How to Sell on Amazon: Set Up and Start Selling

Selling on Amazon is less a business decision than a distribution one. You are renting access to an enormous number of buyers, and paying for it in fees and control.

Selling on Amazon for beginners is mostly straightforward to set up. The parts that catch people out are the fee arithmetic and the fact that the customer is never quite yours.

This guide covers how to sell on Amazon end to end: the account, the plans, who ships, the listing, the Featured Offer, reviews and the fees, in the order you meet them.

Key Takeaways

• Three costs, always. Your plan, a referral fee, and fulfilment.
• FBA buys speed and costs margin. FBM keeps control and costs time.
• The Featured Offer is earned. Nobody can sell you a guarantee.
• Incentivised reviews are banned. Use the routes Amazon provides.
• Build your own store alongside. Amazon rents you the customer.

How to Sell on Amazon: What It Involves

Amazon gives you buyers and keeps the relationship. That is the trade, and everything else in this guide follows from it.

What you get is real. An audience already searching with their cards out, a payment and delivery system that works, and credibility you did not have to earn.

What you give up is equally real. The fees, the rules, and the customer, whose email address and future orders belong to the marketplace rather than to you.

For most small businesses the sensible position is both. Sell there for reach and build a store you own for margin and for the people who come back.

It is also a real competitor to your own site, and worth saying out loud. Some customers who would have bought from you directly will buy from the marketplace instead.

Day to day you live in a seller dashboard. Orders, inventory, listings and payments, and most of the work is keeping those four tidy.

Setting Up a Seller Account

An amazon seller account takes an afternoon to register if your paperwork is already in order and considerably longer if it is not.

You will need business details, a bank account that can receive payments, tax information, and an identity document for verification.

Whether you need a registered company depends on where you are. Amazon will let an individual sell in many markets, and your own tax authority may still expect you to register once you are trading properly.

Check that locally before you start rather than after your first good month. It is much easier to set up correctly than to unpick later.

Pick your marketplace deliberately too. Selling into another country brings its own tax registration, returns handling and customer expectations with it.

Verification is the part that stalls people. Names and addresses that do not match exactly across your documents will cause delays, so get them consistent first.

The Five Decisions

Everything else on this page is a choice you make once and live with for a while.

1. Individual or Professional

Two selling plans, and the difference is a fee shape rather than a feature list.

The Individual plan charges a small fee per item sold with no monthly commitment. It suits low volume and testing whether a product sells at all.

The Professional plan charges a flat monthly fee instead, and unlocks bulk listing, advertising and the ability to compete for the Featured Offer.

The arithmetic is simple. Work out roughly how many units you expect to sell each month, and the plans swap places at a volume you can calculate in a minute.

One caveat is worth knowing before you choose. Competing for the buy button requires the Professional plan, so a product with other sellers on the same listing effectively needs it.

Start on Individual if you are unsure. Moving up is easy and nothing is lost by waiting until the volume justifies it.

2. FBA or FBM

Either Amazon ships your orders or you do. The acronyms are Fulfilment by Amazon and Fulfilment by Merchant.

With amazon fba you send stock to their warehouse and they pick, pack, ship and handle returns. Your listings become eligible for the fast delivery badge that many buyers filter by.

With FBM you store the stock, pack each order and arrange delivery yourself. You keep the margin that fulfilment would have cost and you take on the work.

FBA buys reach and speed, and it costs margin and control. FBM keeps both and asks for your time instead.

A mixed approach is normal and often correct. Fast moving small items through Amazon, and the awkward ones shipped by you.

Heavy, bulky or slow moving items often cost more in storage than they earn in convenience, so run the numbers per product rather than choosing once for everything.

3. Write the listing properly

A listing is a search result before it is a sales page, so it has to work for both at once.

The title carries the most weight. Say what the product is in the words a buyer would use, with the distinguishing detail people search by.

Then the bullet points. That is where most buyers actually read. Lead each one with a benefit and support it with the specification underneath.

The description is for the people still deciding after the bullets, and the search terms field is for words you want to be found by that did not fit naturally.

