Service 02
Amazon gets paid on your activity whether your products win or lose. Together we’ll run it the only way that keeps the margin on your side of the table: a proper P&L for the channel, the fee stack and the bulk buy audited, rank bought on purpose instead of rented, and demand you own routed to Amazon on your terms.
Amazon isn’t a retailer that happens to sell ads. It’s a fee-and-ad machine that happens to sell your products. Referral fees, fulfillment, storage, placement and advertising are the business; the margin on your goods is a rounding error next to it. A losing SKU pays Amazon as reliably as a winner. Most brands run the channel as a shipping account with ads bolted on and a dashboard that says things are fine.
So we treat it as a proper P&L and build the operating rhythm around it together: which SKUs deserve support and which are being harvested, where an ad dollar builds rank you keep instead of renting it, how a launch gets seeded with demand before Amazon ever sees it, and when Amazon’s numbers deserve a real answer instead of a reflex. The practices get written down, installed in your team, and they keep running after I’m gone.
Vendor Central is a spot buyer with a portal, and it has been cutting the vendors it doesn’t need since late 2024. The honest comparison, net contribution per unit on 1P versus 3P, per SKU, gets run, and the 3P hedge gets built while things are good so an algorithm can never zero your revenue.
What Amazon collects separated from what Amazon earns, with the fees that arrive as “terms” on 1P pulled into the light next to the itemized ones on 3P. Fulfillment fees went up again in January 2026; the read tells you what that did to each SKU, not to the blended line.
Velocity is the only currency on Amazon that compounds. Single-keyword pushes buy it deliberately inside a bounded window and convert it into organic position you stop paying for. Listings built for the semantic layer Amazon’s shopping assistant now reads: complete attributes, plain use cases, not keyword soup.
Sponsored Products, Brands and Display structured by the job each dollar does, with branded defense priced deliberately rather than by default. DSP and the retail networks beyond Amazon where the audience actually is. ACOS stays in the weeds where it belongs; contribution and rank durability go on the wall.
Velocity modeled as a distribution so a buying decision carries a stated confidence, and so you have standing to argue with the number Amazon puts in front of you. Sales during a stockout are a floor, not an estimate; every model that forgets it under-buys the SKUs that were working.
Amazon’s algorithm scores your whole marketing program. Off-platform demand arrives as branded search, converts at branded rates, and pays out in organic rank, and Amazon hands back around 10% of the sale through the Brand Referral Bonus for bringing it. Tagged, measured, routed on purpose. The engine stays yours. See Paid Search & Social.
Every dollar of media and every rank position resolves to the same two surfaces: where you show up in the results, and whether the product page converts the click. Organic rank and sponsored placement decide the first; images, title and bullets, A+ content, and a real testing program decide the second.
TACoS is a snapshot of ad intensity. It has no margin in it and it can’t tell you whether rank is compounding or decaying. SKUs get funded on net contribution per unit times realistic velocity times strategic weight, and a ratio never talks you out of a product that’s actually moving.
Every read on a short window and a long one, always against a control, with the baseline window checked for deal events before anyone believes it. When the windows disagree, the disagreement is the finding. A push is judged on rank trajectory, CPC stability and organic velocity; a below-market conversion rate is a diagnosis, not a verdict.
Run rate is velocity. Amazon’s buy template is an alignment check, not the forecast, and the discount is the one strategic decision in the whole exercise, so it gets strategy instead of the lowest number that qualifies for a badge.
The audit is free. A complete read of what Amazon collects versus what you keep, built from your own reports, with the models left with you whether or not we continue. Most brands have never seen the number.
How to sell on Amazon and what it actually costs, what FBA is and when the math works, how advertising on Amazon is really a way of buying rank, the account questions everyone searches for, contacting a seller, how delivery and free shipping work, and what Amazon Flex and working for Amazon actually pay. Written by someone who has run Amazon for national brands and has the fee statements to prove it.
To sell on Amazon you register a seller account at sellercentral.amazon.com, pick a selling plan, list your products, decide who ships the orders, and pay Amazon a referral fee on every sale. Anyone with a tax ID, a bank account and a credit card can do it. You don't need a company, a store, or a warehouse to start. You need margin, and that's the part the "how to sell on Amazon" videos leave out.
The decisions, in the order they'll cost you:
Becoming an Amazon seller is the sequence above; "seller" is the account type. An Amazon store, formally a Brand Store, is a free multi-page storefront on Amazon for sellers enrolled in Brand Registry, which requires a registered trademark. It's a branding and advertising destination, not a prerequisite for selling, and you open one from the Stores tab in Seller Central after Brand Registry approves you. Get the trademark early; it's the slowest step in the whole process and the one everyone discovers last.
Anyone can sell on Amazon. The question is whether anything is left after Amazon takes its share, and you find that out before you list, not after.
