How to sell on Amazon in 2026 (step-by-step guide)

Prefer to read?

Here’s the transcript from the video:

Mickey: “There are a lot of videos out there about how to start selling on Amazon. Let’s be honest, there are probably too many videos. But you’re going to want to watch this one, and you’re going to want to watch it all the way through.

“Because I work here at Amazon and I get to meet with all sorts of data scientists, industry experts, account reps, and sellers like you.

“I’m Mickey Toogood—that is my real name, I promise. And in this video, I’m going to give you everything you need to know about how to sell with Amazon and why to sell with Amazon. And if you like what you hear, go ahead and hit the thumbs up button on this video.

“Let’s start with the first question. People always ask,

Is selling on Amazon worth it?

“So the short answer to this question is yes!

“Selling on Amazon can be very profitable for a lot of different types of sellers. Whether you’re selling something small, something large, whether you want to sell just in the US, or whether you want to sell globally, Amazon can be a great place to build a business and make a lot of sales. In fact, independent sellers in the US averaged more than $290,000 in annual sales in 2024—which is kind of a lot.

“There are three basic factors that often predict the success of sellers in our store.

“So one is product selection. So what are you selling?

“The second one is pricing strategy. A competitive price can be really important for a lot of customers.

“And the third one is marketing. Whether you want to do a coupon, a deal, a promotion, or whether you want to use an ad, reaching more customers can obviously be a really important part of success in any store.

“But there are a few advantages baked right into the Amazon experience. One of them is our brand. We’re trusted by customers in the US and around the globe.

“The second is we have a global customer base in the first place. You can sell in the US, you can sell in Canada, you can expand to Japan, you can expand to Europe. There’s lots of different opportunities with Amazon.

“And we also have, finally, a lot of proven infrastructure. A lot of folks think of our fulfillment network when they think of infrastructure. And that’s true. We have hundreds of fulfillment centers around the globe that can help get your products closer to more customers.

“But we also have a lot of digital infrastructure. We have infrastructure for things like coupons and deals. We also have infrastructure, basic digital tools that can help you advertise in our store and in other places online. Small businesses who use Amazon Ads attributed 30% of their sales to advertising.

“Last but not least, New Seller Incentives. This is a great package of incentives that can help you get started. Over 50K back in branded sales. You can get coupons, money back and credits for coupons, money back for advertising. There’s also a ton of fulfillment-related incentives attached for new sellers.

“So is it worth it to sell in the Amazon store? By and large, I would say yes.

“But how do you do it?

How does selling on Amazon even work?

“First thing you’re going to want to understand if you’re selling with Amazon is the basic business model.

“So here we go. First things first. You list your products in our store. You can do that by matching a product to an existing listing, or you can create a brand new listing in our store. Either works.

“The second thing that happens is that customers search for a product. That means they can type something into a search engine—they’re looking for a specific cup for Father’s Day. Or they can browse our site—maybe they’re looking for something in a particular category, kitchen items that bring them to that mug for Father’s Day.

“Next, when a customer purchases an item, you or Amazon are going to fulfill it. You’re going to fulfill it if you take advantage of what we call Fulfilled by Merchant services, or Amazon’s going to fulfill it if you take advantage of Fulfillment by Amazon and maybe some of our other supply chain services. You decide, and you can decide on a product basis.

“After you’ve made a sale, Amazon’s going to collect payment, and then that payment is going to get deposited into your account. Typically we settle seller accounts every two weeks, which means you get paid by Amazon about every two weeks.

“You can sell branded products in the Amazon store this way. You can sell generic products. That means products without a brand name or logo. Or if you don’t manufacture your own products, you don’t have your own brand, you can buy someone else’s products and then resell them in the Amazon store. All those options work great and they all fit with the business model.

“Last but not least, as you start to sort of mature as a seller, you can start to use a lot of different tools to grow with Amazon. Automate Pricing, coupons, deals, advertising, Global Selling, B2B. These are all options that can sort of help you grow into your Amazon experience.

“So that is how it works, at least in general. But now let me take you step by step through the process

How to start selling with Amazon

“First step when you’re selling with Amazon is choosing a selling plan. You have two basic options: Professional selling plan or Individual selling plan.

