Why Amazon verifies, and re-verifies
Verification does not end at registration. Amazon re-runs identity checks on established accounts from time to time, and the trigger is often invisible to the seller. A change of bank details, a new address, a jump in volume, a change of legal entity, or simply time passing can all put an account back into review. Sellers who have traded for five years without a problem are not exempt, and a verification request does not mean anyone suspects you of wrongdoing.
In the United States there is also a legal layer. The INFORM Consumers Act requires marketplaces to collect and verify information from high volume third party sellers, broadly those passing a couple of hundred transactions and several thousand dollars in a twelve month window. Amazon has to verify bank account details, tax identification and contact information within a short statutory window. That explains why some requests carry unusually tight deadlines and can read as abrupt.
The useful way to think about it is as a document matching exercise done at speed, often by a reviewer who knows nothing about your business. Nobody is judging whether you seem legitimate. They are checking whether the text on three or four documents matches the text in your account. Once you see it that way, most rejections stop being mysterious.
What the INFORM Consumers Act actually requires
The FTC's guidance on the Act sets out the numbers behind that "couple of hundred transactions" summary. You count as a high volume third party seller if, in any continuous 12-month period during the past 24 months, you had 200 or more separate sales of new or unused consumer products and $5,000 or more in gross revenue, counting only sales through that marketplace.
- Once you provide your bank, contact and tax ID information, the marketplace has 10 days to verify it. This is where the tight deadlines come from.
- At least once a year the marketplace must ask you to certify electronically that your information is unchanged, or to provide updates. Amazon's periodic prompts to confirm your details are part of this, and ignoring one puts the account at risk.
- If you have annual gross revenue of $20,000 or more on a marketplace, it must disclose your full name, physical address and contact information to buyers, on the listing or the order confirmation. This is why the address you verify with may become visible to customers.
That last point is a common reason sellers try to verify with a virtual office address, and it is also why those attempts so often fail, as the address section below explains. Our step-by-step guide to passing INFORM Act verification covers the US process in more detail.
What documents actually pass
Requests vary by region and by what triggered them, but the same kinds of document come up again and again. Getting them right the first time saves weeks.
- Government photo identity. A passport is the safest choice because it is readable internationally and has a clean machine readable zone. National identity cards and driving licences are usually accepted, and cards normally need both sides. The document must be in date, and the name must match the account holder exactly.
- Proof of address for the individual. A bank or credit card statement, typically issued within the last 90 days, showing your name, your address, the bank's name and real transaction lines. Utility bills for electricity, gas, water or landline broadband also work in most regions.
- Business registration. For companies, the incorporation certificate or an equivalent registry extract, with the legal entity name matching Seller Central exactly, suffix included.
- Bank account ownership. A statement or bank letter that ties the deposit account to the registered entity. A mismatch between a company and a personal account here is a common and serious blocker.
Supply each document in the cleanest form you can get. A bank statement downloaded as a PDF straight from online banking beats a photograph of paper every time, because the text is selectable, the layout is intact and nothing is cropped. Where you must use a paper original, a flatbed scan beats a phone photo.
Do not try to make one document prove two things. A bank statement that shows the entity name but an old address will fail as proof of address even though it passes as proof of banking. Submit the document that clearly does each job, not the one you happen to have to hand.
The boring reasons documents fail
When sellers describe being stuck in a verification loop, the cause is almost always on this list, not anything substantive.
- Cropped edges. All four corners of the document must be visible. A scan that clips the top of a letterhead or the bottom of a statement looks incomplete and gets bounced without a second look.
- Glare and shadow. Phone photos of glossy identity cards often blow out exactly the area with the document number. Photograph the card flat on a dark surface in diffuse daylight, with the camera held parallel to it.
- Screenshots instead of documents. A screenshot of a banking app shows a balance. Reviewers want the issued statement with its header, address block and date.
- Old documents. A statement from four months ago fails a ninety day rule however legitimate it is. Download a current one instead of reusing the file you sent last time.
- Name formatting. "Rob Hughes" on the bank statement and "Robert James Hughes" on the passport are different strings. Middle names, initials, accents, hyphens and the order of given and family names all matter. Change Seller Central to match the identity document, not the other way round.
- Uncertified translations. Documents that are not in the marketplace's language usually need a certified translation supplied with the original, not in place of it. A translation you typed yourself is not enough.
- Signs of editing. Never open a document in an editor to straighten, brighten or annotate it. Anything that looks retouched invites suspicion, and highlighting a field is the quickest way to have a file treated as altered.
In every case the reviewer is looking for reasons to be confident, and anything ambiguous counts against you. One obviously clean document is worth more than three mediocre ones.
The address problem
Address is the biggest structural cause of repeated failure, and rescanning cannot fix it. Amazon wants the address on your account to be one you can independently evidence, and a surprising number of sellers cannot.
Virtual offices and mail forwarding services are the usual culprit. They are legitimate businesses and many sellers use them for good reasons, but they are also widely used to hide where someone is, so reviewers know the common providers. More practically, no utility company bills you at a mail forwarding address, and your bank statement almost certainly goes elsewhere. The documents will never match the account, so the loop never closes.
Registered agent addresses cause the same problem in a slightly different way. The agent address is legally correct for the company registration but useless as personal proof of address, because nothing in your name is ever sent there.
