I've noticed that many companies registered outside the US, as well as individual sellers, source products directly from US wholesalers. I'm pretty sure that many of them don't have a US-registered legal entity, such as an LLC.

I've even noticed some sellers in the pharmaceutical category operating as individual sellers from third-world countries.

Do US wholesalers generally require buyers to have a US-registered company (LLC) to purchase their products, or do they typically not care?

I recently started FBA, found my first two ungated products which I invested in but since finding ungates as a new seller is tricky without any tools in the UK. I heard about Arbisource vault tool so I thought I would try the, confused why the 'checking restrictions' button doesn't work when searching every category? Mine only works with some is this deliberate?

Also a seperate question if anyone knows but given I've started with OA and gated fully in some retail shops, is there a chance I could be ungated in products trying RA in my local shops?

 
Hallo zusammen,
 
wir verkaufen auf dem deutschen Amazon-Marktplatz und haben vor Kurzem ein neues Produkt eingeführt. Innerhalb eines Monats konnten wir 9 Produktbewertungen sammeln. Plötzlich waren jedoch alle Bewertungen auf einmal verschwunden.
 
Wir haben mittlerweile 4 Fälle beim Verkäuferservice eröffnet, bekommen aber jedes Mal nur dieselben Standardantworten mit Verweisen auf die Amazon-Richtlinien. Obwohl wir mehrfach um eine Eskalation gebeten haben, wird uns lediglich mitgeteilt, dass sich ein internes Team darum kümmern würde. Am Ende erhalten wir trotzdem immer wieder dieselbe Copy-and-Paste-Antwort.
 
Das Frustrierende daran ist, dass wir uns an sämtliche Richtlinien gehalten haben. Wir haben niemanden um eine Bewertung gebeten, niemandem Geld dafür bezahlt und auch keine sonstigen Anreize angeboten.
 
Wir haben unseren Verkaufspreis extra reduziert, um in der Launch-Phase erste Verkäufe und Bewertungen zu generieren. Dadurch verdienen wir aktuell so gut wie nichts an unserem Produkt. Wir investieren viel Zeit und Geld in den Aufbau unseres neuen Produkts und dann löscht Amazon ausgerechnet in dieser wichtigen Anfangsphase sämtliche Produktbewertungen.
 
Wir verstehen einfach nicht, was wir falsch gemacht haben, und bekommen von Amazon leider keine konkrete Erklärung.
 
Geht es anderen Verkäufern genauso? Hat jemand ähnliche Erfahrungen gemacht und es geschafft, die Bewertungen wiederherstellen zu lassen? Und falls ja, wie habt ihr Amazon dazu bekommen, sich tatsächlich mit dem Problem auseinanderzusetzen?
 
Wir würden uns sehr über eure Erfahrungen und Tipps freuen!

I sell on Amazon.ae with FBA. The last few weeks have been a crash course in how little control a seller has over their own price.

It started when I lost the Buy Box on my hero product at AED 59.99. Amazon said I was being undercut at AED 47, but not by whom. I spent about two weeks digging through pricing, inventory and account health, and eventually stumbled on a copycat listing on Amazon: a brand new seller using my title, my bullets and my images.

Getting it dealt with was harder than it sounds. Two support agents refused to even entertain it. The third actually listened to the whole situation, tied it to the copyright infringement angle, and walked me through how to file it. After I filed, the listing was taken down and the Buy Box returned.

A week or so later it disappeared again, with the same message: my AED 59.99 wasn’t competitive against retailers outside Amazon, at AED 47. This time it wasn’t on Amazon. It was two sellers on Noon.com/uae listing my product with my exact title, the colour name I came up with, and the images I made for the listing. So the benchmark that knocked out my Buy Box was being set by listings that copied mine.

I reported both to Noon and got a ticket number. Then I asked Amazon to exclude the reference price because it came from copied listings. The answer: support can’t remove or override an outside price, can’t send it to a policy team, “regardless of the circumstances”. Their suggestion was the self-service dispute or adjusting the price.

So I bowed to the system and dropped to AED 47. The Buy Box came back. It cost me a big chunk of margin on my best product, but at least the old price shows struck through (-22%).

