On Seller Central you are the seller of record. You own the inventory, you set the price, and Amazon takes a referral fee. AIMS360 brings those orders into the same OMS and the same stock record as your wholesale and EDI accounts.
On the marketplace you are the seller of record. You hold the inventory, you set retail, you keep the customer data and the PDP. What you take on in exchange is a fee stack and a set of performance metrics that got noticeably stricter in 2026.
Seller Central is Amazon's third party marketplace. You are the seller of record, you own the inventory, and you set your own retail price. Amazon takes a referral fee on each sale, plus a fulfillment fee if you use FBA. Registration is open, unlike Vendor Central, which is invite only.
For an apparel brand the decisive difference is price control. On 1P, Amazon decides what your goods sell for, which is where MAP conflict with specialty accounts comes from. On 3P that decision stays with you, and so does the customer data, the product page and the brand presentation.
The subscription itself is trivial by comparison: a Professional account runs 39.99 dollars a month, or you can pay 99 cents per item sold on an Individual account. The real economics are in the referral and fulfillment fees below.
The apparel rate is banded by price, not flat. Plenty of software marketing gets this wrong.
| Category | Referral fee | Minimum |
|---|---|---|
| Clothing and accessories | 5% at or under $15. 10% above $15 to $20. 17% above $20 | $0.30 |
| Footwear | 15% | $0.30 |
| Jewelry | 20% up to $250, then 5% above | $0.30 |
| Watches | 16% up to $1,500, then 3% above | $0.30 |
Rates change. Treat this as the shape of the fee, model against Amazon's live rate card, and remember that referral is only the first fee. If you fulfill through FBA, the fulfillment, storage and returns fees stack on top, and for apparel some of those are structured unusually harshly.
Three ways to get the parcel to the customer, with different costs and different obligations.
| FBA | FBM | Seller Fulfilled Prime | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who ships | Amazon | You | You |
| Where stock sits | Amazon fulfillment centers | Your warehouse or 3PL | Your warehouse or 3PL |
| Prime badge | Included | No, by default | Yes, if you pass the bar |
| Customer service and returns | Amazon | You | You |
| Main cost | Fulfillment, storage and returns fees | Your own pick, pack and freight | Your own, plus fast delivery obligations |
| Best for | Velocity styles where Prime conversion pays for the fees | Slow movers, oversized, made to order, and anything you want to keep in house | Brands with fulfillment good enough to earn the badge on their own freight |
Most apparel brands land on a split rather than a single route. Core velocity styles go FBA where the Prime badge earns its fees, the long tail of sizes stays FBM where storage costs would eat the margin, and everything draws from one inventory pool so the two cannot promise the same unit.
Apparel listings on Amazon use parent and child variations. The variation theme is size, color, or size and color together. The parent ASIN is a container and is not buyable. The child ASINs are the actual sellable units, and each one needs its own inventory position, its own barcode and its own truthful availability.
This is where apparel brands running a flat SKU list start losing. A size run is not ten unrelated products, it is one style with a matrix, and every downstream document, from the Amazon listing to a retailer ASN, needs the same structure underneath. AIMS360 treats style, color and size as native rather than as three fields glued into a SKU string.
Brand Registry is free, requires an active registered trademark or a pending application from an approved government IP office, and is what unlocks A+ content, a Brand Store, Sponsored Brands, Brand Analytics and the tooling to act against unauthorized listings. If you are a brand rather than a reseller, enroll before you scale, not after.
From March 2026 in North America, Amazon holds funds until seven days after confirmed delivery rather than from ship date. Once pick, pack and transit are counted that is roughly a week of extra float, and it applies to FBA orders too. Model cash against delivery, not dispatch.
From late June 2026 your stated SKU level handling time has to match what you actually do. Ship consistently earlier than you declared and Amazon flags it, gives you 30 days, then overrides your setting. Repeated mismatch escalates toward listing deactivation.
Higher one day and two day delivery shares required from July 2026, reviewed weekly, with a three strike escalation to program removal. Fine if you are ready. Expensive if you enrolled optimistically.
