WebStore Guide

The new beta Amazon WebStore, which was announced by Amazon.com in March 2010, lets you build an online store that includes your own products and/or Amazon products.

But that doesn’t mean that your products will show up on Amazon.com.

If you want your products to show up on Amazon.com, you need to sign up for the “Selling on Amazon” program.

Here’s a look at (and deciphering of) the information Amazon provides to merchants wanting to sign up for both the WebStore and Selling on Amazon.

Amazon’s policies seem to be in flux, and there’s contradictory information on their site. I’m figuring that the sign-up page for the beta Amazon WebStore will have the most up-to-date info, hopefully, so let’s start from there.

Beta Amazon WebStore Subscription Options

• Choose the left column if you want your own online store, where you sell your own and/or Amazon products — this is called an Amazon WebStore.
• The middle column is the one to choose if you want to have your own Amazon WebStore and have your products sold through Amazon.com.
• Choose the right column if you want your own store, and you want your products to be sold on Amazon.com, and you want to ship your products to Amazon and have them package and ship them to customers for you.

We’re going to look at the middle option, WebStore plus selling your products on Amazon.

Don’t be misled by the “1.0% Transaction Fee” and “$14.99/month; Zero Start-Up Costs; 30-day Free Trial”.

The lack of start-up costs is real and very nice, as is the free 30-day trial.

But the fine print says “plus payment processing and fraud protection fees (see below)”. A confusing chart at the bottom of the page separates transaction percentages and fees into two categories: greater than $10 and less than $10 (it’s not clear what happens if your product sells for exactly $10).

For transactions greater than $10, the chart breaks down transaction percentages and fees by your “Total Monthly Sales Proceeds” (which has *** three asterisks of its own; it’s an average of the past three months).

The chart also breaks down transaction percentages and fees according to whether you have an “Amazon WebStore Account” or an “Amazon.com Account. My confusion was not helped when I clicked on the “Learn more” links for each type of account and was taken to the exact same page, an FAQ on the new beta Amazon WebStore.

Since that didn’t help, I returned, unsurprised, to the chart, where I discovered this language from Amazon:

Which fees apply depend upon your decision of whether to implement customer accounts specific to your website (Amazon WebStore Accounts), or to implement customer accounts that can also be used on Amazon.com and other Amazon sites (Amazon.com Accounts).

Got that? Amazon’s #1 problem with their documentation is calling the same thing by numerous other names. I decipher this language to mean that if you sign up for “Selling on Amazon” along with the beta Amazon WebStore (choose the middle column), you are an Amazon.com account. If you sign up only for the WebStore (choose the left column), and are thus not selling products on amazon.com, then you are an Amazon WebStore account.

So, once you identify the correct quadrant on the chart, you can see which fees will apply per transaction for payment processing and fraud protection — they range from “5.0% + $0.05 per transaction” to “2.9% + $0.03 per transaction.”

But the fees don’t stop there. A footnote to the sign-up middle column we started with tells you that if you choose the middle option, you must sign up for the Selling on Amazon Pro program, which charges $39.99/month subscription fee, plus percentages per sale ranging from 6 to 20%, depending on the product category. If you click to see a schedule of fees, you’ll be taken to a page that explains the pro selling program, somewhat.

This “Selling on Amazon” page offers you the choice of either “professional” or “individual” selling plans (also called “selling professionally” or “selling your stuff”). The pro one is the one you’d be subscribing for; according to this page, it charges a flat monthly subscription fee of $39.99, plus an additional closing fee on sales of some products (books, videos, software, video games, video game consoles) of 80 cents to $1.35. It’s not clear if these closing fees would still apply, or if the various other transaction fees we looked at above supercede them, or what.

Additionally, Amazon charges a percentage “selling” or “referral” fee for each sale; the fee varies by product category, from 6% to 20%. A few categories need prior approval to sell in, and Amazon is not currently accepting any more sellers in the category of clothing and accessories. You can see all this info on the Selling on Amazon page.

If you’re signing up for the new beta Amazon WebStore with the Selling on Amazon option, don’t sign up on this (old) page. Go to the new beta Amazon WebStore sign-up page.

If you want to sell a product that doesn’t currently exist on amazon.com, subscribing to the pro selling program allows you to create a new Amazon product page for that item. Here’s the info page for the pro merchant program.

And here’s the help index for selling on Amazon. Be careful when you come across pages about “Webstore by Amazon”; this is not the same thing as the “beta Amazon WebStore.” Webstore by Amazon is the old/current (non-beta) online store offering from Amazon; some of its documentation applies to the new beta Amazon WebStore, and some of it doesn’t. But it’s all there in “Seller Central” hanging out together.