“The Professional selling plan is subscription-based. In the US, it’s $39.99 a month. The Individual selling plan is unit-based. It’s $0.99 per unit sold. So basically, if you’re planning to sell more than 40 units a month, it just makes sense to choose the Professional selling plan. The Professional selling plan also comes with a host of additional tools and programs and services that can help you succeed. Automated pricing, advertising, a lot of really great tools that I recommend for most sellers.

“In addition to a selling plan, you’re going to want to think about at least one other type of fee as you get started with Amazon, which is a referral fee. Referral fees vary by category. It’s either going to be a percentage of the sale or a minimum amount. You can also incur additional costs for selling with Amazon if you choose to use certain optional programs. FBA is an example of that. You can incur storage fees and fulfillment costs when you use FBA.

“So the next step after you’ve registered with Amazon is configuring your Seller Central account.

“Seller Central is your hub for selling with Amazon. So you want to tailor it and make sure it works for your business. You’re going to configure a couple of different things.

“Payment information. You want to make sure you get paid. Make sure you have your bank account and your credit card information correct. You’re going to input various types of business information to make sure we understand your business.

“You’re going to configure your public seller profile. So if people really like your stuff, they can find you and come back and buy from you again.

“You’re also going to configure your shipping and returns settings. This is especially important for Fulfilled by Merchant sellers. You’re going to tell us what your business runs like. What are the appropriate settings for your business.

“You’re also going to give us tax information. Not everyone’s favorite part, but it’s really critical to make sure that you are taxed appropriately.

“And you’re also, if you like, going to start using the Amazon Seller app. The Amazon Seller app does not have everything that you’ll see inside Seller Central, but it lets you do a couple things on the go. Manage sales. Manage inventory. You can also manage how your advertising is doing. So the Amazon Seller app can be a great thing if you can’t make it to your desktop in time.

“The next step is specifically for brands. It’s a really critical step if you’re selling your own branded products in the Amazon store. And it’s registering for Amazon Brand Registry. It’s a free program and it comes with a ton of different benefits. Benefits for selling and benefits for protecting your brand. Everyone loves to hear about the selling benefits.

“You may know about programs and tools like A+ Content and Brand Stores. A+ Content lets you put videos and product comparison charts on your listings. The kind of content that can really help you convert more customers.

“Brand Stores allows you to create a store in the Amazon store specifically for your brand, which can make it easier for folks to shop your entire catalog.

“We also offer folks enrolled in Brand Registry tools like Amazon Brand Analytics. Brand Analytics can help you understand how people search for your products. It can help you understand their behavior when they purchase products. For example, do they purchase products more than once?

“You can also take advantage of really cool tools like Manage Your Experiments. Amazon does a lot of A/B testing. Manage Your Experiments lets you do A/B testing. You can test different titles, different images to see which one converts more customers.

“Besides selling benefits, Amazon Brand Registry also provides a lot of different protection benefits for brands.

“A really common one that’s used is Report a Violation. If you think someone is violating your intellectual property, whether it’s copyright or patent or trademark, you can use Report a Violation to send that information to Amazon so we can investigate.

“Brands can also use a program called Transparency, which allows you to serialize your units and guarantee that they’re authentic, which means that customers can purchase from you with more confidence.

Now for the step you’ve been waiting for, which is listing your products in the Amazon store. It’s an exciting step.

“Before you start the listing process though, make sure you review applicable laws and regulations related to the product you want to sell. There are laws at the national level, the local level, the state level. Make sure you look into those before you try to create a listing. You also want to be thinking about Amazon’s policies for safety and for restricted products. If you’re selling with FBA, there’s sometimes additional restrictions around storing items in our fulfillment centers. So check those out before you try to list.

“Then when you get to listing, you have two basic options. You can match an offer to a product listing if it already exists in our store. Or if you want to sell a product that isn’t part of the Amazon catalog, you can create a listing from scratch. You’re going to be adding
images, descriptions, bullet points, all those good things.

“You can create product listings one at a time. Or if you have a Professional selling plan, you can create them in bulk.

“That can be really handy if you have thousands of items. For example, let’s say you resell thousands of items. Bulk listing can be really advantageous.

