Common method
Holding company
When running multiple accounts for legitimate reasons, one of the best things that you can do is have a holding company to hold it together.
Once you’ve exceeded a few hundred thousand dollars of revenue per year, it makes even more sense to split things up. This makes the business easier to manage and sell later down the road.
This holding company could be a corporation, could be another LLC, whatever you want. Each of these companies will have an Amazon account and typically have an LLC on these companies as well. I will have a holding company - parent company - HC here.
With that in mind, you are going to have certain things taken care of underneath each account. Under each account, you will not wanna have very many things shared, so here’s some baseline rules.
You need to have a unique bank account, unique task structure, and unique email address. Generally speaking, we recommend having the domain name of the company, and being the main user admin under the account. It’s not critical but makes it easier.
So, you would go through opening up that second account manually by going to Seller Central.
Bank account
You cannot share a bank account and can’t share a bank name
Let’s say you are using a credit union or a national bank of some kind. You would have the ability to take that particular bank and have three accounts or three checking numbers with them. It’s no problem. You should also do the same with credit cards. You could have an Amax, Barclay or capital one, that doesn’t matter and have multiple cards underneath one account.
Basically, underneath each of these accounts, you would have one credit card per account, same thing with bank accounts. Inside of this, the checking number must be unique - unique credit card, unique bank account.
Also, you cannot have the same LLC or same tax infrastructure, same company across these accounts. Each must be individual LLC.
Your holding company name might be brand A, LLC 1 might be brand A1, LLC 2 might be brand A2 and LLC 3 might be brand A3. ( A Limited liability company (LLC) is a business structure that offers limited liability protection and pass-through taxation. As with corporations, the LLC legally exists as a separate entity from its owners)
Don’t sell the same ASIN across multiple accounts
Something to keep in mind: you can not sell the same ASIN across multiple accounts, but can sell with the same brand and same category (though we don’t recommend this). So if you are an Amazon aggregator who is reading this article and wondering “Can I sell the baby goods category across three accounts”, the answer is yes.
Some people will wonder “If I acquired another brand and they only had one ASIN, should i go ahead and suck them into my current seller central account”, the answer is typically yes. Some benefits to doing that is especially if you have other rollup brands in the same product category, it makes it easier to manage, especially for the small amount of SKUs.
One thing to keep in mind is that if you have all this history in the account, let’s say the account is 4 years old. If you are running advertising on this account and have thousands of transactions on a particular campaign. Then, on the same account you just made a new campaign, that campaign will not match the conversion of the ACOS level of the original campaign for about 4 to 8 weeks with an average of 6 being the average.
Now the same principle is applied. Let’s say I have account 1 and account 2, and I wanna bring one ASIN from account 1 to account number 2. If I replicated all of the same campaign structure (let’s just assume for logistics ease in this example here, that the account transfer was seamless and there’s no delay in logistic), the new campaign structure would take six weeks on average to catch up to the original account, so when you are doing your forecasting and you re thinking about potential impacts, of challenges to switching a product from one account to another, these are key things to take into account or keep in mind. Don’t sell the same ASINs across multiple accounts, and if you’re going to do a transfer, be prepared for some transitionary pains.
VAT
About VAT, if you’re in a European market, say you are an European aggregator, you must have one individual VAT per seller account. You cannot just simply take the holding company VAT and apply it. That’s because each individual company or a LLC must have its own VAT. You cannot do just one VAT registration. If you are operating in Europe, this is bad news because that is the pain in the butt. So is operating multiple LLC for that matter. That is significantly more complicated in the EU market.
You will need a separate bank account, separate mail and separate credit card
The general rule is that you are not required to have a separate business or personal entity. However, we still recommend opening a case with Amazon to request permission just to be safe. Use the keywords “sale tax” - Amazon is really sensitive about this keyword, so you can have more chances of getting approved for a second account.
What happens if you are purchasing accounts ?
Let’s say you originally only own LLC 1 and you don’t have a holding company yet, can you purchase a second account and start operating ? Yes. You should go ahead and restructure immediately and get the holding company done because the holding company will simplify your tax filings. At the end of the year, you can simply just file that one holding company across entities. If you don’t do this, then you have to file one set for each LLC. So, the quicker you get the infrastructure in place (you can do this with either a lawyer or a CPA). They can help you with legal entity filings.
In fact, with these methods we’ve listed above, Amazon still knows you have multiple accounts no matter what action you take. But just don’t break the rules
- don’t sell the same ASIN across multiple accounts,
- make sure when you transfer accounts, you don’t put the bank account transfer right before deposit switches.
If you’ve got a hundred thousand dollar deposit going in 48 hours then you switch the bank account, of course they’re gonna flag and trigger a security review. What you should do when transferring an account is switch that bank account right after a deposit three, within 72 hours or 5 days at max after a deposit. When you set up your closing date, keep those sort of dates in mind for easier transfer.
If you do get a security flag or something when transferring an account in, what will happen is they’ll just revert it backward, then they might remove access for 24 to 48 hours while they do a manual security review. It will give you a little bit of heart flutter.
If that were to happen, you just basically contact Amazon and explain that you are transferring the account and there’s no security issue. But you have to log in to the original admin account when that happens.
Just go ahead and produce your transfer to Amazon support, you can switch the legal name, do and redo the tax interview, switch the admin email address, update a credit card. Just be careful with the bank one.
