How to Become an Amazon Seller in 2026: Account, Store, and Storefront Setup

Learning how to become an Amazon seller takes an afternoon. Opening the account is the easy part. The part that decides whether you actually sell anything comes after: getting verified, protecting your brand, building a storefront, and making that storefront convert the shoppers you send to it. Most guides stop at “create your account and list a product,” which is why so many new sellers end up with a live account, an empty store, and no sales.

This guide runs the full path in order. You will register and get verified, understand the difference between a seller account, a store, and a Brand Store, enroll in Brand Registry, build your storefront, and set it up to sell. Every fee and rule here was current as of the publish date below. Where a number changes often, we tell you where to check it yourself.

Is it worth becoming an Amazon seller in 2026?

Amazon is harder to win on now than it was five years ago, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something. More sellers, higher ad costs, and pickier shoppers mean a generic product with a plain listing rarely gets traction. The sellers who do well have either a genuinely differentiated product or creative that makes an ordinary product look like the obvious choice, usually both.

The “can I make $1,000 a month” question does not have one answer, because it depends on your product, your margin, and how much you invest in getting seen. Plenty of sellers clear that and far more. Plenty also lose money in year one because they bought inventory before they understood their real costs. Treat early income as a range, not a promise, and plan your budget around the possibility that the first product does not work.

What actually separates sellers who make it is narrower than most people expect. It is rarely the lowest price or the biggest ad budget. It is a product that solves a real problem plus a listing that communicates that in the first three seconds. Amazon rewards conversion. A listing that turns more clicks into sales ranks higher, which brings more clicks, which compounds. That loop is why the sellers who invest in their creative early tend to pull away from the ones who treat the listing as an afterthought.

So who should do it? People with a product idea and enough capital to survive a slow start, who are willing to treat their listing as a sales asset rather than a form to fill in. If that is you, the rest of this guide is the setup.

Seller account vs. Amazon store vs. Brand Store: what you are actually setting up

This is where most beginners get confused, and the confusion costs them weeks. Three things share similar names and mean very different things.

Your seller (or selling) account is your login to Seller Central, the dashboard where you manage products, orders, and payments. During registration, Amazon asks for the store name that shows on your listings as the seller. That name is just a label. It is not a designed page, and it needs no trademark.

A Brand Store (also called a storefront) is the thing people usually picture when they say “Amazon store”: a dedicated, multi-page, branded destination with your logo, category pages, and shoppable tiles, like a mini website inside Amazon. Building one requires three things: a Professional selling account, enrollment in Amazon Brand Registry (which requires a pending or registered trademark), and an Amazon Ads account. Once those are in place, building the storefront itself is free.

One more distinction worth knowing. A Brand Store is owned by a brand to sell its own products. An influencer storefront is a different thing entirely: it is created through the Amazon Influencer Program to feature products from many brands for commission. If you are building a business around your own products, you want a Brand Store, not an influencer storefront.

What you need before you register

Gather these before you start so verification does not stall halfway through. Amazon checks each one, and a mismatch is the most common reason a new account gets held.

With those ready, the path ahead has four real stages: register and verify your account, add your first product, enroll in Brand Registry, and build the storefront. Then the work shifts from setup to selling. Here is each step.

Step 1: Choose your Amazon selling plan

Amazon offers two plans. The Individual plan costs $0.99 per item sold and has no monthly fee. The Professional plan costs $39.99 per month and has no per-item fee. You can confirm both on Amazon’s pricing page.

The math is simple. The two plans break even at about 40 sales a month. Below that, an individual is cheaper. Above it, Professional saves you money, and it gives you things the Individual plan does not: eligibility for the Buy Box (the “Add to Cart” that most sales come through), access to advertising, bulk listing tools, and, once you add Brand Registry, the storefront builder. Most people who are serious about building a brand start on Professional or switch to it quickly.

