Amazon are changing the company who are providing the payment component of their services to sellers. Up until now it’s been provided by Amazon Services Europe S.à r.l., but moving forwards Amazon Payments Europe S.C.A. will be the new entity you deal with.
In addition to your current Amazon seller account you now need to open a Selling on Amazon payment account with Amazon Payments Europe.
This is causing a number of issues for sellers. Amazon say that EU regulations require Amazon Payments Europe to collect certain business and personal information from you and take steps to confirm your identity. For businesses selling on Amazon as Limited companies it involves a ton of paperwork, which while tedious to gather isn’t particularly tricky to compile.
Where this is throwing up some issues is for sole traders and limited partnerships as Amazon don’t appear to readily recognise that in the UK, unlike many other parts of the EU, it’s easier to start a business and apart from registering with HMRC for income tax you may not have a whole load of paperwork identifying you as an entity. This means Amazon will want to know pretty much everything about you as an individual.
UK sole traders will need to request a Confirmation of Unique Taxpayer Reference letter from HMRC if they don’t already have one, other information Amazon may request is bank account number, passport details, VAT registration, utility bills etc. In some cases Amazon Payments Europe may need more information to verify your identity and request additional identity information.
Amazon Disbursement Frequency
We’ve also heard from sellers who are seeing more frequent disbursements from Amazon, weekly instead of fortnightly. We don’t know if this will be ongoing, but anything that gets funds into your bank account faster sounds like good news!
23 Responses
We have just gone through the verification with Amazon (we are a ltd company), it took 6 days, but a look at the Amazon Seller forum and its full of sellers having issues with Verification.
The one overriding advantage is the disbursement, we can now disburse on a daily basis and we also saw that our EU account disbursement into our World First account appeared on same day.
Lee
They aren’t replying to e-mail requests for further information very quickly at all.
I am a little confused, I cannot see anything about this change. Is this for everyone selling on Amazon ?
I have to be honest if they are changing the disbursements to weekly or even more regularly then that would be amazing progress.
I have been through the verification process with Amazon and although I am not a limited company just a sole trader I didn’t have any problems at all. I did have to ask HMRC for a letter to say I was registered with them but once that arrived a couple of days after I asked for it everything was fine and I was fully registered. I’ve seen the people on the forums saying they had problems but I certainly didn’t.
This is apparently a rolling process, some were verified a few months ago, some haven’t.
I helped set up another company’s account on Amazon and was surprised it was different to my much older one. When I queried it with Amazon they confirmed that they were getting round to all accounts but don’t know when they will have finished.
From what I can gather it is going to be for the rest of the year.
This has been a very stressful process for me. Been ongoing for at least 3 months. Verification is STILL pending (on Amazon’s side, not mine…)
One thing that surprises me – I’ve been able to make disbursements from my account on a daily basis for at least 18 months? Surprised that others here have to wait a week?
S.
I supplied the information to Amazon a few days ago and am just awaiting the verification process.
One thing I didn’t realise, until this morning, was that my regular disbursement has stopped.
I started a Support chat with Amazon this morning to be told that “verification takes between 10-14 days and within that time I would not receive regular disbursements”. So the chunk of money I was expecting in to my account this morning is on hold until they get their finger out.
I thought I’d mention this in case anyone else is about to go through the procedure. Knowing that your latest regular disbursement MAY be delayed may or may not help someone.
Had a big problem with this. Our representative name was somehow missing from the German account (Not sure how, as have had it for a couple of years) but as the account was in verification mode we could not edit anything. We made this aware to Amazon and they agreed to just wait for the verification to finish then it would be editable, however add it to our about section just to make sure we conform with the German online selling laws. This was done and accepted by them.
However, in this time the performance team thought we had done this on purpose and suspended our account. We contacted them many times and they kept saying this was out fault and nothing they could do. Finally after many emails and calls we got an email to say we have added and they decided to re-instate our privileges. So something out of our control from Amazon got us suspended.
Anyway, before doing the verification make sure that anything you want to change in the account details are done as you cannot edit these until the verification is finished which is 5-10 days.
Does anyone have the link to the “EU regulations that require Amazon Payments Europe to collect certain business and personal information from you and take steps to confirm your identity”. ?
Hi, I have a question on this, I sell as a hobby in small volume and would probably register as an individual with Amazon payments EU, my only concern is that if I did this would they remove my Professional selling plan subscription? I have had this for years and use the various listing tools like the inventory page. It seems over complicated for me to register as a business or sole trader, but I do want to carry on with the seller features the way they are – do you know if one thing impacts the other or are they simply gathering information for the payments side? My concern is choosing the wrong ‘seller category’ (under business and contact information) because this can’t be changed later and I don’t want my choice of ‘individual’ to damage my existing professional selling plan features – Thanks!