From late July 2026, product titles outside media categories must fit 75 characters including spaces. This hits apparel hardest, since size, color, material and gender descriptors traditionally ate long titles. Brand owners get a review window before Amazon applies its own rewrite.
Fulfilled by Merchant orders reach AIMS360 two ways. Through the Shopify integration, where the Amazon order flows into Shopify and AIMS360 imports it on a timed automation, tagged with its Amazon source so it can be scheduled separately from your other Shopify traffic. Or through the EasyShop API in conjunction with Package Bee. FBA shipped orders come back through the FBA API integration.
Either way the order lands in the same order management queue as your wholesale, EDI and direct to consumer business, and draws from the same available to sell number. AIMS360 is a listed app in the Amazon Selling Partner Appstore.
Amazon FBM orders arriving via Shopify are tagged as such inside AIMS360, so you can schedule, report on and route them separately rather than treating all Shopify traffic as one thing.
Marketplace listings, wholesale POs and EDI retailers all draw from the same record, which is what stops a marketplace sale consuming units already promised to a retailer.
FBM parcels ship through your normal shipping flow, with tracking written back so the order closes cleanly rather than by hand.
Marketplace settlements land alongside your wholesale receivables, which matters more now that disbursements sit seven days past delivery.
What apparel brands ask before scaling on the marketplace.
Seller Central is Amazon's third party marketplace. You are the seller of record, you own the inventory, and you set your own retail price. Amazon takes a referral fee on each sale and, if you use FBA, a fulfillment fee on top. Registration is open, unlike Vendor Central which is invite only.
Clothing and accessories are tiered by item price rather than charged flat: 5 percent on items at or under 15 dollars, 10 percent above 15 up to 20 dollars, and 17 percent above 20 dollars, with a 30 cent minimum. Footwear is 15 percent. Jewelry is 20 percent up to 250 dollars then 5 percent above. Watches are 16 percent up to 1,500 dollars then 3 percent. Check Amazon's current rate card before modeling margin.
With FBA, your inventory sits in Amazon's fulfillment centers and Amazon picks, packs, ships and handles customer service, with the Prime badge included. With FBM, or Fulfilled by Merchant, you hold the stock and ship the orders yourself, without a Prime badge by default. Seller Fulfilled Prime lets you carry the Prime badge on orders you ship yourself, provided you pass Amazon's delivery speed and performance requirements.
Fulfilled by Merchant orders reach AIMS360 two ways. Through the Shopify integration, where Amazon orders flow into Shopify and AIMS360 imports them on a timed automation, tagged with their Amazon source so they can be scheduled separately. Or through the EasyShop API in conjunction with Package Bee. FBA shipped orders come back through the FBA API integration. AIMS360 is listed in the Amazon Selling Partner Appstore.
Amazon apparel listings use parent and child variations, with variation themes of size, color, or size and color combined. The parent is a container and is not buyable. The child ASINs are the sellable units. AIMS360 holds style, color and size as native structure rather than a flat SKU list, so each child maps to a real inventory position rather than to a spreadsheet row.
Not to sell, but it is what unlocks the tools that matter for a brand. Brand Registry is free and requires an active registered trademark or a pending application from an approved government IP office. It opens A+ content, a Brand Store, Sponsored Brands, Brand Analytics and the reporting tools used to act against unauthorized listings.
On disbursement cycles rather than invoice terms, but the timing changed. From March 2026 in North America, Amazon holds funds until seven days after confirmed delivery rather than releasing from ship date, which in practice adds roughly a week once pick, pack and transit are counted. It applies to FBA orders as well. Model cash flow against delivery, not dispatch.
Yes, and many brands do. The usual split sends predictable core styles through 1P and keeps launches, exclusives and long tail sizes on 3P where you hold the price. The requirement is that both draw on one inventory record, otherwise a marketplace sale becomes a shortage claim on the wholesale side.
Last reviewed 17 August 2026. Referral fee rates, subscription pricing, Brand Registry requirements and program rules reflect Amazon's published information as of August 2026. Amazon revises fees and program requirements regularly, so model margin against Amazon's live rate card in Seller Central rather than against any summary, including this one.
Bring your Amazon listings, your size runs and your fulfillment split to a demo, and we will walk how the orders land and where the inventory actually sits.
