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Open multiple Amazon seller accounts: Legal and grayhack method

 

In 2022, starting an ecommerce business would be the best decision that you ever made. Consumers are increasingly buying products online, and the tools and the knowledge that you need to reach them are more accessible than ever. There has never been a better time to start an ecommerce business than right now.

For beginners, starting an ecommerce business can feel overwhelming. We are going to talk about opening multiple seller accounts on Amazon. Specifically we’ll be talking about their legality, how they are used by some sellers to take advantage of the system and what the requirements are for opening a second account

According to Amazon, “You may only maintain one Seller Central account for each region in which you sell unless you have a legitimate business need to open a second account and all of your accounts are in good standing.

Generally speaking, you can operate with only one selling account on Amazon. If you try to create multiple accounts with similar information, it is possible that Amazon will soon realize what you are doing and ban all of your selling accounts, including the original one. Therefore, always operate under one selling account only.

Why have multiple Amazon accounts ?

2022 is a great year to expand your businesses on Amazon. Most sellers after having been successful on one account will open up a second or third account. But be completely cautious with Amazon policies as long as you never sell the same items, across those accounts, maybe you’ve got multiple brands.

There’s actually quite a few reasons why sellers want another account for legitimate reasons and there’s also some blackhat reason.

Increase revenue and monthly income

If your business is already doing well, opening a second account could be the next best step. Another account can generate even more revenue every month.

If one account gets suspended. You might have the ability to navigate or at least keep some sales going on on another account.

Diversify your business

Diversifying a business is usually a great move. This has to be planned for it to be successful; however, diversifying a business is also risky. That is why, if you want to diversify your business, you should open another account. You can combine other products or services to increase sales.

If you have very different brands under one company or even under multiple companies, this can make it more difficult to manage all your different brands than it was under one Amazon account. But that’s a legitimate reason.

An illegitimate reason would be to have another account to quote, unquote fall back on if your other account is shut down.  

Amazon is actually very good at detecting multiple accounts even if there isn’t any information shared between them.

Another reason might be because you have different business partners, maybe you’ve got A and B together on business 1, but business partner A and C are on business 2. In addition to that, you might have different display names.

Expand your business

A second account can be a great way of expanding your business. Expanding a business will, in the long run, result in more profits. If your business is doing well then you might consider expansion as the next big thing. Expanding your business is like building a new brand for your business.

The constraint of opening multiple Amazon seller Accounts

  • More time to manage all accounts:  Having a second account means doubling the time and effort if you want to achieve good results.
  • Possibilities of running into losses Most sellers only consider all the benefits of opening multiple accounts on Amazon. You should also consider the possibility of running into losses. Loss can result from various factors, including main reasons like lack of ample time to manage both accounts.
  • Risk of accounts being closed:  Once Amazon discovers your multiple accounts, you risk suspension, which is a huge blow, especially if you are already making a lot of profits.

How Does Amazon Detect Multiple Accounts?

Amazon knows you have multiple accounts from using your IP address to cookies and computer operating systems, Amazon uses several ways to trace accounts.

They keep track of email addresses, passwords, and under names, and any false step could trigger their system.

Known ways that Amazon detects that a seller may have a second account are as follows:

  • Device ID
  • IP Address
  • Credit Card
  • Bank Account
  • Company name (and/or DBA)
  • Billing and/or Shipping Address
  • Phone number
  • User's IP address
  • Amazon user login name
  • Email address
  • Amazon login password
  • Browser and browser plugin
  • Computer operating system
  • Cookies stored on your computer, including text and Flash cookies

Amazon will cross-reference all this data and figure out if you are using multiple accounts. Since Amazon has a lot of tools at their disposal, you may be wondering how black hat and gray hat sellers are able to open multiple accounts. It all starts with Amazon requirements.

What you can or can’t do running multiple accounts

Here are the most important things to keep separated:

  • IP addresses
  • Computers
  • Phones
  • Points of contact
  • Staff members (with limited access to accounts)
  • Tax ID numbers
  • Entities (LLC, etc.)
  • Domains and hosting companies
  • Phone numbers
  • Email addresses
  • Physical locations
  • Warehouse addresses
  • Product spreadsheets
  • Branding

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.

Blackhat method

Some of the requirements to open a second account are separate credit cards or separate email address or maybe a separate bank account.

These three requirements don’t have to match up to the seller entity name. Many black hat sellers who open multiple accounts also use multiple ISPs (Internet Service Provider) and different computers to avoid being detected. But this way will take you a lot of effort and money to operate.

With so many risks stacked against any business running multiple accounts, how can you help to protect your work against sudden bans?

A lot of Amazon sellers don’t know about anti detect-browser software. This is a solution that is considered much cheaper than the traditional way to change device information. digital parameters and IP addresses. Hidemyacc is an excellent example if you are considering this technique to safely open multiple accounts without being detected.

Antidetect browsers like Hidemyacc could help you get rid of those risks listed above by hiding your original browser fingerprint and creating new and unique browser fingerprints for your new profiles.

Besides, Hidemyacc updates continuous computer/smartphone (iOS, Android) parameters, browsers, new operating systems, creating dense data sources to help users create a variety of different machine parameters. That’s why you are UNDETECTABLE.

You can take the 7 days free trial package from Hidemyacc by downloading the link below

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Windup

Now you’ve had in hand the overall technique to open a second Amazon seller account. Creating multiple accounts is absolutely possible with the help of technology and the right use of the method we mentioned above. Obviously, with uncountable benefits of an antidetect browser tool, you will eliminate the maximum number of risks occurring when running these accounts.