Step 2: Create and verify your seller account

Go to sell.amazon.com and start the sign-up. Amazon walks you through your business location and type, the seller details, and your billing information, then it verifies your identity. Have the checklist above open while you do it, because the details you enter have to match your documents exactly.

Verification is the part people underestimate. Amazon confirms your identity through document uploads and, for most new accounts since 2025, a live video call or facial recognition check. In the call, an Amazon associate confirms you are a real person and that your documents are genuine. It is quick when you are prepared and frustrating when you are not.

Once you clear verification, your account is live and you can list products. Do not rush past this to sourcing. A pending or rejected verification blocks everything downstream, so get it fully cleared first.

Can you become an Amazon seller from outside the US?

Yes, and a large share of US marketplace sellers are based abroad. Amazon accepts sellers from the large majority of countries (Amazon lists 188), with a handful excluded under US sanctions, such as Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Syria. You can confirm your country’s status inside the Seller Central registration flow.

The requirements are similar to a US seller’s, with a few additions. You need a government photo ID (a passport works well internationally), proof of address dated within the last 180 days, a bank account that can receive payouts in a supported currency, and a chargeable credit card. The video or facial verification applies here too. Sellers registering from a few countries, including China, Taiwan, and Turkey, generally cannot register as individuals and need a registered business entity instead.

Decide which marketplace you are registering for, because it shapes everything else. Selling on Amazon US gives you the largest audience but comes with US tax and compliance expectations. Selling on your home marketplace can be simpler to set up and easier to ship to at first. Many international sellers start with the US because that is where the volume is, then expand to other Amazon marketplaces later through the same account. Pick the one that matches where your customers are and where you can realistically fulfill orders.

Getting paid is the other question international sellers ask. You do not need a US bank account. Amazon’s own Currency Converter deposits into your local account for a percentage fee, and third-party payout services such as WorldFirst or Payoneer are common alternatives with their own rates. Compare the fees against your expected volume, because at scale the difference adds up. None of this is legal or tax advice; check your own country’s rules or ask a professional before you register a business.

FBA or FBM: how your orders reach customers

You have to pick how orders get fulfilled. With Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), you send inventory to Amazon’s warehouses, and Amazon handles storage, shipping, and returns. Your products become Prime-eligible, which helps conversion, but you pay fulfillment and storage fees. With Fulfillment by Merchant (FBM), you store and ship orders yourself. You keep more control and avoid storage fees, but you handle logistics and are not automatically Prime-eligible.

For most new sellers with a small, standard-size product, FBA is the simpler start because Prime eligibility lifts conversion and you are not packing boxes at midnight. If your product is oversized, low-volume, or you want to keep fulfillment in-house, FBM makes sense. You can also mix the two across your catalog.

Step 3: Add your first product and create the listing

With a live account, you create your first listing. You either add a brand-new product (a new ASIN, Amazon’s product identifier) or match an existing catalog page if you are reselling something already listed. New brands almost always create their own ASIN.

You will need a product identifier, usually a UPC or GTIN barcode, which you buy from GS1. In some cases, you can apply for a GTIN exemption if you are selling under your own brand without barcodes. Then you fill in the listing itself: title, bullet points, description, images, and backend search terms that shoppers do not see but Amazon uses to index you.

Check whether your product sits in a restricted or gated category before you invest in it. Amazon gates categories like supplements, some beauty and health products, and certain electronics, which means you need approval and sometimes documentation such as FDA registration before you can list. Sellers who source inventory first and check later can get stuck holding stock they cannot sell. A quick look at the category requirements in Seller Central, before you buy, saves that headache.

Write the title for a real person first and the algorithm second, and mind the 2026 character limits (covered below). If copy is not your strength, this is a place many sellers bring in help; our Amazon listing copywriting work is built around keyword research plus conversion, not keyword stuffing. This step gets you listed. Making the listing actually sell comes after the storefront, and that is where most of the real work is. If you want the deeper product-research and business-model breakdown, our full guide on how to sell on Amazon covers it.