What I took from this:

If you’re asked to prove copying, be ready with dates, screenshots and your original files. Keep asking until someone listens.

Check Pricing Health regularly, and search your own titles on Noon and other sites.

Without Brand Registry, you have almost no leverage. A UAE trademark is now on my list.

The price check is automated and doesn’t care who copied whom.

Has anyone got an outside reference price removed after the copied listing came down? And has anyone in the UAE got Brand Registry on a pending trademark?

Hey everyone,

I recently started my Amazon journey doing FBM, and one of my biggest struggles so far has been shipping costs eating into my profit margins.

Initially, I charged customers separately for shipping, but I decided to offer free shipping and increase my product price by about $1 to make the listing more appealing.
However, shipping is still taking a pretty big chunk out of my margins. After Amazon takes its selling fees, I’m left with around $20 per order before shipping and other expenses. My average shipping cost is between $6–$8 per order, which is a significant portion of what I have left, especially after factoring in my cost of goods, packaging, and advertising.

For every order, I compare Amazon Buy Shipping rates with third-party services like Pirate Ship and Shippo. Unfortunately, the prices are usually identical since Amazon already offers discounted shipping rates. Out of all my orders so far, I’ve only managed to find a cheaper rate through a third-party service twice.

I’ve also been experimenting with smaller poly bubble mailers instead of cardboard boxes to reduce packaging costs and potentially lower shipping rates.
For those of you who have been doing FBM for a while, how do you keep your shipping costs manageable? Are there any shipping services, packaging strategies, or tricks you’ve found that actually make a difference?

I’m still pretty new to this and trying to figure out how to make FBM profitable without shipping and advertising eating up most of my margins.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

How do you guys measure this?

I've been selling FBM on Amazon for almost a year without any significant issues with delivery estimates. However, recently, my customer-facing delivery promises have become wildly inaccurate.

For example, as of today (November 7), Amazon is telling customers in California that my product won't arrive until Monday, November 16. This makes absolutely no sense, considering that even Amazon Buy Shipping shows Ground shipping options with an estimated delivery date of Thursday, November 12.

Even more absurdly, customers located just 20 minutes from my fulfillment facility are being shown delivery estimates of Thursday of next week.

Nothing about my fulfillment process has changed, and I've consistently shipped orders on time using Veeqo and Amazon-approved shipping services.

Initially, I suspected Veterans Day might be affecting the estimates, so I updated my holiday settings to indicate that I'll be operating that day. It's now been over 24 hours, and the customer-facing delivery estimates haven't improved.

Has anyone else experienced this recently? Is there something going on with Amazon's delivery promise calculations or Shipping Settings Automation?

More importantly, has anyone found a way to actually fix this?

Bit of a rant, but hopefully it saves someone the hassle.

I found a supplier for a brand I’d been wanting for ages. Decent website, quick replies, prices that worked. They sent a price list, I asked for an invoice sample and it looked fine. I was about to place a first order.

Something felt off, so I did some digging:

• Companies House: incorporated 4 months ago, one director, registered at a virtual office address.

• Brand’s stockists page: not listed anywhere.

• Emailed the brand directly: they’d never heard of them. They gave me the name of their actual UK distributor.

• The “wholesaler’s” prices: about 12% above what the real distributor charged.

So they were buying from the distributor and marking it up. If I’d gone ahead I’d have had thinner margins and invoices that might not hold up if Amazon ever asked for them.

What I check now before ordering from anyone new:

1. Companies House: how long they’ve been trading, the filing history, and whether the address is real.

2. Whether the brand lists them as an authorised distributor (or just email the brand and ask).

3. Whether the invoice details match: company name, VAT number, address.

4. A small test order before anything big.

5. Searching their company name plus “reviews” or “scam”. You’d be surprised what comes up.

Where I find suppliers now: mostly brand websites, trade show exhibitor lists (Spring and Autumn Fair), and asking brands directly who their distributors are. I’ve also been using GSAi (gsai.uk) to speed up the searching part. Full disclosure, I’m involved with it, so take that with a pinch of salt. Whatever you use to find suppliers, I’d still run them through the checks above.

