Hello!! I’m still waiting for a reply from Google AdSense. It’s been a week and a half. Hope the results of the site review comes soon..!
In the meantime, I decided to go ahead and make my Amazon seller central account first, since I’m planning to sell my books and merchandise in the near future. After a huge mess, I’ve successfully passed their review and made my account this afternoon, so we’re now on Amazon! Yay~! Here’re a little picture of the Tenko Store to celebrate!
I’ll keep working hard until I’ve successfully sold my first merchandise! Now, if you’re interested in the ‘huge mess’ I got into, feel free to read on!
The Wild Adventure
The only online shop I’ve ever opened was my LINE Store. So something like Amazon is my first time. I don’t have a buyer’s account either, so I’ve actually never used it before. (My sis uses it and I usually just ask her to order for me. Oops…)
But since everyone uses Amazon, I thought that it’ll be a good place to start if I want to open an online store. My friends from other countries would be able to buy things easily, too. How convenient! I was quite excited to have my own store there.
So I sat down on Monday night, looked up detailed tutorials on YouTube, followed them to the T to fill my registration form, and then went to sleep…
Only to wake up in the morning and find my form rejected!
Kept getting stuck at Identity Verification
Amazon’s huge, so it’s only natural for it to have a strong security system. As of now, a new seller’s asked to show a photo or scan of (1) Either a driver’s license or passport. (2) Bank or credit card statement.
For reference, I’m a foreigner currently living and working in Japan. My passport passed, but my bank statement didn’t for some unknown reason. So I tried resending a scan of my bank book instead since some users said that worked.
But then it got rejected again. So I tried sending my credit card statement. But it didn’t work either. They never mentioned what the problem was in the rejection email. So I had to do a huge, frustrating goose chase all over Google and the Amazon forums to figure out where I went wrong. It got even more frustrating when a method that might work for one user didn’t seem to work for another.
Feeling completely lost and frustrated out of my mind, I talked about it a little with my dear friend Bobotan. Bobotan’s so nice she went to YouTube to help look for tutorials that explained what Amazon actually wants, and where to watch out when filling the form. (God bless her!) She found a nice one for me, so I just looked through it and a few other tutorials.
After watching them, I made a few guesses about why all my documents failed:
- Bank statement probably failed because it didn’t have my name and the bank’s details on it. (It was a PDF I downloaded from the bank’s site and only had the latest transactions.)
- Bank book scan, I have no idea why it failed. (My name’s correct, bank transactions for a whole year’s there, too!)
- Credit card statement probably failed because my bank reverses my name and surname. (In Japan, the surname’s written first.)
- (Possible) Because my documents are Japan’s documents, maybe it didn’t get through the international check??
Of course, all the above were just guesses. Despite watching the tutorials, my head was still relatively full of question marks. But since Bobotan had been so nice to help me, I had to keep going!
Retry
Just to be sure I hadn’t messed up anywhere else, I decided to just delete the rejected account and start from scratch. And to be ultra safe that everything was matching my documents this time, I logged in from the amazon.co.jp site, switched the site language to Japanese, and filled my whole form (especially addresses!) in Japanese. (In my previous try, I did everything in English.)
Passport passed, so I just sent the same scan I did previously.
In my previous try, my bank book scan failed and I had no idea why, but after looking at the tutorials, I decided to give it another shot. Amazon and the tutorials said that just the front page (if it has your name on it) + your latest transactions are enough. I sent exactly those two previously but it didn’t work.
The page behind the cover page has some extra information about my bank on it, so maaaaybe they wanted that, too? So I scanned cover page + page behind the cover page + latest transactions and sent them. If it didn’t work, I was planning to go to the bank and ask them to give me a physical bank statement.
But then surprise!
Some time after I submitted the documents, I got an email telling me that I passed and that I can start selling!
Quest complete!
I’m glad that I succeeded in making the account! (Thanks a lot to Bobotan for being an emotional support and helping out!) I’ll poke around a bit and try to get used to how the Amazon seller account works. I’ll see if I can get some goods on the shelves soon, too. Until next time~
