How we write and check our Amazon guides

This page is for anyone deciding how much to trust what we write. It explains who writes our guides, where the facts come from, how we label what we could not confirm, and what happens when we get something wrong.

These rules apply to every guide we publish or update. Some of our older guides were written before we put them down on paper, and we're bringing those up to the same standard one by one. If you find one that falls short, please tell us.

Who writes our guides

The guides on this site are written by the Apex Applications team, the people who build Apex. Apex is software for Amazon sellers who buy existing brands from wholesale suppliers and resell them, so most of what we write is about that kind of business: finding suppliers, getting approved to sell, working out fees and profit, and keeping a seller account healthy.

Many guides start from Stef's own teaching. Stef (Stefano) founded Apex, and he recorded the lessons in Apex University. When a guide uses something he said, it's marked "from Stef's lesson" with the lesson's name and the time in the video, so you can find the moment and hear it in his own words. Those passages are one seller's experience. They are not Amazon's rules, and they are not a promise.

Bylines and dates

The byline at the top of each guide names who wrote it. A person's name goes there only when that person wrote the page or checked it line by line. Until then, the byline reads Apex Applications Team. We'd rather show a team name than put someone's name on work they didn't do.

The byline also shows when the page was first published, and an "Updated" date when we change something that matters, such as a fee, a rule, a step or a recommendation. Fixing a typo doesn't change the date.

How we use AI help

We draft some guides with AI help. A person on our team checks every page against Amazon's own help pages and against Apex's real screens before it goes live.

Here is what that means in practice.

What AI helps with:

• Turning Stef's recorded lessons into an outline, so a guide starts from what a seller actually said rather than from a blank page.
• Writing a first draft, and finding Amazon's pages on the topic so the person checking it can read them.
• Checking a draft against the rules on this page.

What AI never does here:

• Decide what Amazon's rule is. A rule goes on a page only with a link to Amazon's own page for it.
• Invent a number, a quote, a customer story or a screenshot.
• Put words in Stef's mouth on a page. Anything quoted from him comes from his recorded lessons, with the time in the video.

One more place AI shows up: some short product videos are narrated with a voice generated from recordings of Stef's voice. Those videos say so under the player. There's more on that in how we show the software.

The checks every page goes through

Before a page goes live, it also runs through an automated check that reads every line. It flags a page that:

• marks something as one of Amazon's rules without linking Amazon's own US page for it,
• links to Amazon's site for another country, where the rules and fees are different,
• has an Apex price, plan limit or trial length typed in by hand instead of pulled from the records behind our pricing page,
• shows a screenshot nobody has checked for private details,
• uses an Amazon fee table whose dates have run out.

A page that fails the check is fixed before it goes live. The check is there for the mechanical mistakes. Whether a guide is right, clear and actually useful is the person's job.

How we source Amazon's rules

Amazon's rules change often, and a lot of what gets repeated about them online is out of date or about another country. So we go to Amazon first, and only to Amazon's US pages.

The pages we use:

• Seller Central help pages (sellercentral.amazon.com), where Amazon publishes its program policies, its fee pages and its how-to guides for sellers.
• Sell on Amazon (sell.amazon.com), Amazon's public site for people thinking about selling, which includes its selling plans and referral fees.
• Amazon's own announcements: posts from Amazon's news account on the US Seller Forums, the Selling Partner API changelog and Amazon's yearly fee update.
• Amazon.com help pages, for the things buyers see.

When a guide states one of Amazon's rules, the rule sits in a box marked "Amazon's rule" with a link to Amazon's page underneath it. You can see that format all through our log of Amazon rule changes.

We don't use Amazon's UK, Canadian or other non-US sites on our guides. Fees, gated categories and rules differ from one marketplace to the next, and a rule that's true in one country can get a US seller into trouble.

When we can't open Amazon's page

Many Seller Central help pages only show their full text after you sign in to a seller account. When we couldn't read the current wording of a page ourselves, we say so plainly, in the guide and in the Sources list at the end of it. If Amazon's page and our guide ever disagree, Amazon's page is the one that counts, and we'd like to hear about it.

Fees

Amazon's fee tables on this site, like the referral fee for each category, are kept in one place and copied from Amazon's own pages. Each table records where it came from, the dates Amazon gives for it and when we last compared it with Amazon's page. Our fee guides and the calculators on them read those same tables, so when a fee changes, we fix it once.

When we haven't copied a table yet, the guide links to Amazon's page instead of showing numbers. We don't fill our fee tables from other websites. A table whose dates have passed gets flagged until someone checks Amazon's page again, and so does any table nobody has compared with Amazon's page in the last 120 days.

Tax and legal topics

Some guides touch on sales tax, resale certificates or setting up a business. They explain how things generally work and point you to the official sources, and they are not legal or tax advice. A page that's mainly about a tax or legal question stays out of search results until a legal review is done.

How we label figures from other sources

Not every useful number comes from Amazon. When we use one from somewhere else, we tell you where it came from and how sure we are about it.

