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Tonia Read
Tonia Read

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What you need to quickly start selling on Amazon

Out to start your first e-commerce business on Amazon? It’s the world’s largest marketplace and every seller wants a slice of the pie. Starting an Amazon business is not rocket science, but starting right away is a different story. If you are serious about building something that scales, you will need more than just a signup and a product idea. You will need the right stack of tools for data and automation.
We spoke with the experts and brought you this ultimate guide that teaches you exactly how to get started on Amazon. From creating your seller account to choosing the right tool stack that the top sellers are using, here is what works in 2025.

Step 1: Sign up as an Amazon Seller

Before you start worrying about sourcing or marketing, your first step is to create an Amazon Seller account. Amazon offers two selling plans. The Individual Seller plan is $0.99 per sale, while the Professional Seller plan is a flat $39.99/month. It is the Professional tier that makes the most sense if you are intending on selling more than a handful of items per month or if you need access to bulk tools, APIs or advertising features.

Create a seller account on seller.amazon.com. Make sure you have the following ready:

  • A bank number and routing number
  • A chargeable credit card
  • Government-issued identification
  • Tax information (SSN, EIN, etc.)
  • A valid phone number

Once your account is live, you can access Seller Central. Think of it as the control panel for your Amazon business. Seller Central dashboard allows you to manage inventory, set up shipping, configure your tax settings and start listing products.

Now that you have the primary infrastructure set up, you will need to move quickly and sell smart. And for that, you need the right set of tools to power your operations.

Step 2: Building your Amazon tech stack

The default features in Seller Central are enough to get you going. But not enough to win. Most successful Amazon sellers run lean, automated operations powered by third party tools that help them make decisions faster, automate workflows, and uncover insights Amazon doesn’t hand over easily.

Spaw.co: Web scraping for Amazon data

Spaw.co provides fast, high volume access to Amazon data thanks to its robust web scraping API. Track competitor prices, monitor product availability, or pull structured data from category listings effortlessly. Spaw.co gives you real time access to Amazon’s ecosystem in a clean JSON format.

A key perk here is that, unlike tools that use abstracted credit based billing, Spaw.co gives you exactly what you pay for: actual successful requests. Among the best Amazon web scraping APIs of 2025, with Spaw.co, each call routes through mobile proxies, with JavaScript rendering and bot bypassing baked in. This efficient setup ensures that you are getting high fidelity data, even from heavily protected pages. From competitive pricing intelligence to dynamic product research at scale to building your own internal database to running automated audits on third party seller behavior, Spaw’s web scraping API is your edge.

A perfect choice if you plan to build any custom automation or if you need data pipelines that feed your sourcing and pricing decisions.

Viral Launch: Product and keyword intelligence

Originally known for its product launch capabilities, Viral Launch has slowly evolved to become a complete Amazon Intelligence suite. It combines product research, keyword analysis, and listing optimization in one easy to use interface. One major reason why sellers love Viral Launch is its depth of keyword data. When you are creating your product listings, this becomes invaluable. Viral Launch shows you how keywords rank, which ones your competitors are underutilizing, and how to structure your product titles and description bullets for maximum reach.

You also get tools to measure competitor performance, track product trends, and optimize existing ad campaigns. For anyone doing private label or launching a new brand, it is a reliable data partner—though not the most budget friendly option out there.

SourceMogul: Online product arbitrage

If you are in the online arbitrage game—buying low from retail sites and reselling on Amazon for a profit—SourceMogul automates all the heavy lifting for you. It scans hundreds of retail sites and matches products to Amazon listings, flagging items with healthy margins and good sales velocity.

SourceMogul becomes particularly effective for those sellers who want to avoid manual price checks across multiple sources, which can be very time- and labor-intensive. SourceMogul allows you to set filters for ROI, sales volume, category, or specific product traits. This helps eliminate guesswork and surfaces only the visible opportunities. SourceMogul also includes historical pricing data and supplier insights, which helps avoid products with price cliffs or unreliable sources. It is a tool designed for speed and delivers well, especially for US and UK based sellers.

Seller Amp: Real time product analysis

Seller Amp is used by arbitrage, wholesale, and private label sellers alike. It is a powerful Chrome extension and mobile app that gives you real time insight into a product’s viability while browsing Amazon or other third party sites.

