Wholesale Invoice for an Amazon Seller: Every Field

A wholesale invoice is a single document that has to satisfy three readers at once: a matching engine that compares it to a purchase order, a clerk who resolves it when the match fails, and eventually an auditor. It is not a sales document and it is not a receipt. It is a claim, written in the retailer's own reference numbers, that a stated quantity of stated items left your building on a stated date at a stated price.

If your only billing experience is Amazon, the closest analogue is the settlement report, and the resemblance ends at the word document. A settlement report explains money that has already moved. A wholesale invoice is the thing that causes money to move, and any field that is missing or contradicts the purchase order stops it.

This article walks the document field by field and then lists what gets it rejected. The process around it, and the accounts payable machinery it lands in, is covered in Amazon seller wholesale invoicing.

What the header has to say

The top block identifies who is billing, who is being billed, and which transaction this is. Get any of it wrong and the rest of the document is unreadable by their system.

Your legal entity name comes first, and it must match the name on your vendor setup paperwork exactly. If your brand is one name and the company is another, the company name is the one that belongs here, with the brand name underneath if you like. A retailer's system pays vendor records, not brands.

Your remit-to address is separate from your business address and is the one detail suppliers most often leave off. It is where a cheque goes, and in a lot of mid-sized retailers cheques are still a real payment method. Print it clearly, and print the bank details underneath it for the accounts that pay electronically: account name, account number, routing number, and a reference instruction telling them to quote the invoice number.

Then the identifiers. Invoice number, unique across your whole business forever. Invoice date, which is the date you raise it and often the date payment terms start counting from. Purchase order number, exactly as the retailer wrote it, including any letter prefix. Ship date, which is the date the freight actually left rather than the date you packed it. And your vendor number if they issued one, because that is how their system finds you.

Finally, carrier and tracking. For a parcel shipment that is the carrier name and the tracking number. For freight it is the carrier, the pro number, and the bill of lading number. Accounts payable rarely look at these, but the clerk resolving a short-shipment dispute looks at nothing else.

Bill-to and ship-to are rarely the same address

On Amazon there is no distinction to learn, because Amazon is both. In wholesale, the invoice carries two addresses and they are almost never the same building.

Bill-to is the legal entity that owes the money and the office that processes the invoice. Often it is a corporate headquarters, sometimes a shared services centre in a different state, and for a franchise group it may be a company with a different name from the store on the sign.

Ship-to is where the goods went: a distribution centre, a store, or a third-party warehouse. It has its own identifier in their system, frequently a numeric location code, and that code needs to be on the invoice because it is how receiving records are matched.

When a retailer places one purchase order that ships to four stores, you will usually raise four invoices, one per ship-to, each referencing the same purchase order with its own line quantities. Their system reconciles against receiving records that exist per location, and a single combined invoice has nothing to match against.

Selling through a distributor changes the shape of this again: the bill-to is the distributor, the ship-to is their warehouse, and the stores never appear on your paperwork at all. What that hides from you is set out in Amazon seller distributors.

The line items, field by field

This is the part that gets matched automatically, so it is the part worth being pedantic about. Every line needs both sides of the identity: their item number and yours. Their system searches on theirs, and your warehouse picks on yours.

Extended price is quantity times unit price, calculated per line and shown per line. Do not round it. If their system computes a cent differently from yours, a whole invoice can park over a rounding difference that nobody can see by eye.

The case pack field deserves attention because it is where unit-priced and case-priced invoices go wrong. Decide whether you sell by the case or by the unit, say so explicitly, and keep it consistent across the purchase order, the invoice and the carton label. An invoice showing twelve of something at one price against a purchase order for twelve cases of six is not a small discrepancy, it is a six-fold one.

Allowances belong on lines, not in your head

Anything you agreed to give the retailer off the invoice value should appear as its own visible line: a new store allowance, a damage or defective allowance, a marketing or advertising contribution, a volume discount, a freight allowance.

There are two reasons to show them rather than quietly reducing the unit price. The first is matching: the purchase order carries a unit price, and if your invoice shows a lower one the price check fails even though you were being generous. The second is that allowances have a habit of becoming permanent. When the number is a separate line with a name on it, you can see what the account actually costs you, and you can argue about it at the next negotiation. When it is baked into the price, it is the price forever.

Show each allowance as a negative line with a short label, and show the subtotal before and after. The margin arithmetic that decides whether you can afford them at all is in keystone pricing for an Amazon brand.

Freight terms, payment terms and the due date

Three small fields near the total, all of which get disputed if they are left implicit.

