Amazon Seller app notifications: what the official app does and does not tell you

What the Amazon Seller app notifies you about

Amazon lists "customizable notifications" as a feature of the app and adds one line of advice: "Turn on notifications so you don't miss important updates or time-sensitive communications." That sentence is precise. The app is built around things that need your attention, not around sales as such. This is what that means in practice:

FBM orders: yes, but on Amazon's schedule

For orders you fulfil yourself the app does send a push. What it does not do is send it at the moment of the sale. A seller on the EU Seller Forum described it like this: "It decides when it'll tell you, not when there is a sale made and it may decide to tell you multiple sales at the same time." Another reply in the same thread sums up the scope of the whole app: "The app will only notify you when an action is required from your end, such as account suspension, FBM/MFN orders." An FBM order is an action item, so you hear about it. Eventually.

FBA orders: no push per order

This is the question most sellers actually type into Google: does the Amazon Seller app notify you of FBA orders? No. Dominic_Amazon, an Amazon employee on the EU Seller Forum, answered a seller who was waiting for FBA order alerts: "There are no SMS push notifications for FBA, only for FBM. You can get an email every 2 hours summarizing recent FBA orders shipped, but no email as FBA orders are made." Note the wording: the summary covers orders shipped, not orders placed, and between the sale and the shipment there can be hours.

On our own account, which sells mainly through FBA on amazon.de, the app has not announced a single order since 2021. We found out about sales by opening the app or by looking at the daily total the next morning.

Why FBA orders get no alert

The logic behind it is simple. The Seller app is a to-do list. An FBM order needs you: confirm it, print the label, ship within the promised time. An FBA order needs nothing from you: Amazon picks, packs, ships and handles the returns. So the app stays quiet. If you are still weighing up the two models, read our comparison of FBA versus FBM for order alerts.

There is a second, more technical reason. Every new Amazon order starts in the status Pending, which Amazon defines as "The order has been placed but payment has not been authorized." Only when it moves to Unshipped ("Payment has been authorized and order is ready for shipment") is the amount final. Amazon's own push system for app developers does not fire for FBA orders while they are still Pending; we measured that on our account, more on that below. So the official app is not the only Amazon product that keeps quiet in that first stretch. See how long Amazon pending orders take for the details.

Notification settings per platform

Where the switches live differs per platform, and many "notifications stopped" threads on the forum come down to one of them.

When alerts stop arriving, Amazon's own troubleshooting on the US Seller Forum is short. Christine_Amazon told a seller who had stopped receiving order emails to go to Settings, Notification Preferences, toggle the settings off and back on, and add [email protected] to the safe senders list. On the phone side, check that the app is allowed to notify, that no Focus mode or Do Not Disturb schedule is swallowing the banner, and on Android that battery optimisation is not closing the app in the background. We keep a longer checklist in what to do when the Seller app is not sending notifications, and a walk-through of every switch in Seller Central notification settings.

The sound: system default, no cash register

The Seller app has no sound picker. On iPhone every alert uses the default tone. On Android you can assign a different sound per channel in the system settings, so you could point "Amazon Seller Order" at a cash register file. It will still only ring for FBM orders, and only when Amazon decides to send the push.

That gap shows in the ratings. At the time of writing the app scores 4.6 in the US App Store from about 107,000 ratings (version 9.13.0), and 3.9 on Google Play from about 196,000 reviews with more than 10 million downloads. There is no Apple Watch app and no revenue widget. A thread on the US Seller Forum titled "New sale notifications not happening" puts the feeling into one sentence: "I now have to check my email in tray and junk folders every 5 minutes because I'm scared I might miss a sale!" If you wonder why a sound matters that much to sellers, we wrote about the cha-ching sound and why it works.

How to get an alert for every sale, FBA included

Sellers have asked Amazon for this for years. The thread "How do I get an alert when one of my products sells?" on the US Seller Forum has about 2,900 views and 53 replies; its top reply, "looking at the sales pile up is addicting", collected 200 upvotes. In another thread, titled "Why no CHA CHING! Notification on FBA sales", an Amazon employee answered: "I will pass this suggestion along internally." Until that suggestion lands, you have three routes.

1. Email rules. Switch on the order emails under Notification Preferences and give the sender a VIP or priority rule in your mail app. Works for FBM orders. For FBA you get the two-hourly summary of shipped orders, so this is late by definition.
2. The Android channel trick. Give the "Amazon Seller Order" channel its own sound. Free, but FBM only and on Amazon's timing.
3. A separate app on Amazon's Selling Partner API. You authorise it once in Seller Central; the screen shows the exact role it asks for. For order alerts that role is Inventory and Order Tracking, which is read-only. You can revoke it any time under Apps and Services, Manage Your Apps. An app like this sees every order, FBA and FBM, on every marketplace you authorise, and it can check as often as it likes.

Agent ChaChing takes the third route. It checks your orders every minute, lets Amazon's own push add the confirmation and the final amount, and runs a nightly comparison against Amazon's order report so that nothing slips through. You get one alert per order at the first status we see, usually Pending, with an estimated amount marked ≈ that is updated silently once Amazon releases the real figure. The alert usually arrives two to three minutes after the order is placed, often faster, and every notification shows how long it was on the way. We store no buyer data at all: no names, addresses or postcodes. Read how to connect an app to your seller account safely before you authorise anything, and how fast an Amazon order alert can realistically be if you want the numbers.

Amazon itself, in its documentation for developers, recommends exactly this kind of belt and braces: "As a best practice, we recommend that you have a means to retrieve needed information in the event of an unexpected outage or delay in notification delivery." A sale alert is only useful if it comes every time.