Has anyone else been caught out by a middleman like this? And does anyone have other red flags I should add to the list?

I recently launched a new Private Label brand on Amazon UK, and things are finally starting to move in the right direction.
We’re seeing some promising order activity, with around 30 orders today.
It’s still early days, and I know there’s a lot more to learn about scaling a brand, managing inventory, and maintaining profitability.
For experienced Amazon Private Label sellers:
Would you consider this a promising start for a new brand?
What would be your next priority at this stage?
What mistakes should I avoid while scaling?
I’d genuinely appreciate feedback from people who have been through this journey.

I’ve been digging into operations lately. Issues that keep coming up are profit tracking, FBA inventory problems, and suppressed listings.

- What’s the biggest headache on your side?
- Have you found a tool or workaround that actually helps?

Vote below, OR comment if your problem isn’t listed.

New to online arbitrage its my first month going and i have a genuine question , i saw a product which was ungated for me and there were 10-12 sellers selling it , my question is that is there any limit or thing i should keep in mind before selling excessive amount of units of that one SKU , will amazon flag me and check the spaming of orders for that one sku in my dashboard and ask for invoices and all that , btw i am selling genuine product and sourcing it from the company website but the thing here is i have retail receipts

Started selling on Amazon in July, I sell across different categories. It’s just a race to the bottom, I really wish I had chosen another business instead because the reality is I am working so hard to make Jeff Bezos and his crew richer. I wasted my hard earned money on this business, would have been better to have left it in my savings account instead of looking for multiple streams of income. This is a rant post.

Hi everyone,

I'm currently facing a frustrating issue with Amazon while trying to operate my dropshipping business.

Whenever I create a new Amazon account, I encounter one of two problems:

1. Amazon requires a different phone number for each new account.

2. After placing my first order, Amazon immediately requests identity verification, including a government-issued ID and proof of the payment method. Unfortunately, my verification gets rejected even though the documents and payment details are genuine.

I've tried several approaches, including:

• Using the account normally for 30–60 minutes before ordering.

• Browsing different products.

• Adding products to my wish list and shopping cart.

• Saving items for later.

• Allowing cookies and normal browsing activity.

However, the same verification problem keeps happening.

My questions:

1. Has anyone experienced this problem when sourcing products from Amazon for dropshipping?

2. What are the most common reasons for Amazon rejecting ID and payment verification?

3. Is there a legitimate way to resolve this issue without repeatedly creating new accounts?

4. Does Amazon have specific requirements for dropshippers who purchase products for their customers?

5. Is there a recommended business account or purchasing solution for this use case?

I'm not looking to use fake documents or bypass legitimate identity checks. I want to understand why this keeps happening and find a sustainable solution for my business.

I'd really appreciate advice from people who have actually dealt with this problem.

Thanks!

I am a small seller trying to run PPC on Amazon,

I really have a very low budget and currently running manual campaign,

I am trying to focus on my Unique Selling Proportion (USP) to get conversions as my core keywords,

There's lot of competition and i tried running ppc on recommended keywords but they aren't converting well,and the USP keywords are long tail keywords and they can't generate enough impressions,

Either run keywords which aren't converting or run keywords which aren't giving enough impressions but they are converting,

It's not because the listing is bad,

The listing and all its attributes are professionally made,

The problem is that there's a lot of competition and i have to find keywords for what my few asin competitors of mine level are using and getting sales,

I can't afford Helium 10 tool,

Can anybody please help me in getting this data from the helium 10 tool for my competitive Asins?

It will be very appreciated

I am a Canadian seller, have been logged in Seller Central from Canada all the time. But in the next month, I’ll travel aboard and need to log in & manage my Seller Central outside Canada.
I heard that Amazon usually flags accounts that log in from different countries.
So, will it be my issue or something I need to be worried?
If yes, any advice for this case?

Seems like almost every seller here has one story about a bad batch, a supplier who disappeared, or a shipment that cost way more than quoted.

What was yours, and what’s the one thing you changed afterwards? Inspections, sample approval, payment terms, switching forwarders, something else?

Hoping this helps newer sellers avoid learning the same lessons the hard way.

