The Complete Guide to the Amazon Seller App

When you start to sell on Amazon, you will quickly learn that the Amazon seller app is one of the best resources to help you grow your business. With many built-in features provided by Amazon, there’s a ton of functionalities sellers can use on the app. This blog will show you every single feature you can use on the app and how to maximize the use of your Amazon seller app. Here’s everything you need to know about the Amazon seller app:

The Amazon seller app is basically Amazon seller central in your phone. Most sellers use Amazon seller central for most of their Amazon business, but you can perform the vast majority of the same functions on the Amazon seller app. Some of the functions that the Amazon seller app can perform includes:

Product research:

Sellers can perform product research on the Amazon seller app. This can be done by opening the app, click add a product and then a search bar should appear stating “Search Amazon to sell”. Sellers can search keywords for products and Amazon will show all relevant listings.

The Amazon seller app will show you listings with their pictures, sales rank, buy box price and whether you can sell it or not. Once you click on a certain listing, Amazon will show its price if it’s selling the product, the price other sellers are selling it for, the category of the product, the fee if you sold the product and more. 

Sellers can use this data to decide whether they want to source a similar product due to factors like sales rank and profitability. Instead of sitting down and opening up seller central, sellers can do product research on the go 24/7 from the Amazon seller app. This enables sellers to source virtually anywhere and anytime. 

Sellers can also use the built-in scanner/camera on the app to do product research. Once you open the app, there’s a camera icon on the upper right hand corner. If you click that, the camera will open and it can scan the barcode of any product. Once it scans the product, it will notify the seller if the product is sold on Amazon or not.

If it’s listed on Amazon, the camera will take you directly to the listing on Amazon. If it’s not listed on Amazon, sellers will get a blank page and they can choose to make a new listing for a product. It’s recommended that sellers avoid any products without listings on Amazon because it will likely not sell in a long time. 

Adding products:

In addition to product research, sellers can list products directly on the Amazon seller app. Whether you use the camera to find a listing or you manually type the product in, you can add products on the app. Once the listing of your choice comes up on the app, the right hand side will say view offers or sell.

If you click the sell button, it will direct you to a new page on the app for you to list your offering. The offering page will ask you for your price, condition of the item, fulfillment channel (FBA/FBM) and then you can save and finish. 

Once you do this, the listing will be saved in your inventory and you can go and choose your shipping plans later on seller central. This can save a ton of time if you’re listing a lot of products daily. Doing it manually on the computer takes time, so if you can streamline it quicker on the app, it’s much better. This is a feature that sellers love about the Amazon seller app. 

Capture quality photos:

One of the biggest benefits of the Amazon seller app is that it can take quality photos using Photo Studio. This improves the listing process for sellers dramatically because Photo Studio allows pictures taken from a phone to have a professional white background. All sellers on Amazon are required to have listings with a professional white background or Amazon will take the listing down.

Amazon is very stringent regarding what kind of photos can be used for listing products, so having a service within the Amazon seller app is extremely helpful. Sellers can capture a photo and use Photo Studio to make a professional photo for a given listing. Below is an example from an Amazon seller that compares the difference that Photo Studio can make on a picture:

You can see the huge difference that Photo Studio makes, the right picture looks just like any other professional Amazon listing. This process removes all of the technical work that comes with polishing a mobile image. Sellers can use Photo Studio for listing any product.

There’s a separate photo studio app by Amazon that’s not integrated with the Amazon seller app and it can perform some extra functions; it’s available on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. The Photo Studio can be accessed by going to the seller app menu in the top left hand side when you open the app. If you scroll down to the bottom of the menu, you will see Product Photo Studio next to the sign out button. Clicking it will open it and you can take a picture immediately.

Manage returns:

The Amazon seller app also allows sellers to manage returns directly from their phone. Generally, this is done on seller central for most sellers. On the Amazon seller app, sellers can manage virtually every aspect of managing returns. FBA sellers get their returns handled by Amazon, but orders that are seller-fulfilled need to match or exceed Amazon’s return policies.

Sellers can view on the app whenever a buyer initiates a return. The app allows you to take similar actions to seller central. You can view the return, issue a return, dispute the return and more. This is extremely beneficial for sellers that may be dealing with multiple returns per day.

Sales analysis: 

One of the best aspects of the Amazon seller app is it allows sellers to get a quick glance at their sales and do sales analysis. This is likely one of the sellers’ favorite features of the entire app. Once you open the app, Amazon provides you a quick glance at sales with information like sales today, units sold today and more. In addition to this, sellers can see their sales history for the past 7 days.

