Line Sheet for an Amazon Brand: What Goes on It

A line sheet is the document a buyer uses to place an order. It lists every item you sell wholesale with its code, its case pack, its wholesale price and its suggested retail price, plus the terms that apply to the whole order. It is not a brochure, it is not a deck, and the best ones look almost boring.

For an Amazon brand this is usually the first retail document you have never had to make. Seller Central gives you listings, and a listing is the opposite of a line sheet: it persuades one shopper to buy one unit at a price Amazon controls. A line sheet lets a professional buyer decide quantities at a price you control, without asking you anything.

What a buyer does with it

Picture the buyer at their desk with four line sheets open. They are not reading. They are scanning for the code, the case pack, the cost and the ship date, and copying numbers into their own order form or purchasing system.

Everything on your line sheet either helps that or gets in the way. A large lifestyle photograph gets in the way. A paragraph about your founding story gets in the way. A missing case pack stops the process entirely and turns a five-minute task into an email you may not get.

This is why line sheets across every category converge on the same dense layout. It is not a lack of imagination. It is a document that has been optimised by thousands of buyers who all want the same four columns.

The fields a buyer expects

Your SKU or item code. Yours, not your ASIN. An ASIN is a marketplace identifier and means nothing in a purchase order. If you have never had internal codes, create them now, keep them short, and never reuse one for a different product.

UPC or GTIN. The retail barcode for the sellable unit. A chain cannot set the item up without it, and offering a line sheet without barcodes tells a buyer you are not ready. The distinction from your marketplace identifiers is covered in GS1 barcodes for Amazon versus retail.

Product name and short description. Six to ten words. What it is, the variant, the size. Not the keyword-stuffed title from your listing.

A small image. Thumbnail scale, on white, showing the packaging as it will look on the shelf. One per row.

Case pack, and inner pack if you have one. Units per case, and how they break. This is the field that most often derails a first order from an Amazon brand, because FBA never made you decide it.

Case dimensions and weight. A buyer with a distribution centre needs these before they can quote freight or set up the item.

Wholesale price per unit. Per unit, with the case cost either shown or trivially derivable. Do not make the buyer divide.

Suggested retail price. Both because it tells them the margin and because it tells them what you expect the shelf price to be, which is the start of the pricing conversation you need to have anyway.

Minimum order. Expressed in cases or dollars, at the top of the sheet, not buried.

Lead time. In business days, honestly. Understating this is the fastest way to lose a second order.

Terms and dates. Payment terms, ship window, order cutoff, freight policy, and the date the sheet expires or is superseded.

What a row looks like

A worked example with made-up but plausible numbers. Say you sell a ceramic pour-over dripper that lists on Amazon at thirty-four dollars.

A store applying keystone lands at thirty-four and makes seventeen dollars a unit, or a hundred and two dollars a case. That is a clean story, and it is also the moment a buyer looks at your listing and sees the same thirty-four dollars with delivery included. Have the answer ready — hold your listing price, sell a different configuration into retail, or take less wholesale margin. The arithmetic behind each route is in wholesale pricing for Amazon products.

Building it from your ASIN catalog

Start with an export of your active listings and then make three decisions that Seller Central never asked you to make.

Which items go on it. Not all of them. Every SKU on the line sheet is a SKU you must hold inventory for, make case packs for and support. Slow variations, one-off colours and anything with a fragile supply chain should stay off the first version. The reasoning for that cut is in the wholesale catalog.

What the sellable unit is. On Amazon you may sell a two-pack because it improves your fee position. On a shelf that may be the wrong unit, or exactly the right one. Decide per item rather than copying the marketplace.

What a case is. Six, eight, twelve, twenty-four. The right answer balances the store's reorder rhythm against your pack-out cost. A case that takes an independent store four months to sell through will not get reordered, and the buyer will remember the dead facing rather than the product. How cases and inners work together is covered in inner packs and master cartons.

Once those three are decided, the sheet is mostly transcription.

Layout that gets used

One page if you can, two at most, portrait, exported as a PDF. Rows, not cards. Images small and consistent. Prices in a column that lines up. A header with your brand name, the season or effective date, and your ordering contact. A footer with the terms.

Name the file so it survives a buyer's downloads folder: brand, document type, effective date. A file called "linesheet-final-v3.pdf" will be opened once and never found again.

Include the terms block even though it feels like fine print. It is the part that prevents the second call, and buyers notice when it is missing.

Avoid dark backgrounds and anything that costs a colour cartridge. Line sheets get printed and marked up by hand more often than Amazon sellers expect.

What to leave off

No review counts, no rank, no badges. A line sheet is not where you persuade — the buyer has already decided to consider you, or they would not be looking at prices. Marketing on an ordering document reads as inexperience and it slows the scan.

No marketplace price. Listing your own retail price alongside the suggested retail price invites a comparison in the wrong document.

No ASINs, no FNSKUs, no fulfillment channel information. None of it means anything to a buyer and all of it signals that you copied the sheet out of Seller Central.

No "prices subject to change". Either the sheet has an effective date or it is not a price list. Put a date on it and issue a new one when prices move.

The persuasion belongs in a separate document that goes out alongside it. That one is the sell sheet, and keeping the two apart is most of what makes both work.

When you need more than one version

You will, sooner than you think. A distributor buying twenty cases at a time cannot pay the same unit price as an independent store buying one, and a chain will want a sheet that carries only the items in their assortment.

Handle it with tiers on one sheet where the relationship is simple, and with separate account-specific sheets where it is not. The discipline of keeping those versions straight — which account has which prices, which sheet is current, what happens when your own costs move — is its own ongoing job, and it is covered in the Amazon seller line sheet.

Who to send it to

A line sheet with no buyer is a design exercise. Before you spend a week on layout, spend an hour on the list of stores and distributors who plausibly stock a product like yours, because the answer changes your case pack, your price tiers and sometimes your assortment.

If you have no list yet, pasting your listing into WholesalePilot returns the kinds of retailers and distributors that stock comparable products, which is enough to size the first version of the sheet against real buyers rather than an imagined one.

Questions Amazon sellers ask about line sheets

Is a line sheet the same as a catalog? A catalog is a browsing document that can run to many pages and lead with imagery. A line sheet is the ordering page. Small brands often only need the line sheet.

Should I put my Amazon price on it? No. Put the suggested retail price you want on the shelf, and be prepared to explain how your listing price relates to it.

Do I need a different sheet for every retailer? Not at first. Start with one, add tiers when a distributor asks, and add account-specific versions only when the assortment genuinely differs.

What format do buyers want? A PDF to read and, on request, a spreadsheet to import. Send the PDF by default; send the spreadsheet when they ask, because it signals you can support their systems.

How often should I reissue it? Whenever prices, packs or assortment change, and otherwise on a seasonal rhythm so buyers learn when to expect it.