Write for a person who has never heard of you. On your own site the visitor arrived knowing something about the brand, and here they arrived from a search result.

Photographs do the rest. Scale, the back of the product, and it in use. The last of those is the one most sellers leave out.

4. Compete for the Featured Offer

When several sellers offer the same product, one of them gets the buy button by default. Amazon now calls it the Featured Offer, and most people still call it the Buy Box.

It matters enormously, because the majority of buyers never look at the other offers.

Winning it requires the Professional plan, a competitive price, and consistently good seller performance on delivery, cancellations and customer responses.

It is earned and never guaranteed. Anyone selling you a guaranteed Featured Offer is selling something they do not control.

If you are the only seller of your own product, this matters far less. It becomes central the moment somebody else lists the same item.

5. Get reviews the approved way

Reviews decide a great deal on a marketplace where nobody knows your brand, and this is the area where sellers most often get suspended.

Paying for reviews, offering a discount in exchange for one, or asking for a positive review specifically are all against Amazon's policies.

The approved routes exist and work. The request a review function, the Vine programme for new products, and a polite follow up that asks for honest feedback rather than a good rating.

Build the request into your routine rather than doing it in bursts. A steady trickle of genuine reviews looks like what it is.

Product quality is the real lever underneath all of this. A product that disappoints will accumulate the reviews it deserves faster than any process can offset.

And answer the bad ones calmly. A measured reply to a one star review is read by every future buyer scrolling past it.

How the Fees Work

Three parts, every sale, and people routinely price their products having counted only one of them.

Amazon publishes the current rates by category and they change, so take them from Amazon's own pricing page for your marketplace rather than from an article.

Work out your margin after all of them before setting a price. A product that looks profitable on the referral fee alone can lose money once fulfilment and returns are counted.

Common Mistakes

• Pricing without the fees. The most expensive arithmetic error here.
• Paying for reviews. It risks the account rather than the ranking.
• Running out of stock. Momentum on a listing is hard to rebuild.
• Owning no customer list. Amazon keeps the relationship by design.
• One fulfilment choice for everything. Decide per product instead.
• Treating it as the whole business. A marketplace can change its rules.
• Ignoring the performance metrics. They decide the Featured Offer.

The fourth is the strategic one. Everything you build there is on rented land, and the rent and the rules are set by somebody else.

That is not an argument against selling there. It is an argument for not letting it be the only place you sell.

Sell on the marketplace for the reach, and send buyers something in the box that gives them a reason to find you directly next time.

FAQs

How do I start selling on Amazon?

Register a seller account with your business details, bank account, tax information and an identity document. Choose the Individual or Professional plan, create your listings, then decide whether Amazon ships your orders or you do. Verification is the step that usually causes delays.

What does it cost to sell on Amazon?

Three things, always. Your selling plan, charged per item or monthly. A referral fee taken as a percentage of each sale, varying by category. Fulfilment costs if Amazon ships for you. Take current rates from Amazon's own pricing page, since they change.

What is FBA and should I use it?

Fulfilment by Amazon means sending stock to their warehouse so they pick, pack, ship and handle returns. It buys speed and the delivery badge, and it costs margin. Decide per product, since heavy or slow moving items often cost more in storage than they earn.

What is the Buy Box?

It is the default offer when several sellers list the same product, now called the Featured Offer. Winning it needs the Professional plan, a competitive price and consistently good seller performance. It is earned continuously, so nobody can guarantee you will hold it.

How do I get reviews on Amazon?

Use the routes Amazon provides. The request a review function, the Vine programme for new products, and a follow up asking for honest feedback. Paying for reviews, trading a discount for one or asking specifically for a positive rating all risk the account.

Conclusion

Learning how to sell on Amazon is mostly learning the arithmetic. The setup is a form, and the fees are where the business lives or dies.

Price after all three costs, choose fulfilment per product, earn reviews the approved way, and watch the performance metrics that decide the Featured Offer.

Then build something you own alongside it, so the marketplace is a channel rather than the whole business.

If you would rather hand that part over, see how we approach e-commerce website design.