Amazon’s new app is a portable toolbox for merchants

Amazon on Wednesday released Amazon Seller, an iOS app that acts as a portable toolbox for merchants with accounts with the Internet sales giant to initiate sales, manage products and communicate with customers. The Amazon Seller app allows merchants affiliated with Amazon to search for new products to sell, check rankings and estimate profits, among other useful seller tools. For example, the app’s search function taps into Amazon’s database to find prices, sales rankings and customer reviews. Users can type in keywords or “scan in” barcodes with an iPhone’s camera. 

Amazon quietly launched a new mobile application designed for Amazon Sellers, the individuals and businesses who leverage Amazon’s scale to reach the company’s millions of shoppers by listing their products on Amazon’s site. Amazon Seller, as the app is simply called, offers a suite of mobile tools that allow sellers to search and scan barcodes of items, check prices, sales ranking and reviews, list items, as well as communicate with customers. An app designed for sellers has often been called a missing piece in the Amazon Seller ecosystem. The hole, to date, has been largely filled by third-party application developers, like SellerMobile. But some merchants were frustrated that they would have to pay a subscription to a third-party (at $5/month, in SellerMobile’s case) just to make using Amazon’s selling platform easier.