Did you know that Amazon has an entire section of their website dedicated to selling HSA/FSA approved products?
It’s true, and you can find it here.
Health related products that meet a certain criteria can be purchased on the Amazon platform using HSA payments. And in this article, we’re going to walk you through how to get your products HSA/FSA approved on the Amazon platform as a Seller.
Disclaimer: We are Amazon marketing experts, not healthcare, legal, or government professionals. Everything you read in this article is information we gathered through our own research and intended for educational purposes only. Always do your own research before making decisions.
What Is HSA/FSA?
Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) or Flexible Spending Arrangements (FSAs) are often used interchangeably. HealthCare.gov defines an HSA as “a type of savings account that lets you set aside money on a pre-tax basis to pay for qualified medical expenses.”
These savings accounts come with cards that function like credit or debit cards, but only allow you to pay for those “qualified medical expenses.”
This is an obvious benefit for customers, which means there’s an obvious benefit to Amazon Sellers as well. If your products can be paid for using an HSA or FSA, you give your customers one more reason to buy from you.
Which Products Are Eligible?
Not every product can be purchased using HSA or FSA payments. Each product has to meet certain criteria to be eligible. Fortunately, that criteria is easily accessed.
SIG-IS is the organization that keeps the list of all products approved for HSA and FSA payments, and they have an entire page dedicated to criteria that needs to be met in order for a product to be eligible. You can view that page here: https://sig-is.org/eligible-product-list/eligible-product-list-criteria
It’s a good idea to review the criteria and make sure your product matches before trying to get it enrolled in the Eligible Products List (EPL). It doesn’t make a lot of sense to enroll a product if it doesn’t meet the standards.
That should go without saying. But just in case, we mention it here.
Enrolling Your Product(s)
If your product meets the required criteria on the SIG-IS website, you can then submit your product to be entered on the Eligible Products List (EPL).
In order to submit a product for approval, you need to be a SIG-IS member. There are four tiers of membership, the lowest being $100/year. You should only need to have the lowest tier membership to submit products to the EPL.
To join and become a SIG-IS member, just follow this link: https://sig-is.org/membership-services/join
Once you’re a member, you can submit items via a form online. This is done from the membership area, and since we’re an Amazon agency, we don’t have access to that. However, tucked away in a sidebar on the SIG-IS website, we find these instructions:
Once you submit the form, there isn’t a whole lot to do but wait. SIG-IS releases a new list of products once a month. It’s unclear to us if SIG-IS will inform you if/when your product makes it on the list, but the hunch we get is they won’t.
This means that you just need to check the EPL each month for your product. And since there are lots of submissions every month for SIG-IS to look through (and it’s a really large list to maintain in the first place), it’s possible that your product might not be approved in the month immediately following your application.
If you have any questions or concerns though, the SIG-IS helpdesk is very reachable and helpful. So you can always contact them.
How Amazon Knows Which Products Are Eligible
So far, we’ve only talked about SIG-IS. But you’re trying to get your products HSA eligible on Amazon. What does all of this have to do with getting your products eligible there?
Well, as we discussed earlier, SIG-IS maintains the EPL (Eligible Products List). This is a centralized list of HSA approved products across the US. SIG-IS uses UPCs to keep track of which products are which.
Periodically, Amazon cross-references all the EPL UPCs against the UPCs in the Amazon Catalog. Products that have a matching UPC on the EPL can be paid for using HSA or FSA cards.
It’s also possible this happens automatically because the IRS utilizes the Inventory Information Approval System (IIAS). This is a database used in Point of Sale (POS) systems that checks for UPCs on the EPL and automatically authorizes payments with HSA cards. If Amazon also utilizes the IIAS, then products that are on the EPL should automatically be eligible for HSA payments on Amazon.
Note: This makes it crucial that the UPC you submit to SIG-IS matches the UPC you used to set up your product on Amazon. If the UPC is different, it’s highly likely your product will not be eligible for HSA payments on Amazon.
Once you have submitted your product to SIG-IS, everything else is handled between SIG-IS and Amazon. There shouldn’t be anything else you need to do for your products to be purchased using HSA payments.
How Long It Takes
Each step of this process takes some time. Even just joining as a SIG-IS member is an application, and that application needs to be approved. It’s likely that doesn’t take too much time, but it’s not clear how long it takes on average—our assumption is not terribly long.
There’s an indefinite amount of time set for the product approval process. Generally speaking, the whole process is rather silent. You submit your product, and there’s not a lot of communication from there. We’re not sure how many products SIG-IS needs to work through, how many they can approve at a time, etc. So it could be a rather short period of time between application and approval, or it could take months.
Each month, the newest EPL becomes available on the 15th. Once your product is on the list, it might take additional time before Amazon is able to get your product processed in their system.
Amazon actually provides very little information on how they handle things with HSA or FSA eligible products. And since Amazon doesn’t give you customer payment information, it’s really difficult to tell when your products are HSA eligible.
Conclusion
We think, if you have a product that’s eligible, getting HSA or FSA approved is a good idea. Even though the process is tedious and rather silent, it offers a clear benefit to your customers, which is always a win.
Since Amazon is such a competitive platform, anything you can do to stand out is a good move. If your product gets approved, then customers also get access to your product through the HSA Amazon store. This is a much smaller store, making it easier to be discovered, giving you a leg up on the competition.