A Compliance Checklist for Marketplace Sellers

Compliance is one of those words that sounds like paperwork, audits and time taken away from selling. With that reading, most sellers postpone it until an email from the platform forces the issue — which is, by definition, the worst possible moment to start.

It is worth reframing. A marketplace seller has an entire business built on an account they do not own, on a platform that can pause it. That is not a criticism of the model: it is a description. And in any other business, when income depends on an asset a third party controls, nobody calls it bureaucracy to spend an hour a week on it. It is called risk management, and it is exactly the same thing as keeping a backup or paying for insurance.

The practical difference between the seller who has never had a scare and the one who already did is almost never luck. It is that one has a routine and a file, and the other reacts. And the routine is not long: done well, it fits into an hour a week plus a couple of deeper reviews a year.

This article is that routine. Before we start, the usual warning, which matters more here than anywhere else: Amazon and MercadoLibre policies and requirements change, by marketplace and by category. Use this list as structure and confirm every specific requirement in your Account Health page in Seller Central and in MercadoLibre’s official help center.

the weekly hour: five reads and nothing more

The key to a routine surviving is keeping it short and pinning it to a fixed day. Monday morning, one hour, always. Five reads:

1. The Account Health page, in full. Not the color of the traffic light: the list of open violations, the unread performance notifications and the detail behind each metric. Amazon publishes targets for its performance metrics — order defect rate, late shipments, pre-fulfillment cancellations, valid tracking — and shows them there with their trend. Confirm the current thresholds in your own dashboard, and keep in mind that several of those metrics apply only to orders you ship yourself, not to FBA.

2. Your MercadoLibre reputation. The color and, more importantly, the three signals that determine it: claims that reached mediation, sales you cancelled yourself, and dispatch delays. They are recalculated over a recent rolling window, so the useful read is the trend of the last few weeks, not today’s color.

3. The message inbox on both platforms. It sounds trivial and it is where the most valuable time gets lost. Performance notices, documentation requests and rights-holder reports arrive there, mixed in with dozens of automated emails. If you have a team, this inbox needs an owner with a name.

4. Your SKUs with less than two weeks of coverage. This is the operational read that prevents the most performance problems, and it does not live on any platform dashboard. A SKU about to run out while still listed on two channels is a cancellation or a late shipment waiting for a date.

5. Price discrepancies and misaligned listings across channels. An old price left alive on one channel, an expired promotion nobody pulled, a listing that no longer matches the product you ship. All of it produces claims, and claims are the raw material of the metrics that punish you.

Five reads. Most weeks, zero findings and you are done in twenty minutes. That is the point: the value of the routine lives in the boring weeks, because on the week something does turn up, you find it with time to spare.

the file you build before you need it

This is the part nobody does until they need it, and precisely the part that cannot be improvised. When a platform asks you for documentation, it asks with a deadline and with strict format criteria. Chasing an invoice from a supplier who no longer replies, with the clock running, is an experience you would not wish on anyone.

Have this filed and findable, today, before anyone asks:

• Supplier invoices by batch, with full supplier details, date, quantities and product description. Stored by period and linked to the SKU, not loose in an email thread.
• Brand authorization letters for everything you resell from a third party. If you sell your own brand, your trademark registration and your intellectual property file.
• Certifications and labeling for the categories that require them. Electricals, children’s products, supplements, cosmetics and similar carry requirements that are not negotiable.
• Tax and company identity documentation up to date and — critically — consistent across platforms. Legal name, address, bank account, legal representative. A mismatch between what Amazon has and what MercadoLibre has is an open formality waiting to happen.
• Current contact details, including a phone number somebody answers. Amazon runs programs that use that number to reach you before deactivating an account; confirm in your Seller Central whether your account qualifies for any of them and what data they require.
• Spec sheets and original photos of each product, with the exact specification of what you ship. That is the evidence used when someone claims the product does not match.

The test for whether your file is in order: if tomorrow you were asked to evidence the origin of a batch sold four months ago, how long would it take? If the answer is more than an hour, it is not ready yet.