Amazon provides sellers analytics that compare their 7-day sale history to their previous week and previous year. This gives sellers input into how their business is performing and what improvements they can make. Amazon also provides sellers with data on their business has performed in the:

• last 7 days
• last month
• last year
• year to date and more

Tapping on the sales chart can provide sellers with more analytics like how a specific ASIN has performed over a given time. This along with showing trends in sales enables sellers to get a good idea of their top performing products.

Managing inventory:

Every seller knows that managing inventory is one of the most important aspects of selling on Amazon. Without accurate awareness of how much inventory you have, you can run out and have days if not weeks without sales.

The Amazon seller app allows you to manage your inventory from anywhere and make changes directly on the app. Sellers can access their inventory by opening the app and clicking the menu on the left. Inventory is the second button next to the home button at the top.

Once you open it, Amazon provides a quick overview of inventory. Amazon will show sellers how much inventory they have, if it’s active or inactive and the ability to filter inventory and find specific ones quickly. If sellers are looking for a specific product, they can use the search bar to find it or use the filter.

This is very useful because sellers with scale can easily have hundreds if not thousands of products in inventory. The filter allows sellers to find inventory based on:

• date listed
• active/inactive listings
• fulfillment whether by FBA or FBM

Once sellers find their listing of choice, they can do anything that they’d be able to do on seller central. This includes changing the price, viewing other offers, editing the listing, deleting the listing and more. This can save sellers significant time because they may need to edit aspects of many listings on a daily basis.

Managing account health: 

Sellers can also manage their account health directly from the Amazon seller app. There’s no point of working hard to source and ship products if you’re going to get your account suspended. Every seller who’s experienced a suspension knows the immense pain and frustration that it can cause.

Many of the factors that lead to suspension are performance related like shipping products late or canceling orders prior to fulfillment. Amazon has strict rules for sellers when it comes to meeting operational standards.

Sellers can view their account health directly on the app. If you open the menu on the left upper hand side on the app, you will see the performance button. If you click on it, you can view both account health and feedback.

Clicking on account health will give you a detailed overview of your Amazon seller account is looking. It will show you the number of each metric that is relevant to maintaining good account health. This includes:

• customer service performance
• shipping performance
• pre-fulfillment cancel rate
• valid tracking rate
• IP claims against you and more.

Viewing your account health periodically is a good idea to ensure you stay within the bounds of good performance for Amazon. The Amazon seller app will also notify you what the target metric should be for each aspect of your account health.

If your account were to get deactivated or suspended, you would see an immediate red banner on your Amazon seller account. This would prevent you from listing any new products.

Reach support: 

An underrated aspect of the Amazon seller app is how easy it makes for sellers to reach seller support. Sellers that are new to Amazon may find it difficult to find the right contact to get an issue solved. Unless you’re logged into seller central, it can be hard to find the right number or email to get a hold of someone. In contrast, the Amazon seller app makes it very easy.

You can reach seller support by clicking on the menu on the upper left hand side. You will see a button labeled seller support. If you click on it, it will open any case logs you have and it will also provide another button saying contact seller support. That will take you to a new window where you can select what issue you are having.

Once you click on the appropriate button, Amazon will give you the option to either reach them via email or by phone. It takes a few hours or sometimes longer for support to get back to you via email. You can also request a callback if the phone lines are too busy on Amazon’s end. This makes it extremely easy to reach support whenever you’re having issues with your account.

Payments: 

The Amazon seller app also allows sellers to directly manage their payments on the app. Payments information can be accessed directly on the app. This includes when you should anticipate your next payment, your available balance, your monthly statements and more.

In addition to this, you can see all of your payments to Amazon like your selling plan, any fees and more. Amazon provides additional details on orders processed, refund and more. This includes information like product charges, promo rebates, refund charges and more. The payments area of the Amazon seller app is basically like a profit and loss statement and you can dive deeper into any category you wish.

Communications:

Amazon sellers know how important communicating with buyers is to succeeding and avoiding issues with Amazon. Amazon has raised the standard for customer service and their customers can be very demanding. In general, Amazon expects to you to reply to buyers within 24 hours or less.

Failure to do this can result in negative reviews or the buyer escalating the case and having to involve Amazon. This is a huge waste of your time as a seller and it can be a big detriment to your business. Proficient sellers schedule time for communicating with buyers in their daily operations.

