Amazon Seller Terms Glossary

You ship inventory to Amazon’s warehouses and Amazon picks, packs, ships and handles customer service. You gain Prime eligibility and lose direct control of your stock. Fees are charged per unit for fulfilment plus ongoing storage, and both are revised regularly.

You hold the stock and ship every order yourself. Lower fees, more labour, and you carry the delivery performance metrics on your own account.

You ship from your own premises but carry the Prime badge, which requires meeting Amazon’s delivery speed and cancellation standards. Entry requirements are strict and the programme has opened and closed to new applicants over the years.

Where Amazon directs your inventory. Sending stock to multiple distribution centres can reduce per-unit fees while increasing your shipping cost and complexity. The arithmetic is genuinely worth doing rather than guessing.

Instructions to return or destroy inventory held at Amazon. Relevant because long-term storage of goods that are not selling quietly consumes any margin the goods once had.

The process for recovering the value of inventory Amazon has lost or damaged. There are time limits, and unclaimed money is simply kept.

Amazon’s scored view of your policy compliance, presented on a points basis over a rolling window with a healthy baseline you lose points from. It is the number to watch, because it moves before an enforcement action lands rather than after.

The share of orders with a negative feedback, an A-to-z claim or a chargeback. Amazon requires it to stay under one per cent, which on low order volume means a very small number of unhappy customers can put you in breach.

Losing the ability to sell. Your listings come down and your funds are held while the matter is reviewed. Nobody can promise you reinstatement, because the decision is not theirs to make.

The written submission required to seek reinstatement, setting out root cause, immediate corrective action and preventive measures. It is judged on evidence and specificity, not on how sorry you sound.

Approval to sell in a restricted category or brand, normally requiring supplier invoices Amazon will accept. Submitting an invoice judged inauthentic is far more dangerous than not applying at all.

A rights owner’s assertion that your listing infringes a trademark, copyright or patent. Listings typically come down first and the merits are examined afterwards, which is why the complaint itself is a weapon.

Any attempt to influence reviews through incentives, family, friends or purchased accounts. It is one of the fastest routes to permanent closure, and it can be done to you by a competitor as easily as by you.

Another selling account Amazon associates with yours through shared details. Enforcement can travel between related accounts, which is why “just open another one” is advice that ends businesses.

A third party running a storefront in your name for a fee. The term itself has appeared in repeated federal enforcement actions, including judgments of $21,765,902.65 against the Automators AI operators and $15.7 million against FBA Machine. Your name stays on the account and so does the liability. The case records are here.

Applied to retail, this is close to meaningless. Inventory, pricing, compliance and customer service all require attention, and the moments requiring most attention arrive unannounced.

Someone else operates it and you fund it. Ask specifically who holds the account, who holds the liability, and what happens to your capital if the account is deactivated.

Nobody outside Amazon can guarantee either. In the FTC’s actions against both Automators AI and FBA Machine, guaranteed income claims were central to the allegations.

The current phrasing of an old pitch. In the Click Profit matter the FTC’s filing cited the operator’s own figures: more than a fifth of its Amazon stores earned nothing and another third earned under $2,500 gross.

A shortcut into restricted categories, often resting on invoices that will not survive scrutiny. A rejected invoice can cost the whole account, not just the application.