Glossary: real-time synchronization across channels →

the monthly review: what does not fit weekly

Once a month, another half hour, on things that do not change daily:

Review your listings against their category policies. Especially the products added that month. Right category, a page that does not promise what the product does not do, images that are yours, a legitimate product code.

Audit listings that have not been touched in a long time. Old listings accumulate misalignments: variants that no longer exist, descriptions of a previous version of the product, codes that got reused. It is a silent source of “item not as described” claims.

Review your suppliers’ performance. A supplier who started delivering late or with irregular quality is a future root cause. It shows up in your real lead time and in your return rate per SKU before it shows up in a platform metric.

Confirm your details still match across platforms, bank and tax records. Address and legal-name changes are the ones most often left half done.

the deep review, twice a year

Twice a year, half a day. It is the only part that genuinely feels like paperwork, and it is worth it:

• Read the updated policies for the categories you sell in. They change, and nobody sends you a summary.
• Review who has access to your accounts. Users who no longer work with you, agencies with broad permissions, integrations you connected years ago and never use. Unnecessary access is unnecessary risk.
• Check that none of your certifications are about to expire.
• Run an honest drill. If your main channel stopped tomorrow, how many weeks does the business last? How much of the income lives on the other channel or on your own store? That is not pessimism: it is the only question that turns channel diversification into a decision rather than a wish.

the operational signals, which come earliest

This deserves insisting on because it is counterintuitive: most performance problems do not start as compliance problems. They start as inventory and catalog problems.

The SKU that ran out and stayed listed generates cancellations. Stock that does not match across channels generates overselling. The misaligned listing generates wrong shipments. The price discrepancy generates claims. And cancellations, oversells, wrong shipments and claims are exactly the inputs of the metrics both platforms watch.

That is why operational monitoring is, in practice, the first layer of compliance — and the only one that buys you days or weeks of lead time, because it happens before the platform records anything at all.

Glossary: lead time, how long your restock really takes →

who owns this

A routine without an owner does not exist. If you work alone, it is you, and it goes in your calendar with a reminder. If there is a team, each block needs a name: who reads the inbox, who reviews the metrics, who maintains the document file, who audits listings.

And one rule that saves grief: the account owner does not delegate access to the Account Health page. Daily operations can be delegated, but the place where serious notices land is reviewed by whoever answers for the business.

which part of this lives in iqseller

This needs to be said precisely: iqseller does not do platform compliance. It does not read your Account Health page, it does not file your supplier invoices, it does not review your certifications, it does not manage appeals, and it does not communicate with Amazon or MercadoLibre. Points 1, 2 and 3 of the weekly routine and the entire document file are your work, outside the panel.

What the panel covers is the operational layer — points 4 and 5 of the weekly routine, the ones that most often precede a problem:

• Inventory consolidates real stock per SKU across Amazon, MercadoLibre, your warehouses and your 3PL, and separates total stock from real available stock. That is where you see the SKU about to run out while it is still listed.
• Alerts fires when a SKU crosses its critical stock threshold, when there is a price discrepancy between channels, or when a listing stops being aligned with its master product.
• Catalog keeps the Parent → Model → SKU tree and shows which listing on each channel hangs off each real product, which is how you spot the orphan listing, the duplicate and the variant that no longer exists.
• Forecast projects when each SKU runs out given current sales velocity and the lead time you loaded, so the purchase order goes out before the stockout.
• Pricing shows the live price per channel and its history, which is where the promotion nobody pulled shows up.
• Profitability gives net margin per SKU with COGS, Amazon settlement commissions and MercadoLibre order commissions, FBA and Full fees, shipping, advertising, VAT and withholdings.

That last point looks unrelated to the topic and is not: when a SKU is generating claims and returns, the decision to keep selling it or discontinue it is better made while looking at what it actually leaves behind.

the argument, in one line

Compliance is not bureaucracy, because you are not filling out forms for anyone: you are protecting the one asset you cannot replace by buying more inventory, which is the ability to keep selling tomorrow.

One hour on Monday, half an hour a month, half a day twice a year. A file you do not need today. And the calm — no small thing — of knowing that if the email ever arrives, you are not starting from zero: you start with a routine, with data and with paperwork. That does not eliminate the risk — nothing does — but it turns an emergency into a procedure, and that difference is everything.