Amazon has made it easy for sellers to communicate with customers via their communication portal on the Amazon seller app. This can be found in the menu on the upper left hand side and you should see communications under manage payments. Opening communications provides sellers a glance at what their messages between them and customers look like.

This is extremely helpful for sellers with scale because it can be hard to get back to every customer. The communications page shows sellers how many responses they need, their unread messages, business buyer messages and more. It’s an all-in-one shop for all of your communication needs while selling on Amazon.

Pricing management:

Sellers on Amazon know the importance of price management for profitability and sales. If you had to log in to seller central every time you need to make a pricing change, that can quickly eat up your time. The Amazon seller app allows sellers to manage the prices for products directly. Sellers can manage prices for products by clicking on the menu in the upper left hand of the app and going to pricing.

There are two main functions that pricing can do in the Amazon seller app: compare to Buy Box and fee promotions. Compare to Buy Box allows sellers to find any opportunities for their products to win the Buy Box. The Buy Box is the default listing that Amazon customers see and it wins the lion’s share of the sales on Amazon.

Amazon suggests which products can have pricing changes to win the Buy Box, this can result in significantly more sales for any given product. Fee promotions are another pricing feature that sellers can do on the Amazon seller app. Amazon helps sellers promote their products by telling them which listings are eligible for fee promotions based on customer views. Sellers can optimize accordingly and increase the sales on a product.

Order management:

Managing orders efficiently is one of the best perks of the Amazon seller app. When sellers list a product to be fulfilled by them, they have to be able to manage all of the orders they receive. This is important especially during the holiday periods. It can be difficult to manage orders solely from seller central, so having the Amazon seller app can be a huge benefit. Sellers can access this by going to the menu in the upper left hand and selecting orders.

A new page will show up that will show how many orders you have to fulfill and you can sort them by priority, fulfillment and more criteria.  For new sellers, this may seem underwhelming, but sellers with scale know how helpful filtering orders are. When you have hundreds of orders, you need to be able to distinguish each one and what you need to do to get them out. Some of the criteria sellers can filter by include:

• Whether it’s fulfilled by Amazon or the seller
• The shipping service
• Ship by date
• Status (unshipped, shipped, canceled, pending, etc.)
• Order date
• The sales channel (Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.mx)

This allows sellers to fulfill their orders efficiently and avoid making errors which can hurt their ratings and seller performance metrics.

Help:

While selling on Amazon, you’ll need a lot of help to navigate the platform. In comparison to other platforms, Amazon has exponentially better support for sellers. Although there are a ton of resources online like Amazon Seller University, blogs on Amazon and more, there’s a help resource for sellers in the Amazon seller app.

You can access this by going to the menu in the upper left hand corner and clicking on help. Amazon will provide for you several categories that it can help you with. These include:

• Product search: This category answers all of the frequently asked questions regarding product search like requesting approval for selling a product, search history for scanned products and more.
• Fees and proceeds: This category helps sellers navigate all of the fees they will encounter while selling on Amazon. Almost all of the questions regarding fees can be answered on here, so you don’t need to email or call anyone.
• Inventory and listings: This answers the popular questions regarding inventory and listings. This includes how to modify a listing, how to change quantities in the app, how to convert listings to FBA and more.
• Orders: From pending orders to how to change your shipping address, the majority of new seller questions regarding orders are answered  here.
• Returns: Returns can be one of the most asked categories by sellers. Viewing this portion of the help page can help you answer the vast majority of return questions.
• Selling coach: The selling coach is basically a tool Amazon uses to help sellers increase sales. You can find answers to more inventory and price change questions here.
• Communications: This area covers all of the issues sellers can have while communicating with a customer.
• Settings: This page helps sellers optimize their Amazon seller app settings to maximize productivity.
• Frequently asked questions: This is just a page where you can view the FAQs by sellers on the Amazon seller app.

At the end of each help page, there’s a contact Amazon option that sellers can use if their question was not answered.

Final thoughts

This covers everything sellers need to know about the Amazon seller app. The Amazon seller app is a seller’s best friend because it allows you to manage your Amazon business on the go. Getting familiar with the app will help you maximize the resources that Amazon provides for you and it will enable you to grow your business quicker.

Once you get a hold of how to efficiently use the app, you can explore using other apps and tools along with it to maximize your business. You can download the Amazon seller app from the App Store or Play Store. Make sure you don’t share it with anyone because this is a huge risk for your business and Amazon won’t be responsible.