Switch between Seller Central and Search Inside This Book on Amazon

Some time ago, I expressed my dismay over the apparent way Seller Central accounts and the Search Inside This Book feature on Amazon were linked. It seemed that signing up for Search Inside This Book had made my (defunct) Seller Central account disappear — when I logged in to Amazon Seller Central, it now defaulted to my publisher interface, and I couldn't figure out how to access my Amazon Marketplace account.

Well, they say a tax audit is the mother of figuring things out. Or something like that. We were audited by the state of Washington, and I had to get into my old Seller Central account to prove some income, and — wouldn't you know it — there is a way. It's just in teensy-tiny-font form.

Here are some screen shots, in case you're as near-sighted and unobservant as I am. You can click on any of the pictures to make them larger.





If you're in Amazon Seller Central, there's a little down arrow next to your seller name toward the top of the page. Yes, my seller name was Seller name. Ok, not really.


If you click on the little arrow or your seller name, down drops a little menu that lets you toggle between the two interfaces. Ah! Choose "Search Inside the Book PDF Submissions" to get to your publisher account. See how it says "Change Merchant" but only after you've clicked on the little arrow? So helpful.

This is the view from within the publisher interface, Amazon Vendor Tools and the Search Inside The Book PDF Submissions area. Up in the toppish left corner is the word "Vendor" (which apparently was supposed to mean something to me) next to a drop-down menu.


And that's how you get back to Seller Central, by clicking on your seller name again. Ta da!


To sum up, you can have both a Seller Central / Amazon Marketplace account and an Amazon Vendor Tools / Publisher / Search Inside This Book account. No worries, no problems — I just wish Amazon had made that drop-down menu a little more obvious!

Seller Central account for Search Inside This Book

Follow-up / solution / oh-duh-now-I-get-it here: http://www.laurenwayne.com/2010/04/switch-between-seller-central-and.html. Basically, ignore all of the following.

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Just as a follow-up to my last post on Search Inside This Book, I mentioned that you need a Seller Central account to sign up. I already had one, so I just switched my log-in email over to the one I'd given to Search Inside This Book.

Well, now I have a caution about using an existing Seller Central account for Search Inside This Book. I'm no longer using my Seller Central account for selling anything, but when I tried to log in to it to access previous information from when I previously used that account to sell DVDs through Amazon's Marketplace, I couldn't reach the typical Seller Central page anymore, no matter how I tried. It would only default to the Search Inside This Book page, which is a specialized author/publisher-specific interface.

Fortunately for me, this isn't disastrous, since it was a defunct seller account anyway, and I didn't badly need to get into those old files.

BUT...beware if you use your Seller Central account for serious selling that you might want to contact Amazon in advance and ask what's best. I know that having two seller accounts is actually against Amazon rules and can lead to your being banned as a seller. But if Search Inside This Book really does make your Seller Central account inoperable as a seller account for selling on the Marketplace, then you would need a second one specifically for your publishing interests.

So, there you have it. No real advice from here, but a counsel to seek out Amazon's take on the situation. Maybe there's a secret link to access your Seller Central information from the publisher page, or maybe it's something they'll fix in the future.