Updated September 2026 · 7 min read · Hadjer Ben, COO
Almost every guide ranking for how to sell on Amazon UAE is published by a company that sells trade licences. That is not a conspiracy, it is an incentive: their guide ends where their sale ends, at registration. The parts that decide whether the account makes money start immediately afterwards, and those guides have no reason to cover them.
This one covers the registration requirements, with sources, and then the four things the licence guides leave out.
Amazon lists six requirements, and the trade licence is the one that stops most people. You need a business email address, a reachable phone number, a national ID, a trade licence, a recent proof of address, and a UAE bank account.
Amazon’s own beginner’s guide states you need “Trade License if you are owner and a Power of Attorney only if you are a legal representative”, and that the proof of address must be “Either a recent (less than 3 months old): bank account statement, credit card statement, or utility bill”.
| What Amazon asks for | Detail that catches people out |
|---|---|
| Business email address or Amazon customer account | Using a personal shopping account you already own creates confusion later. Register with a business address. |
| Phone number where you are reachable | Used for verification, so it must be a number you can answer during the check. |
| National ID, for example Emirates ID | Passport copy for the business owner where an Emirates ID does not apply. |
| Trade licence | Required for the owner. A legal representative also needs a Power of Attorney. |
| Proof of address, less than three months old | Bank statement, credit card statement or utility bill. Older documents are rejected. |
| UAE bank account | Where Amazon sends your sales proceeds. |
Source: Amazon’s beginner’s guide for UAE sellers.
If your business operates in the UAE, yes. Amazon’s wording is conditional: a valid commercial licence is required “if your business is operating in the UAE”. A brand operating from outside the UAE is a different case, and we have answered that one separately.
This is the question the free zone guides answer most enthusiastically, because the answer leads to their product. What they are less keen to explain is that the licence is the cheap part of the problem. A licence gets you registered. It does not get you found, and it does not get you profitable.
The useful question is not whether you need a licence but which activity your licence needs to cover, because a licence issued for the wrong business activity will pass company formation and fail at Amazon.
Only above a threshold, and the threshold is a rolling twelve-month figure rather than an annual one. The UAE Federal Tax Authority requires registration when “The total value of taxable supplies and imports exceeds AED 375,000 over the past 12 months, or is expected to exceed that threshold within the next 30 days”.
Below that, registration is optional rather than forbidden. The FTA sets a voluntary threshold at AED 187,500, and the UAE Ministry of Finance confirms the standard rate as 5%, in force since 1 January 2018.
Two details matter here and are routinely missed. The mandatory threshold is forward-looking as well as backward-looking, so a strong launch month can trigger the obligation before your annual figures suggest it. And registration must be filed within 30 days of being required to register, which is a shorter window than most new sellers plan for.
Saudi Arabia works differently again. If you are considering Amazon.sa as well, the obligation there is triggered by a taxable supply in the Kingdom, not by a threshold you grow into.
Amazon splits selling plans at forty items a month, and the split decides which tools you can use rather than only what you pay. The Individual plan suits sellers moving fewer than forty items monthly; the Professional plan is for higher volume and unlocks API access, expanded reporting, restricted category applications and bulk operations.
Amazon states that “For a limited time only, Professional accounts are now available with no monthly subscription fee”, while noting that “additional selling fees apply” on both plans.
If you intend to build a brand rather than test a few units, start Professional. The reporting alone changes what you can see, and you cannot diagnose an account whose data you cannot export.
Four things, and each costs money after registration. The largest is Brand Registry: three of Amazon’s four sponsored ad products require it, so a seller without it can only run Sponsored Products.
Brand Registry gates most of your advertising. Amazon offers four sponsored products to sellers on Amazon.ae, and “Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and Stores are available to professional sellers enrolled in the Amazon Brand Registry”. Only Sponsored Products is open without it. Sellers who believe they have tested Amazon advertising have usually tested one quarter of it. How Brand Registry works in the GCC covers the application.
Amazon.ae and Amazon.sa are different markets, not one region. Category competition, seasonality and buyer behaviour diverge, and a plan written for one arrives wrong in the other. Deal submission deadlines sit weeks earlier than most brands expect.
The working week is not the one you are used to, and it is not the same across the Gulf. The UAE moved to a Monday to Thursday week with a half day on Friday from 1 January 2022, with the weekend running Friday afternoon through Sunday. Saudi Arabia keeps a Sunday to Thursday week. Campaign schedules and deal deadlines built on a European calendar land on the wrong days in at least one of the two.
Arabic is not a translation layer. Buyers search in Arabic and in English, often for the same product with different terms, and a listing that was translated rather than researched will perform normally in one language and disappear in the other.
The licence is the predictable cost and the smallest one. The costs that decide the outcome are inventory, photography and content, and advertising budget during the period before the listing has any sales history to rank on.
New sellers routinely budget for registration and not for the launch window, then run out of advertising budget in the weeks when the listing most needs it. Amazon also advertises incentives for new sellers, currently stated as “over AED 175,000 in potential incentives when you start selling with Amazon”, though these are credits and benefits against spend rather than cash, so read the conditions before you build a plan around them.
Not at registration. Registration is paperwork, it is well documented, and paying an agency to do it is paying for something you can complete yourself in an afternoon.
It becomes worth it when the account is live and the numbers stop making sense: advertising spending without producing orders, listings that rank in one language and not the other, or an account health warning nobody can explain. That is the point where an hour of the right attention is worth more than a month of guessing.
We are an Amazon SPN-listed agency in Dubai, working Amazon.ae and Amazon.sa. If you are past registration and something is not adding up, request a free audit and we will tell you what we would change, including when the answer is that you do not need us yet.
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