Getting set up in Seller Central — account, region, sub-users.

Seller Central is the most common entry surface for new sellers and the daily-driver UI for the third-party side of Amazon's marketplace. The account you set up on day one shapes every later episode in this module — and several of the decisions are difficult or impossible to reverse without closing the account and starting over. Treating the registration form as a five-minute formality is one of the most expensive mistakes a new seller can make.

Account type — Professional vs Individual

Amazon offers two account tiers, and they are not equivalent:

• Professional. €39 / £30 / $39.99 per month (varies by marketplace, VAT-exclusive in the EU), no per-item fee. Eligible for the Buy Box. Required for Brand Registry enrolment. Required for A+ Content, Sponsored Brands, and Brand Store. Required to list in gated categories. Required to upload via flat-file. Supports sub-users and the user-permission model. Bulk inventory management. SP-API access.
• Individual. No monthly fee, but a €0.99 / £0.75 / $0.99 fee on every item sold. Never eligible for the Buy Box. No Brand Registry. No A+ Content. No Sponsored Brands. No flat-files. No sub-users. Listing limited to ~40 items per month in most marketplaces. Effectively a hobby account.

For anyone serious about selling on Amazon, it is always Professional. The per-item Individual fee crosses the Professional break-even at roughly 40 units per month — and that calculation ignores the Buy Box eligibility, the Brand Registry access, and the ad-product gating, all of which make Professional the correct choice from unit one for any commercial seller.

Marketplace region — the unified-account map

Amazon operates regional unified accounts. One registration gets you access to multiple country marketplaces inside that region, but each marketplace has its own VAT registration requirements, its own language, its own Style Guide rules, and its own buyer base. The three regions:

• Europe (EU). One account covers Germany (DE), United Kingdom (UK — separate post-Brexit), France (FR), Italy (IT), Spain (ES), Netherlands (NL), Poland (PL), Sweden (SE), and Belgium (BE). VAT registration required in each country where you hold inventory or exceed distance-selling thresholds.
• North America (NA). One account covers United States (US), Canada (CA), and Mexico (MX). Tax and import-of-record handled per country.
• Far East (FE). One account covers Japan (JP), Australia (AU), and Singapore (SG). Each has distinct certification and labelling requirements.

Pick the home marketplace where your legal entity is registered and where you will hold the primary inventory. Adding marketplaces later is straightforward; changing the home marketplace requires support cases and weeks of friction.

What Amazon asks for at registration

• Legal entity documents. Articles of incorporation, business registration certificate, VAT/tax ID. The legal entity name must match exactly across every document — a "Ltd" missing from one form is a 4-week rejection cycle.
• Bank account. Held in the seller's legal entity name, in a country Amazon supports for the chosen marketplace region.
• Credit card. For the monthly Professional fee and as a fraud-prevention signal.
• Government-issued ID of the primary contact. Passport or national ID card, matching the name on the legal-entity registration where the contact is a beneficial owner.
• Proof of address for the primary contact — utility bill or bank statement less than 90 days old.
• Phone verification. A phone number that can receive SMS during the live verification call.

Amazon's Account Verification team has tightened the matching rules significantly since 2020. The name, address, and entity details must match across every submitted document, the bank account, the credit card, and the legal-entity registration. Any inconsistency triggers a rejection and a re-submission cycle that can run 4–8 weeks.

Sub-users and the permission model

The biggest operational mistake new sellers make is logging in as the root user for everything and sharing the root credentials with the team. The correct pattern is:

• One root user — the legal entity's primary contact. Used only for billing, legal-entity changes, and inviting other users. Not for daily work.
• One admin user per long-term employee with broad permissions. Each person logs in under their own credentials, so the audit trail attributes every edit to the correct individual.
• Scoped users for agencies and freelancers — permissions limited to exactly the modules they need (Advertising for ad agencies, Inventory for warehouse partners, etc.). Revoke when the engagement ends.
• Scoped users for third-party tools — AMALYZE, any other analytics tool, any 3PL, any repricer. Each tool gets its own sub-user with permissions limited to what it actually needs.

This is also a prerequisite for working with AMALYZE, with any other tool, and with any reasonable third-party logistics provider — they all expect to authenticate against a dedicated sub-user, not against the root credentials.

Two-step verification and authenticator apps

Amazon requires two-step verification (2SV) on every Seller Central account. Use an authenticator app (Authy, 1Password, Google Authenticator) rather than SMS — SIM-swap attacks against high-value Seller Central accounts are not rare. The 2SV setting is per-user, so every sub-user needs their own 2SV configured before they can log in.

The day-one checklist before Episode 04

• A Professional Seller Central account approved in your home marketplace.
• At least one admin sub-user separate from the root login, with 2SV enabled.
• The legal entity documents organised in one folder — Amazon will ask for them again at Brand Registry enrolment and at gated-category approval.
• The trademark documentation organised separately — registration certificate, serial number, issuing office. Required for Brand Registry in the next episode.
• VAT registration in every EU country where you will hold inventory, or a clear plan for the One-Stop-Shop (OSS) scheme if you'll stay below the storage threshold.

Seller vs Vendor — the registration paths diverge here

Vendors do not self-register. The Vendor relationship is invitation-only: Amazon's category teams or the Vendor Recruitment team approach a brand, send a vendor agreement, and onboard the brand into Vendor Central manually. If your brand is currently a Seller but Amazon Retail wants to source from you wholesale, the invitation arrives via email from an @amazon.com address — verify carefully because the invitation is a frequent phishing target. The two account types are not mutually exclusive; many brands run a Hybrid model with Vendor for hero SKUs and Seller for long-tail.

What to take into the next episode

With Seller Central set up cleanly, the next episode is Brand Registry — the single enrolment that unlocks A+ Content, the Brand Story, Sponsored Brands, the Brand Store, and (quietly the most useful) the content-edit override that protects your listings from competing edits.