• Reported, not confirmed. Anything that only trade press, another company or other sellers have reported goes in a box that names the publisher and says "We have not confirmed it with Amazon." It never goes into a fee table as one of Amazon's fees. An average fee increase reported by a trade publication, for example, sits in one of those boxes, and it moves out only once we can link Amazon's own page for it.
• Ranges and names, not one official-looking number. Prices for services like prep and labeling vary a lot from one company to the next. When we mention them, we give a range and say who reported it.
• Rules of thumb and examples. A rule of thumb is labeled as a rule of thumb. A worked example is labeled as one example, on one product at one moment, not an average.
• Estimates. Monthly sales for a product are estimates wherever they come from, including Apex's own tools, and we call them estimates.
• Other companies' prices. On our comparison pages, another software company's price is read on that company's own pricing page and linked to it. If nobody has checked it again within 90 days, the price comes off the page and a link to their pricing page takes its place.
• Apex's own prices and limits. Every Apex price, plan limit and trial term in a guide is pulled from the same records as our pricing page. When a price changes, it changes on every page at once.

No income promises

We won't tell you how much money you'll make, whether from Amazon, from wholesale or from Apex. You won't find income figures, success stories about what someone earned, or screenshots of someone's sales used as proof in our guides.

Whether wholesale works for you depends on things no guide controls: the products you choose, what you pay for them, what Amazon charges, how many other sellers are on the listing and how well you manage your cash. When a guide works through numbers, it's showing you how the math works on one product at one moment. Prices move and fees change, so treat those numbers as a method, not a forecast.

If we ever publish a customer's story, it will be with their written permission and figures they agreed to share, and it won't be presented as what you should expect.

What the FTC tells buyers to look for

If someone selling a course, coaching or a "done for you" Amazon store tells you what you'll earn, the FTC's advice is to ask for the seller's disclosure document, and for an earnings claim statement whenever they claim you can make money. If what they say doesn't match those documents, the FTC calls that a sign to walk away (FTC consumer alert).

In 2023, after an FTC lawsuit, a federal court temporarily shut down Automators AI, a business that sold online stores to people as an investment. The FTC said its income claims weren't backed up, and that Amazon and Walmart had routinely suspended or terminated the stores it ran (FTC press release). We hold ourselves to the standard we'd want you to hold anyone else to.

How we show the software

When a guide shows Apex, our Chrome extension or one of Amazon's screens, here is what you can count on:

• Real screens only. Every picture of a screen is a real capture. We don't use mock-ups or generated images of a screen. Diagrams, like the map of the ten stages on our roadmap, are drawings, and they're labeled as illustrations.
• Private details are blurred or left out. Before a capture goes on a page, someone checks it for a seller's revenue, store names, supplier logins and contact details, and anything about a customer. Those are removed or blurred.
• We blur private details, not results. If a screen would hide the very number that tests a claim we're making, we show the number or we don't use that screen.
• Seller Central screens come only from an account whose owner agreed to publish them, and they go through the same checks.
• Screens change. Apex is updated often, and some screenshots were taken on an earlier version, so the app may look a little different today. Videos filmed on an older version say so under the player.
• Voice-overs are labeled. The Apex University lessons on our YouTube channel are Stef talking. Some shorter product videos are narrated with a voice generated from recordings of Stef's voice, and those carry the line "Voice-over generated from Stef's recorded voice" under the player. We don't present them as Stef speaking to you live.
• Videos load when you press play. A YouTube video in our guides shows only a still image until you press play. The player loads after that, in YouTube's privacy-enhanced mode, so just opening a page doesn't load YouTube's player or its cookies.

Related businesses (PrimeWell)

PrimeWell receives account applications from Amazon resellers. That gives us a view most sellers never get: what a distributor sees when a reseller applies, and what a real wholesale catalog looks like. It also gives us a reason to be careful. The FTC's guidance on endorsements says that when a connection would change how people judge what they're reading, and many of them wouldn't expect it, it should be disclosed clearly (FTC endorsement guidance). Owning the business being talked about is that kind of connection.

Our rules for it:

• We say so every time. When a guide uses PrimeWell's catalog, its data or what PrimeWell sees in reseller applications, the page carries a disclosure box like the one above. The sample products in our referral fee guide, for example, come from a scan of PrimeWell's catalog, and the page says so right there.
• An example, not a benchmark. PrimeWell's catalog is a convenient example, not a typical one. A price list from your own suppliers will look different, and we don't use PrimeWell's results to suggest what yours will be.
• Same place, same sentence. If a guide ever names PrimeWell as a supplier you could apply to, the connection is stated right there, not in a footnote.

Apex itself

We sell Apex, so we have an interest whenever a guide mentions it. Where it fits, a guide shows a way to do the step without buying anything next to the way Apex does it, and it says plainly when there's nothing to buy at that stage. Any Apex price, plan limit or trial term in a guide comes from our pricing records, so it always matches our pricing page.

Corrections

If something in a guide is wrong, out of date or just unclear, please tell us. Email support@apexapplications.io or use our contact page. The most useful reports include:

• the address of the page,
• what you think is wrong,
• a link to Amazon's page, or whatever source shows it, if you have one.

Here is what happens next:

1. A person on our team reads it and checks it against Amazon's own page or the original source.
2. If we got it wrong, we fix the page. If the fix changes a fee, a rule, a date or a step, the "Updated" date in the byline changes too.
3. If the correction changes something you might already have acted on, the page says what changed in plain words, not only in the date.
4. If it's a change Amazon made, it also goes into our log of Amazon rule changes.

We also re-check pages without waiting to be told: fee guides whenever Amazon announces a fee change, and any guide when Amazon changes a rule it describes.

Questions about this policy go to the same address. We'd rather hear about a mistake than leave it up.