn't work" when really the setup was wrong.

Every one of these is cheaper to prevent than to fix. The common thread is treating Amazon like a storefront when it's really a numbers business with a storefront attached.

• •Ordering a large first inventory buy before validating demand with a small one
• •Pricing off supplier cost instead of landed cost (freight and duties add real dollars)
• •Ignoring gated categories and discovering approval requirements after buying stock
• •Recording only net bank deposits, which understates both revenue and fees in your books
• •Never checking whether Amazon lost or damaged inventory it owes reimbursements for
• •Waiting until tax season to reconstruct a year of settlements from scratch

The starter toolkit: what you actually need (and what can wait)

New sellers get pitched a lot of subscriptions. Be skeptical. In the first months, the amazon seller tools that genuinely earn their cost are a keyword/product research tool while you're choosing what to sell, a repricer only if you're doing arbitrage or wholesale against competing offers, and an accounting setup. Everything else (inventory forecasting suites, review automation, listing AI) can wait until you have sales to manage.

On the accounting side you have a real choice. At tiny volume, a spreadsheet plus Amazon's settlement reports works if you're disciplined about it. Once orders pick up, amazon accounting software takes over the settlement-splitting job: it should parse each payout into sales, every fee type, refunds, and reimbursements, and post clean summary journals when you connect amazon to quickbooks or Xero so the books tie to each deposit exactly. Compare A2X, Link My Books, and BeanHawk on that reconciliation quality plus what else you get; BeanHawk, for example, bundles the reimbursement auditing mentioned earlier with the accounting. If Amazon won't be your only channel, check channel coverage before you subscribe, because eBay seller accounting software and Amazon connectors are often sold as separate products even by the same vendor. Whichever amazon seller accounting software you pick, set it up in month one. Migrating six months of messy history later is the single most avoidable chore in this business.