It calculates your estimated profits and ROI based on your Amazon fees, fulfillment method, and sourcing cost. It also shows you eligibility to sell certain products, the number of competitors average BSR (Best Seller Rank), and Keepa carts directly on the listing.

Because your data and settings sync across devices, Seller Amp becomes a daily driver for sellers who source on the go or manage multiple marketplaces. It’s easy but super powerful, especially in markets like the US, UK and Europe.

SmartScout: Wholesale and brand analytics

SmartScout is designed for sellers who want to go beyond the “retail to Amazon” model and into wholesale or brand outreach. SmartScout maps Amazon’s brand and seller ecosystem, helping you identify profitable niches, assess seller competition and find suppliers.

It is the data depth that sets SmartScout apart from other tools in its segment. It can show you who is dominating a category, what their pricing strategy looks like and how saturated a niche really is. Sellers can then use this invaluable data to approach brands directly or design product bundles that fill gaps in the market.

SmartScout can be a bit more technical than most beginner tools, but for sellers looking to scale strategically, especially through wholesale, it becomes indispensable.

PPC Entourage: Ad campaign optimization

Amazon PPC is a money pit if you don’t know what you are doing. PPC Entourage can be super helpful in managing your PPC campaigns. Instead of just running ads the same old way, you use it to refine your keyword targeting, control budgets, and extract better ROI from every campaign. PPC Entourage comes bundled with tools for automated bid optimization, keyword harvesting, and A/B testing. Sellers can get suggestions on which campaigns to pause, where to relocate spending and which keywords are dragging down your profitability.

The software adjusts dynamically as your campaigns run, so you are not babysitting bids manually. It is especially valuable for private label sellers who rely mostly on ads to get momentum in competitive categories.

Seller Investigators: FBA reimbursement recovery

Amazon does not always reimburse sellers automatically for lost or damaged inventory. Seller Investigators steps in to audit your FBA account and file claims on your behalf. They manually dig through the reports to track down discrepancies, can add up to thousands in recoverable funds. What’s even more important here is compliance. Seller Investigators is an approved partner and everything they file aligns with Amazon’s terms of service. This matters because filing incorrect claims or spamming the reimbursement system can put your account at risk.

Sellers often forget how many little financial leaks happen in an FBA setup. This service plugs them without creating any extra work for you.

BQool: Real time repricing automation

Winning the Boy Box on Amazon is part science, part timing and 1% luck. While you can’t control luck, the other two can be optimized with BQool. It helps you stay competitive with automated repricing logic that reacts to the market in real time. You can define custom strategies—compete with sellers who have X feedback, stay above certain profit margins or never price below your floor. Once configured, BQool will update your listings automatically as conditions change.

It supports all major Amazon marketplaces and includes detailed performance analytics. The key value here is speed: BQool checks and updates prices faster than you ever could manually.

Bonus tool: Keepa

Keepa is one of the few free tools that almost every Amazon seller uses. It is a simple browser extension overlay that shows historical price and sales rank charts directly on the Amazon product pages. Keepa can be a powerful tool to spot fake discounts, identify pricing trends and avoid products that have recently tanked. It becomes especially useful when sourcing new inventory, as it shows you how a product has performed over time.

While advanced features like product tracking require a paid upgrade, the free version still provides substantial value. Most useful for sellers doing arbitrage or sourcing one-off deals.

Wrap up

Selling on Amazon is not all about signing up and finding the right products for sale. Success on the platform is all about stacking the right tools to help you sell. Anyone can open an account. But sellers who actually want to scale are the ones who build the right tech stack from day one.

Spaw gives you the infrastructure for real time data access. Viral Launch and SmartScout help you find high potential products. BQool and PPC Entourage keep your margins intact. Seller Investigators recover money Amazon won’t. And tools like SourceMogul, SellerAmp, and Keepa keep your sourcing efficient and defensible.
It is true that you don’t need every single one of them to get started. But you do need the right ones for how you plan to sell. Start with your model. Map your progress and then plug in the gaps with the right software.

Amazon ain’t just a regular online marketplace anymore. It has become an algorithm. The more data you feed it and the smarter you move, the faster you win.

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