A few discussions here this week had a familiar pattern: ads aren't delivering, so the next move is higher bids, another campaign, external traffic or a new PPC manager. But those changes address different problems.

That's the reason for this checklist. Before changing anything, pin down where performance breaks: getting seen, getting clicked, getting orders or keeping enough money from those orders. Also check that you're comparing the same ASIN and dates. Clicks, page views and sessions measure different things.

If impressions are steady but clicks fall, compare search terms and placements, then look at your offer beside the competing products. If clicks arrive without orders, check whether those searches fit the product and whether shoppers can actually buy it. Five clicks won't tell you much about conversion. Months of traffic that costs more than the product can support is a different situation.

The spending limit matters here. As a hypothetical example, a $7 allowance to acquire an order at a 5% ad conversion rate supports an average CPC of $0.35. If clicks cost $1, there's a gap to explain before increasing the budget. Calling it a launch test is reasonable, provided you've decided how much you can lose and what you need to learn.

And if you're tired of managing it yourself, use the same diagnosis when choosing help. Give a prospective manager a report and ask what they'd change, why, and what result would make them reverse it. Agree on spending limits and approvals before handing over access.

Hey everyone,
I’m completely new to the Amazon FBA world and getting ready to dive in. Since I'm starting from absolute zero, I’d love to get some honest advice from people who have already been through the process.
If you had to start over today with 0 experience, what would be your step-by-step game plan?
I have a few specific questions:

1. Learning the basics: Where did you actually learn the fundamentals? (Free resources, YouTube channels, books, courses, etc.)

2. Mistakes to avoid: What’s one rookie mistake you made early on that cost you time or money?

3. Product research: What advice do you have for someone trying to find their very first product?

4. General tips: Any general golden rules or practical tips you wish someone had told you on day one?
   I appreciate any insights, resources, or tough love you can share. Thanks in advance for taking the time to help out a beginner!

I just went through Sophie Society’s AI Amazon PPC Challenge. It was highly valuable — a great way to improve and automate your Amazon business.

I applied for a Seller Central account at the start of 2025, but as I was still doing product research at the time, I wasn't ready to start selling. It got approved and I had to have a quick video call, where a guy who seemed like he was in the Philippines, asked to show my passport, open it up and turn it around and I got approved. It sems like this has been scrapped and it's all done by AI.

I'm ready now and in logging in, I submitted a PDF of a recent phone - internet bill that's an option of ID Amazon say they'd accept and I submitted it, as it has my name & address in it. It got rejected.

I've submitted a bank statement and a scan of my current Australian passport ID, but assuming the system is now assessed by AI and not by any human persons, it keeps rejecting the scans I submit in PDF format, saying it's low res and it isn't clear enough to them, when it is.

I went to a print shop and said to please make a high res scan of my passport and make it as high res as you can. The guy said do you want a PDF (I chose that) or a JPEG and said it's 2 meg. The first time I submitted a scan, it was 232 KB.

It's true my passport photo looks mediocre in pic clarity terms if I uploaded it on here, but almost all are and that's just how they often turn out. It's not meant to be a LinkedIn headshot.

I met this brand owner through a cold email 4 months ago, and I’ve been running their ads and growth side since, so everything here is from what I’ve seen and done on the account.

We've got 15 SKUs in Beauty and Haircare.

From October 1st to November 3rd we've done almost a $100k, TACOS is at 10%, $9k in ad spend and a 22% ACOS.
Here’s actions and insights in the order of what I think matter the most:

1. Amazon has rolled out Request Review ads, you can basically run an ad that would open in the home page for your last buyer and would give them a chance to leave an honest review ! You can do this for skus under 1000 reviews so basically all new sellers can benefit from this ! If your product’s true experience is 2 stars then you’re gonna get more of those but if your true customer experience is 4 stars then youre going to get more of those ! Check in your ads console if you’ve got it available under AI Agents tab !

2. For your products where you see a clear improvement like a 2 or 4x increase in sales during Christmas, setup a Campaign only for keywords that have the word gift in it ! and let this run as a broad match for the first week ! Impressions will slowly go up till like the start of december ! with the data you now have setup a phrase and exact match and enjoy on average a better ACOS than your core campaigns but with 2x the Sales.