If you genuinely trade from home, using the home address consistently is usually the quickest way through, uncomfortable as that can feel. The address in Seller Central, on the bank account and on the utility bill should be the same address. If you have moved recently, expect a period where old documents conflict with the new account details, and update the bank first so a current statement exists at the new address.
How the video call works
Video verification is now routine in several regions. Sellers often expect an interrogation, but it is closer to a live document check. You book an appointment slot, join at the time, and an Amazon associate confirms that the person on camera matches the identity document and that the physical documents exist.
Preparation makes the difference. Have the original identity document in your hand, not a copy and not an image on a second screen, and have the originals of the other documents you uploaded nearby. Join from somewhere quiet with good light on your face and a stable connection, on a device you can hold steady while showing a document to the camera. That is why a laptop with a fixed webcam is often harder to use than a phone.
Expect to confirm basic facts about the business: the legal entity, the address, what you sell and who owns it. Answer plainly and consistently with what is in the account. Sellers run into trouble when someone else set up the account for them and they cannot answer simple questions about their own business, which is exactly what the call is designed to catch.
If you cannot make the slot, rebook rather than miss it. A missed appointment is recorded and sets the case back.
When verification hits a live account
Re-verification on a trading account is more disruptive than at registration, because money and inventory are moving. Selling privileges may be paused and disbursements are often held, yet existing orders still need fulfilling. Run the operational side and the paperwork side as two parallel tasks.
Operationally, keep fulfilling. Late shipments and cancellations during a verification hold add a performance problem to a compliance problem, and different teams handle the two with different remedies. Where you can, stop FBA inventory drifting into stranded status while your attention is elsewhere.
On the paperwork, respond once, completely, with the cleanest documents you can produce. The urge to send everything you own straight away in a long message is understandable and backfires. A reviewer working through a queue wants exactly the items requested, clearly named, in the formats requested.
Held funds are usually the biggest worry. Money reserved during verification is not lost. It is released once the review clears, though it can take another settlement cycle to come through. Plan cash on the assumption that a hold could last a few weeks rather than a few days, because the businesses that get hurt are the ones with a payment due on Friday and nothing else in the bank.
Getting unstuck
If you have been rejected more than twice, stop resubmitting and audit the mismatch. Write down, side by side, the exact text in Seller Central for legal name, entity name, address and bank details, then the exact text on each document. The differences usually show up within a minute, and they are almost always the reason.
When you resubmit, change something real. Sending the same file again gets the same result and wastes a cycle. If the address cannot be evidenced, change the address situation, not the file. If the name differs because of a marriage, a transliteration or a legal name change, supply the document that links the two, because reviewers cannot infer it.
Escalate once you have a clean submission that has been wrongly rejected, and not before. A calm message that names the requested item, the document you supplied, the field said to be deficient and why the document satisfies it tends to move faster than a long account of what the hold is costing you. Keep it factual and short. Our guide to escalating with Seller Support covers the routes available when a case stalls.
The sellers who clear verification quickly rarely have the best story. Their bank, their government identity document and their Seller Central account all describe the same person at the same address, and they send a clean scan the first time. Getting those three records to agree is worth doing before Amazon asks.
A checklist before you submit
- The name in Seller Central matches your passport or ID card character for character, including middle names.
- The legal entity name matches the registry extract, including the suffix (Ltd, LLC, GmbH and so on).
- One address appears in Seller Central, on the bank account and on the proof of address.
- The proof of address was issued within the last 90 days and is a full document, not a screenshot.
- The deposit account belongs to the entity that holds the seller account.
- Every file shows all four corners, with no glare, edits or highlighting.
- Any document not in the marketplace's language has a certified translation attached alongside the original.
- If a video call is likely, the original documents are somewhere you can reach them.
Frequently Asked Questions
Usually because of the date, the format or the name. Most reviewers expect a document issued within the last 90 days, supplied as a full scan of the original or the provider's own PDF rather than a phone screenshot, showing your name and address exactly as they appear in Seller Central. Mobile phone bills are often refused as proof of address even though they look like utility bills.
A clean submission is often reviewed within two to three business days. Cases that need a video call depend on appointment availability, and each rejected resubmission restarts the clock. Sellers stuck in loops are usually resubmitting the same flawed document instead of fixing the mismatch behind it.
It often fails. Reviewers recognize virtual offices, mail forwarding services and registered agent addresses, and these rarely match a utility bill or bank statement in your name. If your business really operates from a home address, using that address consistently across Seller Central, your bank and your documents is usually the smoother path.
Amazon may pause selling privileges, hold disbursements, or both, while the review runs. Existing orders normally still need to be fulfilled. Funds held during verification are released once the review clears, though the reserve can take another settlement cycle to work through.
Yes. The call exists to confirm that the physical documents you uploaded exist and belong to you, so you will be asked to hold the original identity document up to the camera. Photocopies, phone images of documents and printed scans defeat the point of the call and usually fail it.
Possibly. Under the INFORM Consumers Act, US marketplaces must disclose the full name, physical address and contact information of high volume sellers with annual gross revenue of $20,000 or more on that marketplace, on the listing or the order confirmation. Read the FTC guidance for the detail before you decide which address to use.
