What is a Platinum Merchant on Amazon?

In this article, I will answer the question: what is a Platinum Merchant on Amazon?

A lot of people don’t realize is that Amazon used to have different tiers for sellers. For example, a platinum merchant was the highest possible tier, and a seller would have benefits and perks to support this.

Let me give you some further details.

What is a Platinum Merchant on Amazon?

A Platinum merchant was the highest tier an Amazon seller could reach, and with it, you received several great perks. But, unfortunately, Amazon recently decided to discontinue this seller program.

One of the benefits of becoming a Platinum Merchant was increased product listing visibility. You were also able to sell items in restricted categories, giving you exclusive access to specific customers. These categories were reserved for the highest quality products.

Other benefits included custom storefronts and access to select keywords that could be used to win the buy box more often – more on that later.

Amazon used to have a Gold tier too, but this too was phased out.

Most of the above perks are now rolled out to most sellers; it’s now really easy to create a custom brand storefront, so nowadays, I think most of these benefits would be obsolete.

Amazon offers different programs and perks to help with growth; recently, we’ve joined the Amazon 360 Program, so far, we are really enjoying it.

How to Sign Up for an Amazon Platinum Membership

As mentioned, this seller program is no longer available – there are now only Individual and Professional Seller account options available on Amazon.

In the past, though, you could either apply for a Platinum Membership by contacting Amazon directly or wait for them to invite you.

To be invited, you needed to have an excellent sales track records that spanned several years. Customer feedback and ratings also mattered.

As mentioned above, Amazon has now introduced different growth programs for high-achieving sellers; if your metrics are good enough, you should get an invite.

Thinking about canceling your Amazon account – read this first.

I want to cover another closely related topic whilst we are talking about platinum Amazon merchants, and that is platinum keywords; these do still exist.

How to Find Your Platinum Keywords on Amazon

Since Platinum Merchants no longer exist, Platinum keywords are no longer reserved for top-tier sellers either.

To find Platinum keywords, login to your Seller Central account and hover over Inventory to get the option for Manage Inventory.  You can now click on the listing you want to edit, which is where you will find the relevant keywords tab.

I wouldn’t be surprised if these were soon removed; according to other sellers, these have no real product promotional purpose.

If you are trying to optimize your listing for maximum exposure and keyword visibility, I’d spend your time focusing on the traditional Amazon keywords.

In this article, we talk about our Amazon listing title optimization process; this has been one of the most important areas to focus on.

I hope this helped answer questions on Platinum Merchants on Amazon; if you have any questions, please ask away below.

Until next time…