Selling Jewelry on Amazon: Application Process

Amazon will bond you to the whole process by requiring you to pay a $500 application fee upfront. Amazon is aware that no reasonable business owner will stay with them until the end of this process without tricking them into some sort of bondage – you’re in a sense, enslaved by your own actions by paying them $500 upfront.

This is not the only cost! In our case, the following is what it cost us in addition to the application fee to be hesitantly part of this process. If we had known initially that this would cost to go through this process, we would have happily withdrawn the application and given Amazon the $500 in charity.

• At least 20 hours of work to read their instructions and guidelines.
• At least 200 hours of work to redo all product pictures on a pure white background.
• At least 20 hours to complete a daunting 25-page Excel sheet form.
• At least 15-20 hours of phone calls to get a simple answer to our questions or get our own products back after waiting for 3-4 months.
• Ten of thousand dollars in revenues because we were supposed to hold 25 of our top-selling products on hold valued between $100,000-$150,000 so that Amazon can physically inspect 10 of them. They have the right to keep these ten products with them for review for up to 90 days but would not disclose it to you at the time of the application. In our case, the products submitted to them for inspection alone were worth over $50-60K. We lost two sales of over $10,000.00 while these products were with Amazon for inspection. No reasonable business is going to live up to this.
• Hundreds of dollars in shipping and Amazon seller’s account fees. They charged us the seller’s account fee for three months even though we were not authorized to list any item as the review was incomplete.
• The stress and nightmares of not receiving feedback or response in months.

The most challenging and surprisingly ironic aspect of this process is that Amazon’s sales team has no control over this process. They don’t even have a phone number for the team that oversees this process. All they can do is email them! Amazon’s sales team and we had to wait for the Fine Jewelry Quality Assurance Team for weeks at times to get a simple response.

In a nutshell, no matter how long you take to read the instructions and follow their vague guidelines, you will not succeed on your first attempt.

If you sell real fine jewelry (by which we mean high-value jewelry), you simply can’t afford this process unless you have thousands of pieces, in which case you are not a small business. As a small business, it is not the right fit for you.

On the other hand, if you are selling sterling silver jewelry that you buy from Alibaba and resell on Amazon, you should apply. This is the right marketplace for you as the inventory you’ll submit to Amazon would be worth barely $1,000, and it can sit at Amazon for as long as they want.

Check our guide on unique engagement rings, halo engagement rings, and engagement ring settings.