Step 4: Enroll in Amazon Brand Registry

Brand Registry is the gate to everything branded on Amazon: A+ Content, the Brand Story strip, Sponsored Brands ads, brand-protection tools, and the storefront builder. To enroll, you need a pending or registered trademark for your brand name. You start at Amazon’s Brand Registry and link the trademark to your Seller Central account.

The trademark is the slow part. A registered mark can take months, though Amazon accepts brands with a pending application filed through approved routes, which lets you move faster. This is exactly why the storefront confuses beginners: they finish registration, look for the “build a store” button, and discover it is locked behind a trademark they have not started.

Step 5: Build your Amazon storefront (Brand Store)

Once you have a Professional account, Brand Registry, and an Amazon Ads account, the storefront builder opens up. You can confirm the current requirements and flow on Amazon’s own storefront guide. Building the storefront is free. The five steps look like this:

• Open the builder. In Seller Central, go to Stores, then Manage Stores, and start a new Store (you can also reach it through the Ads console).
• Design the layout. Pick a template and build your pages with drag-and-drop tiles. Amazon recommends at least three page levels so shoppers can navigate by category.
• Add your products. Populate the pages with product grids, curated collections, and shoppable images that let people buy without leaving the store.
• Test it. Preview on both mobile and desktop, and check for broken tiles, typos, and low-quality images before you submit.
• Submit for publishing. Send it for review. Approval usually lands in under 24 hours.

A storefront that earns its place is more than a product grid. A strong one opens with a homepage that says who the brand is in a few seconds, breaks the catalog into category pages a shopper can browse by need, and uses a Brand Story strip and lifestyle imagery to build enough trust that price stops being the only deciding factor. Sellers with more than a handful of SKUs get the most out of it, because the store becomes the place a returning shopper explores the full range instead of bouncing after one product.

The builder makes it easy to publish something. It does not make it easy to publish something that sells. A storefront built from default templates and stock imagery looks like every other storefront and gives shoppers no reason to buy or come back. This is the work Desverto does every day: Amazon storefront design that turns the store into a branded selling tool rather than a catalog dump. You can see examples in our portfolio.

Your storefront is live. Now make it actually sell

Here is the truth no setup guide tells you. A brand-new storefront has no visitors, and a brand-new listing has no ranking and no reviews. Publishing does not create demand. Two things do: traffic to get seen, and creative that converts the traffic once it arrives. Skip either one and your store stays quiet.

Traffic, at the start, means ads. A new product will not rank organically for weeks, so Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns are how you buy your first visibility. Running ads well is its own discipline, and it is one side of what we manage for sellers alongside the creative work.

Conversion is where the money is made or lost. If people click and do not buy, that is not a bidding problem, it is a listing problem. The main image drives whether they click at all. The secondary images and A+ Content answer the questions that stop a purchase. The storefront ties it together into a brand a shopper trusts. When traffic is high and sales are low, the fix is almost always the creative, which is why professional listing images and A+ tend to pay for themselves faster than more ad spend does.

It helps to know what each asset actually does. The main image controls your click-through rate in search, so a clean, well-lit shot that shows the product’s key feature at a glance earns clicks that a flat, generic photo loses. The secondary images carry the sell: infographics, comparison shots, dimension callouts, and how-to visuals answer the objections that make a shopper hesitate. A+ Content replaces the plain description with image-and-text modules and adds several hundred words of indexable text (often in the 400 to 600 range), which helps both conversion and how many search terms you rank for. Each of these is a lever, and beginners tend to leave all of them at default.

The practical order: get the listing and storefront genuinely conversion-ready first, then turn on ads. Paying to send traffic to a weak listing just burns money faster. Build the thing that converts, then feed it.