“Amazon also offers sellers now a couple of different ways to use gen AI to list. You can use a URL, maybe from your existing DTC website. Drop it into our Add Products tool, we’ll create an Amazon listing for you. Or you can take a couple of product images, a couple of keywords, and we can generate one for you that way.

“If you are a seller who sells variations of a product or versions of a product for color, for size, you can use one Amazon listing to list all of those products. That tends to save sellers some time.

“An Amazon listing starts with a few basic elements. A title. Images. A description. Bullet points. You take it from there. That’s how you create a listing.

“As you’re listing products, you’re also going to need to price them. And there are three big ideas you’re going to want to keep in mind.

“One of them is a competitive external price. We use these prices, which are the lowest prices from major retailers outside Amazon, to define what is competitive in our store.

“A competitive price is important for many sellers because it is one of the factors we use to determine if an offer can be featured in our store. If you’ve ever seen a Buy Now or Add to Cart button, that is in our Featured Offer section on a product detail page, and it can be really important for sellers.

“Last idea is the lowest price in the Amazon store, which is exactly what it sounds like. It is the lowest price that someone is offering for a product in our store.

“If you’d like help with pricing, I really recommend using the Automate Pricing tool in Seller Central. You can use Automate Pricing to adjust your prices over time in response to different events. Automate Pricing can be a really great way to keep your prices competitive. It can also just be a really great way to understand what a competitive price for your product is. Couldn’t recommend the Automate Pricing more.

“The big question that a lot of sellers start with when it comes to selling with Amazon is their fulfillment method, and you have two basic options.

“The first option is Fulfilled by Merchant. So what this means is that you have your inventory. It’s in your warehouse. It’s in your fulfillment center. And when you receive an order, you’re going to process that order and ship it directly to the customer.

“There are a couple different things to think about when you take on this method.

“One is that you’re going to be owning customer service and returns. That can be a little bit of a heavy lift for some sellers, so think about that carefully.

“But you also have various tools with Fulfilled by Merchant that make the process a little bit easier. One of the best ones is Shipping Settings Automation. This means that you don’t have to configure every single region, or every single package or product. You get to just set it and forget it, and we sort of come up with the right delivery time based on your location and the customer’s location.

“We also offer a really great tool called Buy Shipping. It allows you to purchase and print a shipping label all in one place inside Seller Central and go from there.

“Second basic option is Fulfillment by Amazon. This allows you to use Amazon’s entire fulfillment network to fulfill orders for customers. All you do is get your inventory into our network. When the customer places an order, we pick it off the shelf, we pack it up, and we ship it to them directly. We also handle customer service and returns when you use FBA.

“In addition, your orders are Prime eligible, which is something that customers can sometimes look for when they’re shopping. That means they can get free two-day shipping if they are a Prime member.

“You can use Fulfillment by Amazon in conjunction with a bunch of other services that we provide for your supply chain. Everything from Seller Export & Delivery and Amazon Global Logistics, which can help you ship across borders, to the Partner Carrier program, which can take care of ground transportation domestically.

“We also offer a program called Amazon Warehousing and Distribution, which is for bulk storage, just a little bit cheaper than storing in a fulfillment center. And we offer Multichannel Fulfillment and Buy with Prime. These things allow you to sell in the Amazon store and off the Amazon store, and reach customers using one pool of inventory.

“At this point, your account is set up, you’ve listed your products, you’ve priced your products, you’re fulfilling customer orders. So the thing that you need to do next is monitor your performance.

“We give you a really great dashboard inside Seller Central called the Account Health page. It lists a bunch of different metrics that help you reach performance targets and keep track of your compliance with Amazon policies.

“First metric you’re probably going to want to keep track of is the Order Defect Rate. It’s exactly what it sounds like. If there are defects with an order, a chargeback claim, for example, that can affect your Order Defect Rate.

“Amazon policies. There’s a lot of them. We use the Amazon Account Health dashboard to help you keep track of your compliance. If you get an alert about being out of compliance with a policy, go check it out and follow the steps to resolve it.

“If you’re a Fulfilled by Merchant seller, there’s a couple additional metrics that you’re going to want to keep track of.

