Listing Products in Seller Central

The Seller app lists products from a phone. Seller Central does the same job on a desktop, which is where you will do it when sourcing online or working through a batch. This lesson walks through it.

Amazon revises the Seller Central interface regularly, so the labels below may not match your screen exactly. The sequence of decisions does not change.

Adding a product

1. Open Catalog and choose Add Products.
2. Search for the item. You can use a product name, an ASIN (Amazon's own identifier), or a manufacturer barcode such as a UPC or EAN.

Search by barcode or ASIN whenever you have one. A name search returns a list of similar products and it is easy to attach your stock to the wrong listing. A wrong listing means a customer receives something other than what they ordered, which produces a return, a negative review and a defect on your account. Match on the identifier printed on the item.

Setting the offer

Select the correct product, set the condition, and click Sell this product. Then:

• Price. What you are charging. Check what the Buy Box is currently at before deciding.
• Condition. New if it is new. Be accurate; condition mismatches are one of the more common causes of returns.
• Fulfilment. Choose Amazon will dispatch and provide customer service for FBA. The alternative, I will ship this item myself, is merchant fulfilment, where you store and post the item.

The fulfilment choice is the one to be careful about. It determines which fees apply, whether the offer carries Prime delivery, and whether you are competitive for the Buy Box. If you calculated your margin on FBA fees, select FBA here.

Click Save and finish.

The dangerous goods question

You may be asked for dangerous goods information. Most ordinary products are not dangerous goods, and answering no to the questions and submitting is normally correct.

Answer this honestly rather than clicking through it. As the hazmat lesson covered, the category is wider than people expect and includes anything with batteries and anything pressurised. A wrong answer here means stock arriving at a fulfilment centre that is not permitted to hold it.

What happens next

Amazon may offer to start a shipping plan immediately. You do not have to complete it now, and there is a good reason to wait: shipping a single item is expensive, and you will normally want to accumulate several products and send them together.

Either way, the item is now in your inventory. Open Manage Inventory and it is listed, where you can change the price, edit the offer or remove it.

Where this fits

Listing and shipping are separate steps. Listing creates the offer; the offer is not live and sellable until the stock is in Amazon's warehouse. So a typical week looks like: source and list as you go, then create one shipment covering everything at the end.

The next lesson covers that shipment.