Amazon Seller Central notifications: which emails you can get and how to set them up

Where the settings live

In Seller Central, open Settings and choose Notification Preferences. Amazon staff on the US Seller Forum describe the route as "Go to Settings > Notification Preferences". The page lists the notification types available for your selling plan, each with the address it currently goes to.

Three things about the page are worth knowing before you touch it, all from Amazon's own guidance on the Seller Forum:

• "You can add different email addresses for each of the notification types available in your account." Order emails can go to your warehouse mailbox while account alerts go to you.
• "It is also possible for you to opt out of receiving emails for a number of notification sections." Opting out is per section, not per email.
• "The types of notifications available to you depends on your selling plan." An Individual and a Professional account may not see the same list.

The Contacts tab on the same page holds your default contact details. "Only primary account users can change the default contact email address", so a secondary user who wants order emails somewhere else needs the primary user, or uses the per-type address fields.

Amazon Seller Central notifications, type by type

Amazon lists four notification types that every selling plan gets. Here is what each one sends, whether it works for FBA and FBM, and what we do with it on our own account.

Order notifications

Amazon describes this section as: "Alert you when you receive an order. You can also enable alerts for Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) orders and inbound shipments." Read that sentence carefully. The first part is the FBM order email, one per order. The second part, the FBA option, does not do what most sellers expect. More on that below.

Returns and claims notifications

"Notify you when you receive a return request for a seller-fulfilled order or when a buyer has disputed a charge." Return requests only apply to seller-fulfilled orders. Either way, these emails come with deadlines, so send them to whoever answers cases.

Account notifications

"Business and technical alerts on issues that can affect your business, such as periodic tips about new features, schedule changes or outages, and more." This is the section people switch off because of the tips, and then miss the outage notice. Keep it on and filter the tips in your mail client instead.

Emergency notifications

For large-scale events that affect orders or shipments, Amazon wants a reliable emergency phone number. "This phone number will not be visible to buyers" and it may differ from the other numbers on your account. Check it once a year.

The FBA gap: no email per order

If you sell through FBA and switch on the FBA option under Order notifications, you will not get an email when a customer places an order. Dominic_Amazon put it plainly on the European Seller Forum: "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."

Sellers on every marketplace run into the same wall. A German seller wrote that with FBA he only receives a message once the item ships. A Spanish seller wrote that nothing arrives until Amazon ships the items. On the US forum, Christine_Amazon confirmed in a thread about missing FBA order emails that "The FBA order notification issue has indeed been reported by several sellers" and pointed to the settings and the spam folder.

The timing makes the gap bigger than it sounds. A new order starts as a Pending order, and on our own account FBA orders stayed Pending for hours before moving on. The shipment summary comes after that, once Amazon has picked and packed. So the email tells you about a sale that is often half a day old, together with everything else that shipped in the same two hours.

Which email addresses to use

Because every type can have its own address, the useful question is who should read what. This is how we have set it up on our account.

• Order notifications: a shared mailbox that the people who pick, pack and answer questions all see. For FBM this is the address that must never be missed, because the shipping clock starts with the order.
• Returns and claims: the person who handles cases. If that is you, use your own address, not a group alias where messages age.
• Account notifications: the account owner. Business and technical alerts about the account itself land here.
• Default contact (Contacts tab): the owner's address, kept current. Only the primary user can change it.

Two hygiene tips from Amazon staff on the same forum thread: "Add [email protected] to your safe senders list" and "Check both your spam folder and email filters". If emails still do not arrive, toggle the section off and on again and save, then open a case with Seller Support.

Text messages and the Seller app

The Notification Preferences page covers email, plus a mobile number for some types. Amazon points to a help page called "Amazon Seller SMS Text Message Notification Settings" for the details. Dominic_Amazon's answer above applies here too: text messages exist for FBM orders, not for FBA orders.

The Amazon Seller app has its own push settings inside the app, separate from Seller Central. It can push FBM orders and account and listing alerts, but it sends no push for FBA orders either, and its FBM push is batched. We cover exactly what it does and does not send in our guide to Seller app notifications.

Email versus an order alert app

Email is a good channel for things that can wait an hour: returns, account notices, the shipped summary. It is the wrong channel for "did I just sell something", especially for FBA. That is not a settings problem; Amazon simply does not send that email.

An order alert app connects to your account with the read-only role Inventory and Order Tracking, sees the order while it is still Pending, and plays a sound on your phone. Agent ChaChing does exactly that for FBA and FBM, usually two to three minutes after the order is placed, often faster. If you want to compare every option, including reports and the API, read all the ways to get notified of an Amazon sale; if you want the numbers behind the timing, see how fast an Amazon order notification can be. And before you connect any app, check what it asks for.