Amazon FBA, Fulfillment by Amazon, is the service where Amazon stores your inventory in its warehouses and handles shipping, returns and customer service for every order. You send product in, Amazon does the rest, your listings get the Prime badge. "Starting Amazon FBA" and "starting an Amazon business" mean the same thing to almost everyone who searches them: starting to sell on Amazon with Amazon shipping the boxes.
The economics decide whether it works, and they decide it before you order inventory. On top of the referral fee, FBA charges a fulfillment fee per unit that depends on size and weight (from roughly $3 for a small, light item to well past $10 for large or heavy ones in 2026), monthly storage fees per cubic foot that climb steeply from October through December, inbound placement fees for sending inventory in, and long-term storage and removal fees for stock that sits. A product that sells for $25 can lose $12 to $15 of it to Amazon before you've spent a dollar on advertising. Run that math on a napkin and you'll understand why the businesses that survive on FBA have a landed cost under a third of the retail price and a retail price above $20. Below that, you're working for Amazon's fee lines.
Starting a business on Amazon, in practice: pick a category where you can clear those economics; source the product (private label from a manufacturer, your own goods, or wholesale with the brand's blessing); register as a Professional seller; get a barcode and build the listing; send a conservative first shipment into FBA; launch with advertising; and manage inventory so you neither stock out, which kills sales rank, nor overstock into storage fees. The two numbers first-timers underestimate every single time are the advertising it takes to get a listing moving and the working capital tied up in inventory. Both are why most Amazon businesses die in year one with a dashboard that looked fine in month three.
FBA works when your landed cost is under a third of retail and the retail price clears twenty dollars. Everyone else is renting warehouse space to lose money in.
Advertising on Amazon is done through Amazon Ads, from the Advertising tab in Seller Central or Vendor Central, and it's open to Professional sellers and to vendors. The formats: Sponsored Products, ads for individual listings in search results and on product pages, keyword- or product-targeted, paid per click; Sponsored Brands, the banner with your logo and several products at the top of search, for Brand Registered brands; Sponsored Display, audience- or product-targeted ads on and off Amazon; and Amazon DSP, programmatic display and video bought through a managed service or your own seat at budgets that start in the tens of thousands a month.
Sponsored Products is where everyone starts and where most of the money sits. You pick keywords or let Amazon match automatically, set a bid per click and a daily budget, and pay when a shopper clicks. The metric everyone reports is ACOS, advertising cost of sales, spend divided by the sales the ads produced; ROAS is its inverse. A new listing runs at a high ACOS on purpose to buy its first sales and reviews, then brings it down as organic rank takes over. If your agency reports ACOS as if it were the goal, they've confused the thermometer for the weather.
Here's what makes Amazon advertising different from Google or Meta, and it's the thing the ad console won't tell you: paid sales on Amazon feed organic rank directly. Sales velocity on a keyword moves the listing up the organic results for that keyword. So advertising on Amazon is partly a way of buying organic position, and the question to ask about every campaign isn't "what's the ACOS" but "is this spend building rank I'll keep, or renting a spot I'll pay for again tomorrow." Done deliberately, one exact-match term at a time, funded from margin, with the exit written down before the money goes in, it converts paid velocity into organic rank and then the spend comes off and the position stays. That's the core play of the Amazon service, and it's the difference between an ad program and a subscription.
On Amazon, ads buy rank, not just clicks. If nobody's written down when the spend comes off, it never does.
Creating an Amazon account happens at amazon.com under Account & Lists, "Start here," or during a first checkout: a name, an email or mobile number, a password. The one account works across shopping, Prime, Kindle, Audible and Alexa. A seller account is a separate registration at sellercentral.amazon.com, though it can use the same login.
Changing your details is all in one place: Your Account → Login & security, on the site or in the app. From there you change your name, email address, mobile number and password, and Amazon confirms each change with a one-time code sent to the existing email or phone before it saves. Which means changing the email on an Amazon account requires access to the old email or phone. If you've lost both, the account recovery flow on the sign-in screen is the only route, it involves identity verification, and it takes days. Plan for that before you let an old work email expire.
Changing the name on an Amazon account is the Name field on that same page and changes the account, not past orders. Changing the phone number is the Mobile Phone Number field, and that verified number is also what two-step verification uses, which you should turn on from the same screen and almost nobody does.
Amazon accounts don't have a customer-facing account number. Orders have order numbers, the 17-digit xxx-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxx format; seller accounts have a Merchant Token under Account Info in Seller Central. If something is asking you for your "Amazon account number," it's an order number or it's a scam, and it's usually the second one.
Everything lives under Login & security, every change needs the old email or phone, and there is no account number, so anyone asking for one is lying.
