Amazon Ungating & Brand Approval
On a wholesale account, this is the work that has to clear before anything else can happen. No approval, no listing. No listing, no sales. We handle both halves of it — getting brands to authorize you, and getting Amazon to open the category.
Brand approval and ungating are two different problems
Most sellers use the words interchangeably, then get stuck because they solved the wrong one. They are separate gates, with different gatekeepers, and you usually need to pass both.
Brand approval
Gatekeeper: the brand or its distributor
Authorization from the brand owner to resell their products. It is granted, not bought — which is exactly why it is worth having. An unauthorized seller cannot replicate it by undercutting you on price, and brands increasingly enforce it.
This is where most wholesale accounts stall. Brands ignore generic outreach, ask for business documentation the seller does not have ready, or route the request to a distributor who has their own criteria.
Category ungating
Gatekeeper: Amazon
Amazon's own approval to sell in a restricted category or against a restricted brand. It is an application — invoices, supplier details, and documentation that has to meet Amazon's format exactly.
Applications get rejected on technicalities far more often than on substance: an invoice missing an address, a date outside the window, a supplier Amazon does not recognize. The fix is submitting it correctly the first time.
How we work through it
We do not publish a turnaround time, and you should be sceptical of agencies that do. Neither clock belongs to us: the brand decides when it authorizes you, and Amazon decides when it clears an application. What we can tell you is exactly what happens at each stage and what makes it move faster or slower.
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Account and document readiness
Before a single application goes out, we check that the things brands and Amazon ask for actually exist and are consistent: business registration, resale certificate, the entity name matching across every document. Most delays we see are caused here, before anyone has said no.
What determines the speed: how complete your paperwork already is.
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Brand and distributor outreach
We identify who actually grants authorization for each brand — sometimes the brand, often a regional distributor — and approach them with the documentation they ask for, in the form they ask for it. Generic outreach is what gets ignored.
What determines the speed: the brand's own process. Some answer in days, some take weeks, some have a quarterly review.
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Invoice and supplier documentation
Once you are buying, we prepare the invoice package Amazon requires: correct supplier details, dates inside Amazon's window, quantities that meet the threshold, and formatting that matches what the application expects.
What determines the speed: your supplier's invoicing, and whether the first order meets Amazon's quantity thresholds.
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The Amazon application
We file the ungating application and manage it through to a decision — including the follow-ups and resubmissions that most applications need. A rejection is usually a document problem, not a verdict, and we treat it that way.
What determines the speed: Amazon's review queue and how clean the submission is.
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Listing and launch
Approval is not the finish line. We build the listings, get the catalogue live, and take the account from cleared to selling — which is the point of all of it.
What determines the speed: inventory arriving at the fulfillment centre.
What this has produced
Figures below are from accounts we manage, taken from Seller Central, and are covered in full on our case studies page.
Two further gating applications were approved in August 2026, with more in progress. We report what cleared, not what we applied for.
Why it matters more than it looks
Approval work is unglamorous and it is the reason wholesale accounts either work or do not. A catalogue built on brand authorization is defensible: the brand granted it, a competitor cannot buy their way past it, and it is the precondition for listing at all in the categories worth being in. A catalogue built without it is one enforcement email away from disappearing.
It is also the part of the job most agencies quietly decline. It is slow, it involves chasing people who do not want to be chased, and it produces no reportable metric for weeks. We do it because on a wholesale account there is nothing to manage until it is done.
Common questions
Do I need brand approval, ungating, or both?
Usually both, and in that order. Brand approval gets the brand's permission to resell; ungating gets Amazon's permission to list in the category. Passing one does not pass the other. We work out which gates apply to your target catalogue before any application goes out.
How long does it take?
We do not quote a fixed turnaround, because the two decisions that matter are not ours to make — the brand's and Amazon's. Some brands respond within days, others run a review cycle that takes weeks. What we commit to is that applications go out complete and correct, that rejections get diagnosed and resubmitted rather than abandoned, and that you always know which stage each one is at.
What does it cost?
Brand approval and ungating are included in our monthly management fee — we do not bill them as a separate project. See pricing for the tiers.
What if an application gets rejected?
Rejections are normal and are usually a documentation problem rather than a decision about you. We identify what failed, fix it, and resubmit. An agency that treats a first rejection as the end of the process is not doing the job.
Can you help if I have not started buying yet?
Yes, and that is often the better time to start. Getting the entity, documentation and brand relationships right before the first purchase order avoids the most common cause of delay, which is discovering mid-application that a document does not match.
Which marketplaces do you cover?
The US, UK, Canada, Australia and the Middle East, on both Amazon and eBay.
Find out which gates are in your way
Send us your storefront link and the brands you want to carry. The free audit comes back as a video covering what is gated, what is likely to need brand authorization, and what we would tackle first.