Welcome to the bring your product idea to life podcast. This is the podcast for you if you're getting started selling products or if you'd like to create your own product to sell. I'm Vicki Weinberg, a product creation coach and Amazon expert. Every week I share friendly practical advice as well as inspirational stories from small businesses. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to my mini Tuesday episode, which I've now decided to name Amazon made Easy. I quite like that. So today we're going to talk about whether you need a free or a professional Amazon selling plan. I'm going to cover what's the difference and give you a little bit of insight about which to choose and which might be best for you. I'm going to be honest, this will be a super quick episode. It may be the quickest episode I've ever recorded, but it is still worth recording because this is something I'm asked fairly often. So I do think it's worth covering off in an episode for you. So let's talk about the two types of Amazon seller accounts and which one you need. So first off, I think I've already mentioned that if you want to sell your products on Amazon, you need an Amazon Seller central account. And when you join Amazon and when you set up your seller account, you have two types of account that you can choose. So the first one is the free selling plan and the second is the professional. Going to start here by saying that you can actually switch between these accounts fairly easily. So while I'm giving you some information and hopefully some ideas about which might be right for you now, it doesn't mean that you need to sort of choose a plan and stick with this forever. So give you some examples and real life examples. So some people like to start with an individual selling plan and perhaps they might then work on getting their listing set up, adding the photos, everything else that's involved in selling on Amazon and then, and only then, when they're ready to launch or maybe their they're about to send their stock in, perhaps then they might upgrade to the professional account and that could save you a month or two of fees. Equally, I know people who sell their products on Amazon who have a professional selling plan and then take a break for some reason. So for example, for myself when I was using Tiny Chipmunk, I got to this point where I was really struggling because I was completely out of stock and my supplier couldn't get stocked to me quick enough. I actually didn't do this, but what I could have done at that point was downgrade my Amazon seller account to a free account and avoid any ongoing fees. While I didn't actually have anything to sell, as I say, I didn't do that, could have done that. And I know people who do do that. So just let you know, it's really quick and easy to switch between accounts. So never let this be something you get too hung up on. Okay, so now let's look at the different accounts and what the differences are. So the individual selling account is free, so you don't pay any fee for having that account. What you do pay is 75 pence per sale. So that's it. Now the professional account is £25 per month plus VAT. Obviously, I'm just talking about the UK. If you're listening to this from another country and you want to sell on Amazon in a different territory, then that cost might be different. So for example, in the US it's 39, 99 including, including taxes. But in the UK, 25 pounds a month plus VAT. So that equals 30 pounds a month in total. So that's how much it's going to cost on a very top level. Because remember that there are other fees as well. Whichever Amazon selling account you choose, there will be other fees. I covered this in my bonus episode on the 29th of October. I ran through everything there. So if you haven't listened to this episode already, please do, because I think you'll find that really helpful. So let's talk a little bit about the differences. So with the individual selling account, you can only make 35 sales a month. That's it. Any more than that, either your listings get shut off or you have to pay to upgrade to professional account. So that's the first thing. The other thing is it's a pretty basic account. So if you have an individual selling account, you can't use ads and you can't use any other features. So you can't use Amazon sponsored products to advertise your products on Amazon. You also can't use things such such as Amazon Vine, a content brand registry. You can't send your stock in for fba. Hopefully you know what all of these terms mean. If you don't, please don't worry because anything that I've just rattled off there that I haven't covered, I will talk about in future episodes. So all of this will become clear. But just know that if you have the individual Amazon selling account, all you can do is sell. You can set up a basic listing, images, text, price and you need to fulfill all of your orders yourself. You also can't sell in the handmade category if you have an individual selling account, so that's a free account. So I think that's everything. So if you're selling with the individual account, just to recap, maximum of 35 sales a month, you're going to pay 75 pence per sale, but you don't get any additional features. If you have the professional seller account, that's £30amonth, including VAT, and you can do lots more things with that account. I cannot tell you which one of these you should do. However, my advice would be that if you're a business seller, you might want to consider the professional account, at least have a look and see what you think is right for you. But for me, all of the things that you can do with the professional account, like the brand registry, like the fact that you can use fba, Amazon, vine and all these other features, do make it worth it. Although, having said that, as I mentioned at the beginning, if you're just getting set up and you think actually it's going to take you a while to get up and running, maybe you want to start the individual account knowing that you'll upgrade at some point. Can't tell you what to do. That's just the information you need that will hopefully help you to make a decision. So I'm now going to end this quickest episode ever. And as always, if you have any questions, please do get in touch. I would love to help you and I will be back with another mini Amazon Made Easy episode next week. Thank you so much for listening. Right to the end of this episode. Do remember that you can get the full Black catalogue and lots of free resources on my website, vickiewinberg.com Please do remember to rate and review this episode if you've enjoyed it, and also share it with a friend who you think might find it useful. Thank you again and see you next week.