“The first one is the Late Shipment Rate. It’s exactly what it sounds like. You confirmed shipping for an order later than the promise date.

“There’s something called the Pre-fulfillment Cancellation Rate or just Cancel Rate for short. It means that you received a customer order, and then you had to cancel it, very often because you didn’t have the inventory in order to fulfill it.

“The next one is a Valid Tracking Rate. Tracking on customer orders is really important. Customers want to know when they’re going to get their stuff, where it is. So you want to keep your Valid Tracking Rate high.

“The last one is On-time Delivery Rate. It’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s the number of times, as Fulfilled by Merchant sellers, that you’ve gotten customers their orders on time.

“Last step for selling with Amazon is growing. You didn’t come to Amazon to stay small. So you want to take advantage of tools and programs that can help you grow with us.

“I tend to put these in about four buckets. Promoting products. Advertising products. Getting reviews. And then using a bunch of advanced programs.

“So we’ll take the first one first: promoting products. There’s more than one way to do this. You can create a coupon that someone can clip. You can create a promotion. Buy one, get one free, for example. You can create a deal, a Lightning Deal. Or you can create a discount. Maybe try them all and see which one works best for your business and your products.

“Second bucket is advertising. We offer a bunch of different advertising tools to sellers. The one that I recommend you start with is Sponsored Products. Sponsored Products are CPC ads, which means that you pay at a cost-per-click basis. They can help you get better visibility for an individual product in the Amazon store.

“Third bucket is getting reviews. Reviews are really important to customers, and there’s a couple of ways you can help ensure that you’ll get positive reviews.

“One is to just accurately represent your products on your listings. You don’t want a review that says “This wasn’t the size I ordered,” or “This wasn’t the color I expected.”

“You should also package your products carefully to prevent damage. Whether you’re shipping directly to a customer or shipping to FBA, the better you package your products, the less likely they are to be damaged.

“A really great program that Amazon provides around customer reviews is Vine. This is a program that’s available to brands enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry. Essentially, you take units of your product, you give them away to people we call Vine Voices, and they offer authentic opinions that appear in the Amazon store that can help customers understand what to expect when they receive your product, and it can help increase purchases.

“Fourth bucket is just advanced growth tools. There are a lot of these, so I’m not going to go through them all. But here are my favorites.

“Global Selling. Maybe today you think of yourself as a US seller who sells to US customers, and that’s great. That’s an awesome place to start. It’s also an awesome place to stay if that’s where you want to stay. But what if customers want to buy your products in Canada or Mexico or Brazil or Europe or Japan? Global Selling can help you understand if there’s demand for your products in those international markets. It can also help you get your products into the hands of those customers.

“Amazon Business, another really great program, offers a bunch of different tools for sellers who might want to sell to businesses. Maybe you want to package multiple units of your product up into a case pack. Maybe you want to offer specific prices or discounts to businesses who buy in larger quantities and return items less. Amazon Business can help you do all of that more effectively.

“My personal favorite growth opportunity is the Product Opportunity Explorer. This is a tool inside Seller Central. It basically helps you find new product niches that you might want to sell in so you can expand your catalog. You can dig into the data, understand what customers are looking for, understand if there’s a gap, and then go fill it.

“Congrats, you made it to the end of the video. You now know how to sell with Amazon. I’ve got a couple of key takeaways for you.

“Remember independent sellers in the US averaged more than $290,000 in sales in 2024. We’re still crunching the numbers for 2025, but I think that’s pretty impressive.

“We also offer sellers 50K in incentives to get started. That’s credits back on branded sales, along with credits for advertising and coupons.

“There are two main ways to fulfill customer orders with Amazon. There’s Fulfilled by Merchant and there’s Fulfilled by Amazon. Fulfilled by Merchant means you have your inventory on hand and you ship it directly to customers. FBA means we have your inventory on hand and we fulfill it for you. We also handle returns and customer service.

“Lastly we went step by step through the process in this video. So you need to choose your plan, configure your Seller Central account, enroll your brand if you have one, list your products, price your products, monitor your account health, and then grow with programs like Vine and Amazon Business.

“So comment below, subscribe for more, and head to the Sell on Amazon channel for more videos.

“See you next time!”