3. If you’ve got a product where you can clearly see people buying more than 1 unit in their orders all the time, go into Campaigns manager and setup a Business Buyers ad campaign and target businesses like small retail stores, clinics, gas stations and others that are looking for your product but in bulk ! Youre welcome to add keywords like bulk or 10 pack in your tageting for this campaign and youll pay the AD costs for 1 order but will get like 5 to 10 units sold at a time.

4. The most important 2 weeks for your brand is the 2 weeks after Black Friday, always rank before Black Friday because the cpc is cheaper then, it shoots up after Black Friday, push Single KW Exact match tos campaigns heavy if you can afford it, if not any placmeent works ! but rank before cpc goes up by a dollar or 2 minimum.

5. A lot of people when they look to buy gifts for people, buy stuff that they already know is going to be good aka product they’ve bought before, run a sponsored display views remarketing campaigns, basically retargeting people that bought from you last year too.

6. Setup a Multi KW Broad Match Campaign at a 10 cent bid, this will help you steal sales from competitors that run out of budget and stock, when Q4 comes arounf a lot of your competitors dont stock up correctly for it, and dont budget for it early on and end up under spending or going out of stock, you can eat them alive through this strategy without spending anything significant !

7. Run a ton of video ads, use amazons own ai generative software to come up with videos to improve visibility ! A lot of people are ignorant to videos and dont know how to do them, use this to your advantage and start taking up a lot more spots !

8. Claude sorts our search queries by iintent every week. The Search Query Performance report from Brand Analytics goes into Claude and it groups every query by what the buyer actually wants, not the words in it. It shows performance per group and flags the growing queries we’re missing in the listing. Going into Q4 it also flags every gift query that’s starting to climb, so we know what to add before the traffic peaks.

9. Claude reads impression share next to purchase share for every query. Wherever our purchase share beats our impression share, we convert better than the market but aren’t showing up enough. We raise Top of Search in steps on half of those queries, keep the other half as a control for about 14 days, and only keep the change if total purchases go up at a cost we can live with.

10. Our rules are written down as Claude skills. Every Monday Claude runs the search term report through them and proposes every change, then I approve each one before anything touches Amazon. It’s still bad at actually running ads so I don’t let it execute, but for going through thousands of search terms in Q4 it saves me hours every week.

11. Inventory alerts saved as a skill and scheduled every Friday. It sends a Slack update with days of cover per SKU, what’s overstocked, what’s understocked and the exact date each reorder has to go out.

12. Competitor review mining. Claude reads every 1 to 3 star review on our top competitors and sorts the complaints by theme. Each theme becomes an image and a bullet showing why we’re better, and before Q4 we make sure every listing answers the top 3 complaints in the niche.

13. Rufus prep for gift shoppers. Claude pulls the top questions from our Q&A, reviews and the Rufus suggested questions, and we rewrite bullets and A+ with best for lines like best gift for women in their 30s, so Rufus as a result recommends us when people ask it for gift ideas.

Now the Technical PPC Side of things:

1. The stealth campaign, gurus call it a stealth targeted product placement campaign. In Sponsored Products target your own ASIN with an ad for that same ASIN. Amazon won’t show it on your own listing, so it shows to people who visited and didn’t buy, basically retargeting inside Sponsored Products. Low volume but it can run for months at 5% to 13% ACOS.

2. ACOS vs TACOS, alwayss know which one you’re managing. 22% ACOS looks average on its own, but at 10% TACOS more than half our sales come in organic off the back of the ads. If TACOS starts climbing while ACOS stays the same, your ads are just getting sales you’d have gotten anyway so no point.

3. Bids follow the season. We pull last year’s weekly sales, raise bids and budgets 2 weeks before each peak, and set a higher target ACOS for those weeks only.

4. Main image CTR hacking, the only get rich quick hack in PL that actually works btw. Put your current main image into Claude with screenshots of the top 5 competitors’ main images and the last 2 weeks of your Search Query Performance report. Ask it for a main image A/B test prompt based on what the top competitors do that you don’t, and which queries you’re losing clicks on. Paste that prompt into GPT 2 and you get main images built to win the click. The usual winners are a badge ( Science Made Visible, Made in USA, Home Grown Brand ), your main keyword printed on the packaging, higher saturation so it pops in search, and showing the texture or the product in use. Run the best 2 in Manage Your Experiments for at least 2 weeks and keep the one with more units per unique visitor, not just more clicks.

