How to Setup your Amazon Sellers Account – Part 10

The topic I will be covering today will be how to properly setup your Amazon sellers account. The process itself is fairly straightforward but I want to talk about a couple things regarding the sellers account that will benefit you in the long run.

Before we hop into talking about the sellers account, you can read any update you may have missed below:

Alrighty, this update is not going to be as long as the other ones but I will still be covering some important information. Let’s get right into it!

What is an Amazon Sellers Account?

An Amazon sellers account enables you to sell products on the Amazon marketplace. It also let’s Amazon handle all of the shipping, orders, customers and storage for your business. They do all of the hard work for you and they make your life 100 time easier as a seller.

Amazon also provides a HUGE marketplace full of hungry buyers looking to buy your products. You don’t have to go out and find your own buyers, Amazon does it for you which is awesome.

To be able to utilize all of this stuff Amazon provides you need to setup a sellers account with them. They give you two options in terms of the type of account you can choose, professional and individual. 

I will be going over why you NEED a professional account below!

You Need a Professional Sellers Account

When you go to create a sellers account with Amazon you are faced with a decision. You can either sign up for the free individual account or the professional account that costs a monthly fee.

You may be tempted to sign up for the free account at first, especially considering at this point you have probably already paid thousands of dollars for inventory + shipping fees.

However, if you are going to take this Amazon FBA business serious you need the professional account for a couple of big reasons.

The bottomline, the free individual account is geared towards people just starting out with retail arbitrage. Retail arbitrage is NOT what we are doing here and that is why we need the professional sellers account. The monthly fee might suck but it is a necessary business expense.

Plus, the monthly fee is only $40 and the first month is free. That is a small fee to pay for being able to use Amazon to sell your products.

Now let’s talk about how we go about setting up our professional sellers account the correct way.

How to Setup your Account

I am going to walk you through the basic steps that you need to follow so that you setup your account the right way. 

1. Visit this Link – services.amazon.com/content/sell-on-amazon.htm

Once you click on that link you will be taking to a page on Amazon where you can choose to sign up for the individual account or the professional account. You will see a page like the one below, click on the “Sell as a Professional” to get started.

Once you click on that link you will then be taken to a page where you can either sign in or create a new account. The page should look like the one below:

2. Either create a new account or sign into an existing one

If you already have an Amazon account then you can use that account to sign up. If you don’t have an existing account then you are going to have to create a new one.

Whatever route you take, you will be taken to a page like the one below next:

On this page you will need to input your legal name and accept the agreement. Pretty straightforward! If you are based outside of the U.S. then you will have to read and agree to different agreements with Amazon.

Click the “Continue” button to proceed to the next step.

3. Fill out seller information

On the next page, Amazon needs to know some basic information about you and your brand. You have to fill out things such as brand name, address, country, phone number, type of product you plan to sell and more. Most if the info you can fill out yourself, however the fields highlighted with the orange I want to talk a little more about.

The first thing I want to talk about is the display name. Make sure you choose this name wisely because it is the brand that you will be selling all of your products under on Amazon.

The good news is that you can change it whenever you want! The only problem is that the name you choose can’t be taken by anyone else. I would try and make sure that your display name is the same as your brand name. I talked about how to choose a good brand name in the previous update if you want to read about that.

The second thing I want to touch on is the bottom orange box. This area includes your main product category, # of products you plan to sell per month and if you own the brand for your products.

Amazon says these are optional but I would suggest filling them out the best you can. It will only help you out.

When it asks if you own the brand for the products you are selling say “yes”. If you are private labeling a product and selling it under your own brand, then you need to say yes. The people that are doing retail arbitrage would be the ones that choose “no”.

4. Add credit card to file

On the next page you will need to input your credit card/debit card information . You need to do this because Amazon will charge this card for the monthly fee for having a professional sellers account. They will also use this card to verify your identity.

5. Verify your identity

Even though Amazon uses your credit card to verify your identity you will also need to do a phone verification. Either by text or by call.

This is really easy and will only take a few minutes to complete this part.

6. Tax information

The last step in setting up your account is making sure Amazon has all of the proper tax records for you. They make this process very simple with their “Tax Interview Wizard” which walks you through the whole process.

Once you click on “Launch Interview Wizard” you will be taken to the beginning of the interview. Don’t worry this isn’t a live interview or anything, I am not too sure why they even call this an interview.

Anyways, once you click on that you will be taken to a page like the one below.

Just follow the onscreen instructions and you should be good! Once you click continue then you will be brought to a page like the one below:

This is where you need to tell Amazon how you want to be taxed. I would suggest you create an LLC in your state and use that LLC business for selling on Amazon. There are multiple reasons for this that I will discuss in just a minute.

However, if you already have an LLC setup for this then choose that option and choose the S-corporation. Fill out the EIN number at the bottom along with the rest of the info and then you can continue on to the next page. 

The next two pages you need to fill out a W-9 form and then sign electronically. I do not have pictures of these pages because Amazon would not let me continue without me inputting an EIN number(which I didn’t want to do since I have already done it).

Just follow the onscreen instructions and it should be easy to follow. 

7. You’re all set!

After you complete the tax interview then you are all done setting up your account! You should now have an Amazon professional sellers account and you are ready to start selling on Amazon.

Why I Would Suggest Having an LLC

Creating an LLC business for your Amazon FBA business is a smart thing to do for a couple of reasons. The biggest reason being that you have legal protection in case anything happens to you or your business.

For example, if you infringe on someone’s copyrighted product and then they sue you will be more protected. Your LLC will be sued, not you. 

This allows you to avoid being sued personally and having your OWN assets taken from you. I am not a lawyer but I am going off of what I remember my own lawyer telling me. I would suggest you at least go talk to a lawyer about setting up an LLC for your business.

Another benefit of having an LLC is that you will be taxed under your business and not you individually. This allows for you to save money when tax season comes around. 

By having an LLC behind your brand, you will look more official to potential customers as they will be more likely to trust an actual business. Also, suppliers will take you more serious if you have a registered business. 

It is not as hard as you think to get an LLC

Getting an LLC formed for your business is very easy and doesn’t cost too much. If you go and see a lawyer they will help you out and make the whole process streamlined. 

It will cost you a couple of hundred of dollars to create an LLC but I think it is well worth the money. If you are serious about your business and want to create a REAL brand then I would suggest getting an LLC formed.

You don’t need one right away

One thing that you can do is start off selling on Amazon as an individual and then once you start to see some success THEN register as a business.

Wrap Things Up

That is gonna do it for this article! This was an update that covered a boring and fairly basic topic but I wanted to make sure people were setting up their sellers account properly.

Thank you all for reading the 10th update in the case study and I am getting closer and closer to actually selling on Amazon. I still have around a month to wait until my products arrive at Amazon’s warehouse.

I will have a new update out soon but in the meantime you can join our Facebook group and if you haven’t already sign up to get notified of each new update that comes out, you can do that below. Thanks for reading 🙂