Most ungating applications fail on the invoice, not on the seller. The document requirements are specific, largely unpublished, and unforgiving of small deviations. This is what we see pass and fail, drawn from the applications our accounts run.
What the review is actually checking
Amazon is trying to establish two things: that you bought genuine product, and that you bought it from someone who could legitimately have sold it. Every requirement traces back to one of those two questions.
The six fields that get applications rejected
- Supplier details must be verifiable. Full legal company name, street address, phone and website. A reviewer will look the supplier up. A PO box, a Gmail address in the contact field, or a company with no web presence will fail the check.
- Your details must match your Seller Central account exactly. Legal entity name and address, character for character. “Acme LLC” on the invoice against “Acme, LLC” on the account is enough to trigger a rejection in some reviews.
- Invoice date within 180 days. Older invoices are rejected without comment. Check this before you submit, not after.
- Quantity of at least ten units. The published threshold. In practice, applications with exactly ten units get scrutinised harder than applications with fifty.
- Item descriptions must match the ASIN. Not approximately — the description should contain the manufacturer name and the model or part number as they appear on the listing. “IP phone x10” will fail.
- No prices redacted. Sellers routinely black out unit cost before uploading. This invalidates the document. If you do not want Amazon to see your cost, that is understandable, and it is also not an option.
What we put on an ungating invoice
When you tell us an order is for an ungating application, we structure the invoice for that purpose:
- Nixovan LLC full legal name, street address in Cumming GA, phone and website
- Your legal entity name and address exactly as you supply it — send it copy-pasted from Seller Central, not typed from memory
- Manufacturer name, full model designation and manufacturer part number on every line
- Quantities and unit prices, unredacted
- Invoice number, invoice date and payment terms
- Where the stock was sourced from, when the application calls for chain of custody
Ask for a draft before the order ships. It costs nothing and it is far easier than getting the invoice reissued after a rejection.
Things that are true but that people do not want to hear
- A retail receipt will never work. Not from Best Buy, not from an online retailer, not from a marketplace. The reviewer is checking for wholesale supply and can tell the difference immediately.
- Brand approval is not category approval. Getting ungated in a category does not give you the right to list a gated brand within it. These are separate applications with separate evidence.
- Refurbished stock will not get you ungated. Ungating applications are assessed against new condition. Buy new for the application, then sell refurbished under the appropriate condition once you are through.
- Rejections are often not explained. When one comes back, the productive move is to review the six fields above line by line rather than to appeal.
A first order that passes
The pattern we see work most consistently: a single supplier, twenty to fifty units across two or three part numbers in new condition, invoiced within the last month, with descriptions copied from the target ASINs. Not the cheapest possible order — but considerably cheaper than three rejected applications and a month of delay.