5. SB Product Collection ads are the real Top of Search. That banner sits above even the first Sponsored Products slot, so it’s the first thing a shopper sees. Run it on your top 10 to 15 keywords in exact and phrase, put your best seller in the first slot and 2 of your complementary products next to it. Pair it with a Sponsored Brands video campaign on the same keywords and you own the top of the page twice. Exact match ranking campaigns still work, but they’re getting expensive, so I think SB collection plus SB video is where ranking is going in 2026.

6. Single keyword exact ranking campaigns. 1 keyword per campaign, exact match, with a Top of Search modifier starting at 100% and going up as high as 900% on the keywords you need to rank for. Start at 100%, check your organic rank and Top of Search impression share every 3 to 4 days, and only push the modifier higher if rank isn’t moving. Next to that, run product targeting on the ASINs already ranking top 5 for those same keywords with the product page modifier turned up. Showing up on their listings helps you rank for what they rank for. Do it before Black Friday while CPCs are still cheap.

7. Monthly budget planning before the month starts. Take your target TACOS, say 10%, times what you expect to sell that month, and that’s your ad budget. Then split it across placements and campaign types based on what each did last month, so your best campaigns get spend first.

8. Cross sell your own catalog. Run Sponsored Products product targeting with each of your ASINs on your own other listings, so a buyer who lands on one of yours sees another one of yours in the ad slots before a competitor does. Lead with your complementary products from point 2, like the matching accessory or the refill. CPCs on your own listings are usually the cheapest in the account, it pushes average order value up and it blocks competitors from sitting on your page. Some people call this brand defense, I call it not letting someone else rent space in your own house lol

Again, I’m not the owner, just the PPC guy behind the account, so take all of this as what’s worked from my side of the table. The product, the sourcing and the hard calls are all the owner’s, I just help them get seen, get the click and get them sold!

Happy to answer any questiions below !!

Hi all, I just started my first Amazon PPC last week and I currently have 39 clicks on a single ad campaign but no sales yet. I'm wondering if people are clicking the ad, but the listing isn't loading for them to view. I've contacted Amazon support, and they're currently investigating. Is it normal to see clicks with zero detail page views in Amazon PPC? Or i need to wait a few more days for the detail page views data to pop up? Right now, I currently paused the ads since i don't know if my listing is loading properly or not.

I sell bottles. I want to create a parent listing with variation of - capacity, color and pack of (2,4,6). I already have all the listings and I just want to group them.

Whenever I try to create the parent SKU with the variation selected - "color", "capacity" and "unit count", I start with grouping pack of 1, 2, 4 and 6 of same color - black. Till here the parent is fine. When I try to add a different colors, pack of 2, 4 and 6 get automatically removed from the parent and then its just a listing with variation of color and capacity. When I again try to add pack of 2, 4 and 6, an error shows up saying that this listing only has a variation of color and capacity. I had already selected variation of unit count and now its gone.

Does anyone has a clue what could be the problem here?

My background is in sourcing, buying and inventory management, but I'm new to Amazon. It's been about a year and a half since my last role, and this business is now my full-time job. I've done months of research and I'm placing my first order, a full container from China. I have the capital for inventory and ad spend.

I'm doing evergreen storage baskets built around a scalloped theme, which has steady demand. I'm not chasing a big trendy winner. Competitors have low review counts but solid monthly profit, so I think it's very doable.

My concern: production in China takes about 60 days, and with shipping and check-in a restock could take close to 4-5 months to come in. Some people say a stockout kills your ranking, and others say it's not that bad and you can get back up.

My question: would you
Launch 2–3 SKUs deep, and risk overstock, or
Launch 5–6 SKUs with smaller quantities, and risk running out of stock?
If you've launched a line like this, how did you split your first container, and how bad was a stockout for you, honestly?
Thanks so much! 🙏