Indeed Amazon is an excellent platform for setting up an eCommerce business. With millions of new sellers joining the forum every year, it has become an attractive marketplace.
Whether it’s a sales decline or you simply want to take a break from work, sometimes, for some known reason, one doesn’t want to continue with their Amazon’s seller account. And unfortunately, it’s pretty uncommon for Amazon sellers to properly close their accounts as most of them just don’t feel the need and leave their accounts unattended. Abandoning your account doesn’t mean it will close itself. Therefore, you need to learn how to close Amazon seller account properly.
Things to Take a Look at Before Closing Your
Seller Account
While closing an Amazon seller account might not seem a complicated task, it comes with pros and cons that you must consider as a business owner.
Once you have closed the account, there’s no going back. If you want to sign in back to your account for any reason, Amazon won’t allow you to do that. There’s a separate process for signing in back to your seller account, which would involve signing up from everywhere all over again.
Apart from that, you will no longer enjoy the benefits that Amazon provides to its seller account holders. For instance,
- You will lose access to credit card information and sales history
- You will lose access to your customers and be unable to process returns and respond to refund requests and Amazon’s A – Z guarantee claims.
- The websites and Amazon accounts in different markets you used to access via your seller account will no longer be accessible once you have closed your seller account.
- You will no longer have access to your customer’s profile. All your product reviews and customer discussions, along with the pictures of your product, will be lost.
- You will lose access to Amazon music, Drive, Prime Photos, etc.
- You would lose all the remaining balance and funds in your seller account like promotional credit balance or Amazon gifts cards.
- If you are a big seller on Amazon, with multiple accounts at different Amazon marketplaces, bear in mind that shutting the North American Unified Account, for example, will close all your eligible Amazon accounts as well.
Therefore, before closing an Amazon account, it is recommended to create a backup of your sales data, customer history, and all the things you want to preserve before finally shutting it down.
Make sure you take care of guarantee claims, returns, and refunds before closing your account. If there are any funds left in your account, you will lose them on closing.
How to Close An Amazon Seller Account?
Following are the steps to close an Amazon seller account.
- Respond to all the processed and pending orders to ensure you don’t leave any before closing your seller account.
- You will have to wait for 90 days to pass the AZ claim period – a system that makes sure your account balance is nil before closing your account.
- Complete all the transactions for your customers.
- Make sure you have entered your current bank account details on your seller account so that you will receive the final remittance from Amazon.
- Make sure you don’t have any inventories left. In case if you are still left with any, send a request to return them before you delete your Amazon account.
- Once you have done all the above steps, click on the “Contact Us” page.
- From the list, select “Close your account.”
- A form will appear. Fill it out carefully and submit the account closure request.
Once you submit the request for account closure, you will receive a confirmation email once your account closes successfully. However, if they encounter any issues in closing your account, they will send you an email with the reason stating why they couldn’t close your account, along with a note of necessary actions to take to solve the problem.
Alternate Options:
If you don’t feel like permanently deleting your Amazon seller account, you can try the alternate option to shut it down temporarily.
1. Downgrading Account:
An Amazon professional account costs $39.99 per month. On the contrary, an individual account will cost you $0.99 for each item sold. If your reason for closing Amazon’s account is low sales. You can switch to an individual account as you won’t have to pay any fee until your item is sold. However, later when your business progresses, you can upgrade to a professional account.
How to downgrade:
- Log into Amazon Seller Central Account and click “Settings” and then “Accounts info” from the drop-down list.
- Head to the “Your services” section and click “Manage.”
- Select “Downgrade”
- Once you are sure, click “Proceed” to finally downgrade your seller account.
2. Turn on Vacation Mode:
If you want a break from your business, you can choose to turn on vacation mode. This will not permanently close your account but inactivate your listings for a specified period of time so that customers can not make a purchase during your off time.
How to activate Vacation Mode:
- Head to the “Settings” tab
- Select “Account Info” from the drop-down list
- Choose the “Going on Vacation?” option from the “Listings Status.”
- Now choose which Amazon marketplace you want to temporarily deactivate and click “Save”
After doing so, within 24 hours, the deactivation takes effect. The reactivation process is quite similar and simple, and within 15 minutes, Amazon will resume your account.
Be mindful. This method will only work for the listings that you fulfill but not for those done by Amazon. Moreover, your FBA listings would remain active until you explicitly inactivate them from your inventory.
Deactivate Your Listings:
Deleting or deactivating a listing is just another method for making your listings inactive. Again, it will not permanently delete your amazon seller account. However, it works best for products that are not performing well. That being said, it is a kind of a permanent change. As once you delete your selected listings, Amazon will remove them forever.
How to delete listings?
- Click on the “Inventory” tab and select “Manage Inventory” from the drop-down menu.
- For every listing, there will be an “Edit” option. Find the ones you want to delete and click “Delete Product and Listings.”
Clicking the “Delete Product and Listings” means you have permanently removed the particular product from your listings, along with its product description and sales history.
Note: Update the inventory units to 0 before deleting them. Inventory quantity deletion and product deletion are two entirely different options. Just following the former will not delete your listings. They will remain on the offer listings page.
Conclusion:
If you have gone through the entire post of how to close an Amazon seller’s account, you must know there are other alternatives as well for deleting an Amazon account if you want it to be done temporarily. Unless you are fully sure to delete your account permanently, you should take a look at the aforementioned alternative ways. However, if you are bent on deleting it permanently, then consider selling it first. You might get a handsome amount from selling it. Try not to settle below $500. In fact, you can get even more from the deal if you work smart.