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Creating a merchant account

Setting up a merchant account with Amazon Payment Services is easy, but you need to complete a few key steps to successfully create an account.

First, you need to get in touch with us to kick off the registration process. Merchants also need to set up specific financial arrangements to be able to accept online payments.

Finally, to ensure a good customer experience for both merchants and their customers, we complete a merchant certification process before you go live.

Starting the sign-up process

Every merchant has unique requirements and we want to ensure that we fully accommodate your specific payment needs as you start using Amazon Payment Services.

That's why we initiate sign-up with a one to one conversation that takes an in-depth look at your business requirements, recommending the best payment integration routes, and flagging potential issues.

We also outline which financial arrangements you need to make explain what you need to do to pass merchant certification.

Get started by simply completing our sign-up form.

Setting up financial arrangements

To accept payments your business will need financial arrangements beyond your relationship with Amazon Payment Services -- starting with a bank account for your business.

The financial arrangements that you need to put into place in order to start processing payments depend on a range of factors including the country your business is in, and which payment methods you wish to accept.

You may also need specific arrangements with third parties for some aspects of payment processing -- by signing up for Apple Pay, for example.

Amazon Payment Services will carefully step you through the necessary requirements to ensure that your business has all the required financial arrangements in place to accept payments safely and securely, and to move cleared funds into your bank account.

Merchant certification

Once you have fully integrated Amazon Payment Services into your ecommerce workflow you will need to pass our merchant certification process in order to obtain your live, production credentials.

The merchant certification process works roughly as follows:

  1. You inform us that you have completed payment integration and that you are ready to move from the test environment to the production environment by emailing merchantsupport-ps@amazon.com.

  2. You need to ensure that your website is reachable over the public internet and that you have provided us with any access credentials required to process a transaction.

  3. Our support team will request a test website so that we can attempt to execute test transactions.

  4. You will get a report back from our support team that highlights any open issues found in your payment integration -- anywhere along the transaction flow.

  5. We will suggest recommendations if any.

  6. When all open issues are resolved we will ask you to confirm the following:

    a. That you are consistently verifying the SHA-encrypted response signature before you accept a response from our server, as a safety measure.

    b. That your server handles responses generated by the direct API feedback call we generate to ensure that your server still receives a response, even where customers fail to successfully redirect to the return URL on your website.

Finally, if you chose to integrate payment processing into your native Android or iOS app, and if you did so using our mobile SDK, we will check that the SDK version in your app is the latest version available to you.

Response handling is an integral part of the merchant certification process. We encourage merchants to read more about response handling here.

Thanks to our certification process you can rest assured that your payment processing infrastructure is configured to always provide a great experience for your customers -- and to deliver resiliency year in, year out.

Get in touch

Starting to accept payments can seem daunting -- but it is really simple. We've helped countless merchants take the first steps. If you have any questions or concerns just get in touch -- email the team at merchantsupport-ps@amazon.com.