Amazon Marketplace
Amazon's third-party selling channel, where independent sellers list beside Amazon's own retail offer.
Aliases: Amazon third-party marketplace, 亚马逊, 亚马逊卖家平台
What the marketplace is
Amazon Marketplace is the third-party half of Amazon's retail business. Independent sellers list products on Amazon's own storefronts, next to Amazon Retail's first-party offer, and reach the same customers, the same Prime delivery promise and the same advertising inventory. Amazon opened its stores to outside sellers in 2000. Third-party listings now make up most of the catalogue in the larger marketplaces, and the seller base runs from one-person businesses to listed companies.
Sellers work through Seller Central, where listings, orders, advertising, reports and policy notices sit in one place. Amazon issues accounts by region rather than by country: one North America account covers the United States, Canada and Mexico, and one Europe account covers the EU marketplaces and the UK. Verification, policy standing and account health attach to that regional account, not to an individual country store.
What the platform enforces
Enforcement rests on a few systems that a cross-border seller meets early.
Account health is a scorecard of order defect rate, cancellation rate, late shipment rate and policy violations. Metrics below target trigger warnings and listing suppression; the end state is suspension.
Brand and listing control runs through Brand Registry, which gives a trademark owner authority over listings and access to reporting tools. Counterfeit, patent and copyright complaints flow through the same intellectual property process, with a notice-and-takedown path open to rights holders.
Multiple accounts are restricted. The default rule is one selling account per region, with exceptions granted for documented business reasons. Accounts that share identity, payment, address or technical signals can be treated as associated accounts and enforced as one unit, which is why multi-brand operators settle the entity structure and the environment design before accounts are created rather than after a suspension.
Compliance layers
Product and tax obligations sit on top of platform rules and change with the destination market. In the EU, sellers handle VAT registration, IOSS for low-value consignments, GPSR safety and traceability duties, CE marking where the category requires it, and EPR registration country by country. In the US, INFORM Consumers Act verification applies to high-volume sellers, CPSC rules cover consumer and children's products, and import duty now includes Section 301 treatment after the low-value route closed (de minimis).
How cost is charged
Amazon charges a referral fee as a percentage of the sale price by category, a fulfilment fee where FBA is used, monthly storage by volume, and advertising spend. Fee schedules are revised on a published calendar, and the referral percentages and size tiers move margin more than the headline subscription does.
Reading a policy change
Amazon publishes programme and fee changes as Seller Central announcements with effective dates, applied per marketplace. A change announced for the US does not carry into the EU, Japan or Canada automatically. Sellers compare each announcement against every regional account they operate before adjusting price, stock or listing plans.