For sellers who are new to the Amazon platform, the most important thing they should be concerned about is opening a store. This section will introduce the five major issues that sellers need to know before opening a store on the Amazon platform. Through these issues, sellers can clearly know what they need to pay attention to when opening a store, so as to avoid many unnecessary troubles and successfully operate their own stores.
2.3.1 What is the difference between a personal seller account and a global store account?
In early 2012, Amazon’s global store model was officially introduced to China, which is a strategic deployment of Amazon in the Chinese market. In this way, domestic e-commerce can directly trade with overseas buyers on the Amazon platform, and many domestic sellers have begun to enter the Amazon global platform.
Since the global store account only accepts corporate entry, it is necessary to review the seller’s company. The main purpose of the review is to screen out high-quality sellers to enter the platform and prevent bad sellers from entering and disrupting the market. If the company passes Amazon’s review, it will receive a registration invitation. Through the registration invitation, it can register as an Amazon seller account using a VISA or MasterCard credit card.
It is worth noting that because the global store is just a project name of Amazon, registering an Amazon seller account requires registration at different sites, so the global store account registered by the seller is not a “global store” in the actual sense, but an account under different countries and regions.
So what is the difference between a personal seller account and a global store account?
1. Different functions
Self-registered users are divided into corporate accounts and personal accounts. The operation interface of self-registered corporate accounts and global store accounts in the background is the same. Most of the functions of self-registered personal accounts are not as good as global store accounts. For example, global store accounts will have a dedicated account manager to provide full guidance. Generally speaking, it takes 5 to 10 minutes to register an account. If the seller encounters any operational problems during this process, he can ask the online manager for help.
The global store account can use the shopping cart function for 3 months for self-built listings; the global store account can apply for flash sales activities at each site. Amazon launches flash sales activities every day. For sellers, flash sales activities can increase sales in the short term on the one hand, and increase the exposure of their own brands on the other hand. From the date of registration, sellers will not have any application channels unless they have outstanding performance and receive an application invitation from Amazon.
For sellers who open stores globally, as long as they meet the requirements of FBA inventory quantity, sales price and store performance, they can apply through the account manager.
2. Audit Difficulty
The audit process for registering a corporate account or a global store account is more stringent and demanding than that for a personal account. The general audit time limit is longer than that for a personal account. For example, the application review for a personal seller account can be reviewed in half an hour at the fastest, while it takes about half a month for a corporate seller to register on the US site.
3. Account Security
Since Amazon attaches great importance to consumer experience feedback, it will impose strict requirements on sellers. If the seller’s sales are poor, the seller is complained by the buyer, or there is an account association problem, the platform will impose a penalty of blocking the account.
According to statistics, on the Amazon platform, the store blocking rate of personal accounts is higher than 56%. Once the account is blocked, it means that the ASIN and store performance accumulated in the early stage will be invalidated. At the same time, the platform will unconditionally support any refund request from the buyer, which is very unfavorable to the seller. In contrast, the global store account is more secure, with a store blocking rate of less than 9%.
In reality, global store accounts or corporate accounts have great advantages over individual seller accounts, but the audit requirements are also higher. Sellers need to make a choice that suits them according to their own circumstances.