To contact an Amazon seller about an order, open the order in Your Orders, choose "Get help with order" or "Problem with order," and select "Contact seller," which appears for third-party sellers. Before an order, the seller's name sits in the "Sold by" line on the product page; click it, and "Ask a question" on the storefront starts a message through Buyer-Seller Messaging. Sellers are required to answer within 24 hours, and the ones who want to stay sellers do.
If the "Sold by" line says Amazon.com, there's no seller to contact; Amazon customer service handles it through the Help section. And for FBA orders, Amazon handles returns and refunds even when the product belongs to a third-party seller, so return and refund questions go through Amazon's return process, not the seller, which is faster and the main reason buyers filter for Prime.
Your Orders → Problem with order → Contact seller. Returns on Prime items go to Amazon, not the seller, and that's a feature.
Amazon delivers seven days a week in most of the US, Sundays included, through its own network (Amazon Logistics, the vans with the smile), the postal service, UPS and regional carriers. Who delivers a given package depends on where it ships from and where it's going; the tracking page names the carrier. Delivery runs from early morning to around 10 pm local time, most packages between 8 am and 8 pm, and drivers don't generally start before 6 am.
Amazon Logistics is Amazon's in-house carrier: delivery stations, Amazon-branded vans, contracted Delivery Service Partner companies, and Flex drivers in their own cars, now carrying the majority of Amazon's own packages in the US. Amazon ships and delivers on Sundays through Amazon Logistics and USPS; UPS and most regional carriers don't. Same-day delivery exists in a growing list of metros on eligible items, shown as "Today" with a cutoff time on the product page, free for Prime members above a threshold and a fee otherwise.
Free shipping works two ways. Prime members get free standard, two-day and often one-day or same-day delivery on Prime-eligible items with no minimum. Non-members get free standard shipping on orders of $35 or more of eligible items; the threshold has bounced between $25 and $35 over the years and $35 is the current figure for most of the US. Below that, you pay per order or per item. The A-to-z Guarantee is Amazon's protection on third-party orders: if the item doesn't arrive or isn't as described and the seller won't fix it, Amazon refunds you. It's also the mechanism by which a third-party seller discovers that Amazon, not the seller, decides what "as described" means.
Seven days a week, $35 for free shipping without Prime, and the A-to-z Guarantee means Amazon referees every dispute. Guess who it's built to protect.
Amazon Flex is Amazon's gig-delivery program: independent contractors deliver packages in their own cars in blocks of a few hours booked through the Flex app, paid per block. It's one of three ways to deliver for Amazon. The others are driving for a Delivery Service Partner, an independent company running Amazon-branded vans under contract, which employs its drivers, and, for parcels Amazon hands to USPS or UPS, working for those carriers.
How Flex works: apply through the app or at flex.amazon.com, pass a background check, get activated in a region when there's capacity. Blocks show up in the app, typically two to four hours; you claim one, pick up packages at a delivery station or a store for Whole Foods and Fresh orders, and run the route the app gives you. You need to be 21 or older, with a valid license, a vehicle (mid-size sedan or larger for most block types), a smartphone and the right to work in the US. Signing up and applying are the same process; approval takes days or weeks depending on how badly your area needs drivers.
What Flex pays: Amazon advertises $18 to $25 an hour, and that's about right for the block itself, before costs. Flex drivers are contractors, so fuel, vehicle wear, insurance and self-employment tax come out of it, and blocks aren't guaranteed, so the hourly figure is for the hours you get, not the hours you want. Delivery Service Partner drivers, who are employees of the DSP, typically earn $19 to $24 an hour in 2026 with benefits, in a van the company owns. Amazon warehouse workers (fulfillment and sortation centers) start around $18 to $20 an hour in most of the US, higher in expensive metros and for nights, and Amazon's stated average starting wage across US operations in 2026 is above $22. Becoming an Amazon delivery driver as an employee means applying to a DSP through Amazon's DSP jobs site; Amazon itself employs the warehouse workers, not most of the people driving its vans, which is a distinction that matters a great deal when something goes wrong.
Applying for Amazon jobs: amazon.jobs for corporate and technical roles, hiring.amazon.com for warehouse, delivery station and customer service. Minimum age for warehouse and delivery station work is 18. Amazon is nearly always hiring somewhere; "is Amazon hiring near me" is answered by typing a location into the hiring site. Working for Amazon from home is real in customer service and some corporate roles, listed as remote or virtual; delivery and warehouse work is on-site by definition. Getting hired for hourly roles is mostly meeting the requirements and passing a background check and sometimes a drug test; the application takes under half an hour and the pipeline is built to move fast, because it has to.
Flex pays $18 to $25 an hour before your car's costs, DSP drivers aren't Amazon employees, and warehouse work starts around $20. The app makes it easy to start; the math is yours to do.
