Today I’m going to show you how to sign up for commercial liability insurance to satisfy Amazon’s new requirements as of September 1st. Amazon is requiring all professional plan sellers to obtain and maintain at least $1 million of commercial general liability and umbrella excess liability insurance within 30 days after exceeding $10,000 in gross proceeds in one month on amazon.com. Basically, any professional seller doing more than $10,000 in sales within 30 days needs to have this liability insurance in place.

Requirements

There’s a variety of insurance providers out there. We chose to use Hiscox, but there are plenty of other good providers, and you can use whichever one you like as long as they meet the requirements Amazon has laid out. I’ll walk you through each of those requirements so you know what to look for.

Once you get this notice, go get a quote from whichever provider you want, as long as they meet the requirements below. I’m going to jump to point three first: Amazon requires that your insurance provider have global claim handling capacity, which Hiscox does, and a financial rating of A- or better on one of a few rating platforms. I signed up for a free account with AM Best since it was easiest, searched for Hiscox, and confirmed it has an A rating, so we were good there.

Policy Limits

Next, make sure the policy limit is at least $1 million per occurrence, both on the application and in aggregate, and that it covers liabilities tied to business operations, including products, completed operations, and bodily injuries. Most commercial general liability and umbrella excess liability policies will meet this, so just confirm it’s $1 million per occurrence and that it’s a general liability policy rather than something like a professional liability policy, which we already touched on.

If you’re changing providers, they need to give Amazon at least 30 days’ notice of cancellation, modification, or non-renewal. This next part matters: the policy has to name Amazon Services LLC and its affiliates and assigns as additional insured.

Legal Entity

Going back to the email, the policy has to cover all sales from the Amazon website, and the insured name has to match the legal entity you have on file with Amazon exactly, capitalization, commas, everything. If it doesn’t match, you can update it fairly easily through Amazon, and you can check your legal entity name by going to your legal entity page. In our case the legal business name is AGE of AGE LLC, along with the address on file, and on our Certificate of Insurance this matches verbatim, which is what Amazon requires.

The policy also needs to be complete and signed, and valid for at least 60 days from the date of submission. Ours is signed, has the certificate holder listed, shows $1 million by occurrence and $2 million general aggregate, and has the policy expiration dates, policy number, and everything else in order.

It has to be an official Certificate of Insurance too, not a screenshot or a receipt. You’ll need to request the actual certificate from your insurance company.

Entering the Information

From here, you’ll go to Amazon and enter the details from your certificate. For insurance provider name, we put Hiscox Inc, matching what’s on the certificate. For legal entity, we entered AGE of AGE LLC to match exactly, then copied over the policy number.

Our policy start date is 9/23/21 and the end date is 9/23/22. Double check that your dates and provider name are entered correctly. The last step is uploading the file, so I uploaded the saved Certificate of Insurance, confirmed it looked right, and gave it one more check before moving on.

Once everything looks good, click submit and wait for Amazon’s response. If you need help with any of this, reach out to us at My Amazon Guy. We’re always happy to help with your selling needs.

Note: this article may reference specific insurance providers we’ve worked with; be sure to confirm current requirements directly with Amazon before purchasing a policy.

Needs Review

• “AGE of AGE LLC” appears to be a transcription artifact of the actual legal entity name mentioned in the original video, but no confident real match could be identified, so it was left as-is rather than guessed at.