New third-party sellers now have to go through Amazon seller account verification before they can start selling on the marketplace. Let’s take a look at what’s involved and what Amazon requires you to provide as part of this process.
What’s Involved with Amazon Seller Identity Verification?
There are a few separate parts to Amazon Seller Identity Verification that proves you’re the seller who belongs to the seller account. The first is an online form with questions that you need to fill out about your business and the person who’ll be the main point of contact. Next, you need to provide supplementary information that verifies your answers.
In terms of what they’ll ask for, here’s what to prepare for when you fill out the form:
- Legal business name
- Business address
- Business contact information (name, address and date of birth have to match what’s on the registered Amazon account). If you have to upload images, they need to be under 10MB in size and with a filename extension of .png, .tif, .jpg, .jpeg or .pdf, with no special characters in the name.
- Business email address
- Valid internationally chargeable credit card
- Working phone number in case Amazon tries to contact you during the registration process
- Federal tax ID (e.g. business’ federal tax ID number, social security number, etc.)
- State tax ID for American sellers
- National ID card that’s in Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese or Spanish (if it’s not in one of these languages, you need to attach a copy of your passport, along with your signature or a notarized translation in one of the above listed languages)
- North American sellers will need a national ID card and statements from your credit card, bank or utilities bill. You can blank out currency amounts, but everything else needs to remain intact. You need to also make sure that your statements are older than 90 days, they cannot be password-protected, and they need to meet the same language requirements as for the national ID card.
How to Complete the Amazon Seller Account Verification Process
Once you have all your documents assembled, go to your Seller Central account and log in. From there, navigate to the Seller Identity Verification page, then select the country where your business is based. Now all you have to do is fill out the relevant fields and you’re good to go.
But before you click okay, it’s important to note these two things:
- All information must be accurate because you won’t be able to change anything after you submit the form.
- It can take up to 3 days for Amazon to review your form. You’ll know they’ve finished once you get the results via email.
Why Was My Identity Verification Process Application Rejected?
If you’ve gotten a rejection in your email, you might be puzzled why, especially if you’ve followed everything in our guide. However, Amazon is quite particular about getting all the details right, so here are the most common reasons why your Identity Verification was rejected.
- The quality of submitted documents is unacceptable. First, check that whatever name you saved your files under has only letters and numbers, no special characters. If that’s okay, check that the filename extension is one that we listed. Finally, if both of those are okay, then it might be the size of the file. If it’s bigger than 10MB, compress it online and try again.
- Missing information. You may have tried to submit an incomplete document. If that’s the case, go over your statements (or anything else) again and make sure you’ve attached every single page, including the small print pages.
- Mismatching business contact information. This one’s fairly straightforward to troubleshoot. Go to your Seller Central account and check the name of the first associated with the account, email, phone number and address all match up. If you notice a discrepancy with, say, your driver’s license, make sure you get that updated to match the information on your Amazon account.
Final Thoughts
It can be a little onerous getting all your documents and bits of information together, especially because the identity verification process is a little more involved than it would be for your email or social media. But you know what’s not? RepricerExpress. That’s because setting up your pricing rules is all right there on the screen in front of you and you don’t have to worry about scanning or emailing anything to get approval. If you’re not already a user, sign up now and we’ll start you off with a free trial.