Step 6: Your first 90 days as a seller

The first three months decide whether a product gets off the ground. Your listing starts with no sales history, so it ranks low and needs help getting seen. That help is a mix of early ad spend and any reviews you can earn legitimately. Amazon’s Vine program lets you offer units to trusted reviewers for honest feedback, and it is one of the few compliant ways to get early reviews. Asking buyers for positive reviews, or offering anything in exchange, breaks Amazon’s rules and can cost you the account, so keep it clean.

Watch your account health from day one. Amazon tracks metrics like order defect rate, late shipments, and policy compliance, and a healthy account keeps your listings live and your Buy Box eligibility intact. New sellers sometimes trip a policy or run into a suppressed listing and panic. Most of it is fixable if you catch it early and respond through the right channel. Expect the first sales to come slowly, resist the urge to change everything after three days of data, and give each change two weeks before you judge it.

What it really costs to become an Amazon seller (and can you do it for free?)

The honest answer to “can I do it for free” is almost, but not quite, and not if you want a brand. You can open an Individual account for no monthly fee, fulfill orders yourself, use free research, and sell something you already own. That is the closest thing to a free start, and it is a legitimate way to test the waters. What you cannot do for free is build the branded, storefront-backed business this guide describes, because that involves inventory, a trademark, and creative.

The ongoing platform fees are the Individual $0.99 per item or the Professional $39.99 per month, plus a referral fee that Amazon takes on each sale (15% in most categories, held flat for 2025 and 2026), plus FBA fees if you use Amazon’s fulfillment. FBA fees changed in 2026 and vary by size and weight, so pull the current numbers from Amazon’s fee schedule rather than trusting an old blog figure.

The table below is a realistic all-in view for two common paths. Treat every number as an estimate, not a quote. Your product, category, and choices will move them.

The fees also shape your product choice, so do the margin math before you commit. On a $25 product, Amazon’s 15% referral fee takes about $3.75, FBA fulfillment and storage take more, and your ad spend comes out of what is left before you have paid for the unit itself. Products with thin margins get squeezed to nothing once every fee lands. This is why cheap commodity items are so hard to win with and why sellers who pick a product with room in the margin have an easier time funding the ads and creative that actually move it.

The pattern is clear. A cautious test can cost almost nothing. A real private-label launch usually runs into the low thousands once you count inventory, the trademark, creative, and enough ad budget to get seen. The mistake is planning only for the $39.99 and running dry before the launch that actually needs funding.

What changed for new Amazon sellers in 2026

A few 2026 rules matter when you set up. The biggest is the title limit. As of July 27, 2026, product titles in most non-media categories are capped at 75 characters, with up to 125 characters moved into a separate Item Highlights field. If you learned Amazon with 200-character titles, that habit now gets your listing suppressed, so write tight, front-loaded titles.

On fees, Amazon held referral fees flat at 15% in most categories for 2025 and 2026, which is good news for planning. FBA fulfillment fees did change for 2026 and vary by product size and weight, and slow-moving inventory now carries steeper aged-inventory surcharges. None of that changes how you register, but it changes your margin math, so confirm the live figures before you price a product.

Common mistakes new Amazon sellers make

• Thinking “store” means “storefront.” Registering gives you a store name, not a designed Brand Store. The storefront needs Brand Registry, and Brand Registry needs a trademark. Know this on day one, not month three.
• Waiting to start the trademark. It has the longest lead time of anything here. File it early, or the storefront becomes a months-long bottleneck.
• Failing verification on avoidable errors. A mismatched name, a blurry document, or a missed video call can freeze your account for days. Prepare before you submit.
• Publishing an empty, template-default storefront. A live store with weak tiles and stock photos converts nothing. The build is the start, not the goal.
• Budgeting only for the $39.99. The plan fee is the smallest cost. Inventory, trademark, creative, and ad budget are where the real money goes, and running out mid-launch is how first products die.

Ready to turn your store into a store that sells?

You can handle registration and verification yourself with this guide. The part that decides your results is the storefront and the listings behind it. Get a free storefront and listing audit from Desverto and we will show you exactly where your images, A+ Content, and store design are leaking sales before you spend on ads.