How to get notified when you make a sale on Amazon: every method, ranked by speed

Why Amazon does not tell you about every sale

Amazon's tools are built around action, not around the moment of the sale. A new FBM order needs you to ship it, so it is worth an email or a push. An FBA order needs nothing from you, so Amazon stays quiet. An Amazon employee, Dominic_Amazon, put it plainly on the EU 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 have asked for more for years. The US Seller Forum thread "How do I get an alert when one of my products sells?" has around 2,900 views and 53 replies, and in the thread "Why no CHA CHING! Notification on FBA sales" an Amazon employee answered: "I will pass this suggestion along internally." We have sold on Amazon since 2021 and still do not get that notification from Amazon itself. What exists instead is the list below, from the slowest option to the fastest.

The built-in options: Seller Central, email, SMS and the Seller app

These four cost nothing extra and need no third party. They are also the slowest or the least complete, so we start here.

Seller Central, Manage Orders

Every order, FBA and FBM, on every marketplace of your account appears under Orders, Manage Orders. Most orders start as Pending, which Amazon defines as "The order has been placed but payment has not been authorized." While an order is Pending, Amazon's own Orders API returns no pricing for it, so you see the order before you see the amount. What Pending means and how long it takes has the details. Delay: none, but only if you happen to be looking.

Email notifications from Seller Central

Under Settings, Notification Preferences, Seller Central can email you about orders: one email per order you ship yourself, and for FBA only the two-hourly summary of shipped orders that Dominic_Amazon describes above. The FBA order lands, sits in Pending for a while, ships, and then appears in the next summary. That is a record, not an alert. Every notification Seller Central can send is still worth setting up, for returns, claims and account health.

SMS and the Amazon Seller app

Both cover FBM orders and nothing for FBA. The push in the Seller app is also not one alert per order at the moment of the sale. A seller on the EU forum described it well: "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." On Android the app uses two notification channels, "Amazon Seller" and "Amazon Seller Order", so you can give orders their own tone in the system settings; on iOS you get the system sound. What the Seller app does and does not notify has its own article.

The complete options: order reports and the Selling Partner API

Both see every order on your account, FBA and FBM, on every marketplace. Neither is built to reach your phone.

Order reports

Seller Central and the Reports API give you files of all orders, sorted by last update. Reports are generated on request and lag behind: right for bookkeeping and for checking that nothing was missed, wrong for an alert. We use them for exactly that, a nightly comparison of what we alerted against Amazon's order report. The report documentation also holds the most useful timing fact about new orders: "the fulfillable date of an order is usually 30 minutes after the order has been created".

The Selling Partner API, if you build it yourself

Amazon's Selling Partner API offers two ways to learn about an order. The ORDER_CHANGE notification pushes a message to a queue you own whenever an order changes status, for both fulfilment types (the payload has a FulfillmentType field, "MFN or AFN"), and needs the role Inventory and Order Tracking. On speed, Amazon says: "Delay of notification is usually trivial (in seconds), however, on prime day or other selling event, the delay can be up to 2 minutes." The second way is polling the Orders API at a fixed interval, and Amazon recommends having it: "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."

The catch, which we only found by measuring on our own account: for FBA orders Amazon sends no ORDER_CHANGE while the order is Pending. The first push arrives at a later status, and our orders stayed Pending for hours. So the push alone does not give you the moment of the sale for FBA; polling does.

Building it yourself costs nothing on Amazon's side, but you register as a developer, request a role, accept the Data Protection Policy, keep a server running around the clock and pass Amazon's yearly security review. We did all of that, which is how our app exists. For one seller who wants a sound on a phone, it is a lot of plumbing.

Alert apps: the API turned into a push with a sound

An alert app does that plumbing for you. It connects to your account through Amazon's own authorisation page, reads orders through the API and sends a push with a sound to your phone. Most apps in this category are small, and most are iOS only. Before you connect one, check five things:

• Which roles does it ask for on Amazon's consent page? One read-only role, Inventory and Order Tracking, is enough for a sales alert.
• Does it alert FBA orders at the moment of the sale, or only once Amazon pushes a later status?
• Does it show you how it performs: how long each alert took and whether it missed anything?
• Does it store buyer data? An alert needs none of it.
• Can you revoke access yourself? In Seller Central that is under Apps and Services, Manage Your Apps.

How to connect an app to Seller Central safely walks through each point.

Where Agent ChaChing fits

Our app is one of the options in this category and works the way the previous section describes. It checks your orders every minute, adds Amazon's own push for the confirmation and the final amount, and compares everything with Amazon's order report at night. The alert usually arrives two to three minutes after the order is placed, often faster, for FBA and FBM, on every marketplace you connect: all European marketplaces including the UK and all North American marketplaces at launch. Every alert shows how long it was on its way, and the app keeps a daily counter and a count of missed orders, with zero as the goal. It needs one read-only role, stores no buyer data, runs on iOS and Android, and costs €4.99 a month or €39.99 a year after 14 free days.

Comparison table: every Amazon sales notification by speed, coverage, sound and cost

Cost means what you pay on top of your Amazon selling plan; delay means the time between the order and the moment you can know about it.

Which method fits which seller

• You ship everything yourself: the Seller app plus the order email covers you, with the caveat that alerts arrive at Amazon's timing, not per sale. Give the Android order channel its own tone. FBA versus FBM covers the other differences.
• You sell FBA and check Seller Central several times a day: you are the person alert apps were built for. Amazon itself gives you a two-hourly email of shipped orders and nothing else.
• You do more than a few dozen orders a day: single alerts stop being useful. Look for bundling, the first order at once and the rest as a group, plus a daily counter, especially on peak days when Amazon's own notifications can be delayed. How fast an Amazon order alert can be explains the limits.
• You have a developer: the API is the complete answer, as long as you poll for Pending orders and reconcile at night.