Freight terms say who pays for the truck and where title passes: prepaid, collect, or prepaid and charged, together with the FOB point. If you are adding freight to the invoice, it appears as its own line with the actual carrier charge, and it should have been agreed before shipment because freight that was never on the purchase order is a classic reason for a hold.

Payment terms, written in words rather than shorthand. Net thirty days from invoice date is unambiguous. Terms offering a two percent discount for paying within ten days, with the full amount due in thirty, should be spelled out that way on the document rather than left as a code that means different things to different systems.

Due date, stated as an actual calendar date. Never make accounts payable calculate it. A due date on the face of the invoice is a fact their clerk can act on, and it is the date you will quote when you chase.

Why is sales tax zero on this invoice?

Because the retailer is not the end consumer. A wholesale sale to somebody who is buying for resale is generally exempt from sales tax, and the mechanism is a resale certificate that the buyer gives you and you keep on file.

Practically, this means three things on the document. There is a sales tax line, and it shows zero rather than being absent, because an absent line reads as an omission. There is a short note saying the sale is exempt for resale. And in your records, not on the invoice, there is the buyer's resale certificate with an expiry date you monitor, because in an audit the certificate is the only thing standing between you and the tax you did not collect.

Two exceptions to watch. Samples and display units given away may be taxable depending on the state, and anything shipped to a location the retailer does not resell from may not be covered by the certificate they gave you.

A worked invoice total

Take a made-up product: a stainless pour-over kettle that sells on Amazon for fifty-eight dollars, wholesales at twenty-six dollars a unit, and packs four to a case.

A regional chain orders thirty cases for one distribution centre. Thirty cases at four units is one hundred and twenty units. One hundred and twenty times twenty-six dollars gives an extended price of three thousand one hundred and twenty dollars.

You shipped twenty-eight cases, because two cases were short in the pick and you told the buyer before the truck left. So the invoice is for one hundred and twelve units, and the extended line is two thousand nine hundred and twelve dollars.

Agreed on this first order was a new store allowance of one hundred and fifty dollars, shown as its own negative line. Freight is collect, so no freight line appears. Sales tax is zero against a resale certificate on file.

The invoice total is two thousand nine hundred and twelve minus one hundred and fifty, which is two thousand seven hundred and sixty-two dollars. Terms are net thirty from invoice date, the invoice is dated the eleventh, so the due date printed on the face of the document is the tenth of the following month.

Notice what the document did not do. It did not invoice the thirty cases that were ordered. It did not hide the allowance inside a lower unit price. It did not leave the due date to be worked out by somebody else.

Why invoices get rejected

Nearly every rejection is one of six things, and five of them are avoidable in the ten seconds before you press send.

• Price mismatch against the purchase order. A discount agreed by email but never reissued on the order is the usual cause. Get the purchase order revised, or invoice at the order price and issue a credit note.
• Quantity mismatch against the receiving record. You invoiced what was ordered rather than what shipped, or a case was damaged in transit and received short.
• Missing or mistyped purchase order number. The invoice has nothing to attach to and sits in an exceptions queue with no owner.
• Duplicate invoice number. Reusing a number, even from three years ago, trips a duplicate check and stops the payment outright.
• Invoicing before receipt. The invoice arrives ahead of the goods or ahead of the shipping notice, fails the match, and is not retried automatically when the goods land.
• Rounding. Per-line extended prices that do not add to your stated total, usually from rounding each line before summing.

The habit that fixes most of these is to build the invoice from the purchase order document rather than from memory, with the shipped quantities read off the packing list rather than the pick list.

Questions sellers ask about wholesale invoices

Can the invoice just be a spreadsheet? For an independent store, a clean PDF is fine. For a chain, the format is whatever their portal or electronic feed accepts, and that is specified during vendor setup. The structured version Amazon expects from its own business sellers is a useful comparison, and it is described in Amazon Business invoices.

Do I put my Amazon price on it? No. The invoice carries the wholesale price only. Retail prices belong in a separate conversation about pricing policy, not on a billing document.

What if the buyer asks for a proforma invoice? That is a quotation shaped like an invoice, used to get an order approved or a payment released before shipment. Number it separately so it never collides with a real invoice number.

Do I invoice samples? Invoice them at zero or at a nominal value with a clear no-charge marking, so there is a record and so your stock reconciles.

If you have not reached the first purchase order yet, the useful first step is finding out which retailers and distributors would realistically carry the product. Paste your product link into WholesalePilot and the preview shows who would plausibly stock it, and the terms you will be invoicing against are worth deciding in advance using payment terms for retailers.