An invoice does two jobs for a wholesale seller. It is the accounting record of what you bought, and it is the evidence Amazon asks for when it wants to know where your stock came from. The second job has requirements the first does not, and an invoice that is perfectly good for your accountant can still be useless to a Seller Support reviewer. This guide lists what a compliant invoice needs to show and why.

The fields Amazon looks for

  • Supplier identity. The legal name of the business that supplied the goods, its trading name if different, a physical address, a phone number and an email or website. Amazon may check these.
  • Your identity. Your business name and address as Amazon holds them. This is the field most often wrong, because sellers register with a supplier under a trading name and with Amazon under a legal name, or move and update only one.
  • Invoice number and date. A unique number and the date of issue. Amazon counts the 180-day window from this date.
  • Line items. One line per product with a name and an identifier (UPC, EAN, ISBN or the supplier's SKU), the quantity, and ideally the unit price. Amazon needs to tie each line to an ASIN and count units per product.
  • Totals and currency. The invoice total and the currency it is billed in. Prices may be obscured when you submit, but the document must originally have carried them.

Dates and quantities

Amazon's published guidance at the time of writing asks for invoices dated within 180 days and for at least 10 units of the product in total. Buy the units for an application on a single invoice where you can: a spread of small purchases is harder for a reviewer to add up, and every invoice you upload is another document that can be questioned. Apply soon after the invoice is issued so the date is never the problem.

Things that are not invoices

Order confirmations, packing slips, delivery notes, quotes, pro forma invoices, card receipts and marketplace order pages all describe a transaction without being a commercial invoice from the supplier. A pro forma in particular looks like an invoice and is regularly declined, because it is a request for payment before supply rather than a record of supply. If your supplier only issues pro formas, ask for a tax or commercial invoice once the goods have shipped.

VAT, sales tax and resale certificates

UK and EU suppliers charge VAT and show it on the invoice. US suppliers do not: there is no VAT in the United States, and US sales tax on wholesale purchases is normally avoided by providing the supplier with a resale certificate for your state. Amazon does not require any of this on the invoice, but a reviewer expects a US invoice to look like a US invoice. A US buyer holding an invoice with UK VAT on it will sometimes be asked to explain it.

Athena invoices US accounts from Hector Solutions, Inc., a Delaware corporation, in US dollars with no VAT. Because we sell to you for resale, no US sales tax is charged provided we hold a valid resale certificate for every state we deliver into. The public signup form does not collect certificates. When the certificate step is shown in your account, sign and store any required certificates there as the last step before that application can be submitted — an authenticated US application that still needs them will not submit without them. UK accounts are invoiced by the same company under its UK correspondence details, in pounds.

What Athena shows you

An issued Athena invoice carries the fields above: the legal entity and trading name, the US address and support line, the legal business name from the account at generation time, the billing address stored on the order at checkout, each product on its own line with identifier, quantity and unit price, the invoice number and date, and the total in US dollars. A single-payment order receives a commercial invoice; a deposit-schedule order first receives a deposit invoice and later a balance invoice. Athena-issued invoices can be downloaded as a PDF from your orders area once issued. Orders invoiced through our invoice portal open there instead of as the Athena PDF. The legal business name is not snapshotted at order time — a later name change on the account can appear on a newly generated copy of an older order — while checkout-time addresses on that order are not rewritten by a later account-address edit.

Match the invoice to the listing before you order

The identifier on the invoice line has to lead a reviewer to the ASIN you are selling. That is easy when the supplier prints the UPC, EAN or ISBN, and hard when the line only carries an internal SKU or a shortened title. Before you order for an application, check that the identifier the supplier will print matches the identifier on the Amazon.com listing, and that the pack configuration matches too: an invoice for a case of twelve does not obviously support a listing for a single unit, and a reviewer will not do the arithmetic for you.

It is also worth reading the listing's economics before you buy the units an application needs. In the Athena catalog a line shows the trade price beside the Amazon.com Buy Box price, fees, sales rank, estimated monthly sales and 90-day ROI wherever that data is available, so you can confirm that the product you are about to document is one worth listing. Ten units of a line that does not sell is an expensive invoice.

Keeping a trail that survives a review

  • Store every invoice with the order confirmation and the delivery record, by order, in one place. An account-health request usually gives you a short window to respond.
  • Keep supplier details current on your side too: if a supplier changes its legal name or address, old invoices remain valid but you should be able to explain the change.
  • Never edit a PDF. If an invoice is wrong, ask the supplier to reissue it. Because a newly generated Athena PDF reads the current account business name, confirm the name and the checkout billing address before you order if you need the document to match Seller Central exactly. Contact the sales team if a past invoice needs a formal correction.
  • Match your Amazon business details to your supplier accounts before the first order, not after the first rejection.

For the application process itself, read how to get ungated on Amazon US with wholesale distributor invoices.