Amazon is one of your biggest accounts. It's managed like every other retailer.
Your team handles Amazon the way it handles every retailer: purchase orders, pricing, the annual negotiation. That's the job Vendor Central appears to ask for.
But how your products rank, convert and sell on Amazon runs on a different set of rules, and most of them aren't visible from the vendor portal.
Vendor Central hides most of the channel
On a vendor account, Amazon holds many of the levers: pricing, much of the promotional toolkit, parts of the data. So the account looks simpler than it is.
That's why vendor accounts often get run as a sales relationship rather than a channel. The work that decides performance is hard to see from inside the vendor portal.
How it shows up
- Amazon is a different kind of account. Your team is built for retail relationships, and that's what the vendor portal asks for. Performance on Amazon depends on a different set of skills on top of that.
- Amazon gets whatever attention is left. Retail and other channels take the team's time. Amazon is too big to ignore and too different to run on the side.
- Performance is reported, not managed. The team sees sales and purchase orders. Rank, conversion and share of search don't get worked on.
- Amazon doesn't get translated for the rest of the business. Leadership gets a number, not what's behind it.
What Vendor Central doesn't give you
- Fewer tools to push performance. Several of the promotional tools Amazon offers aren't available to vendors.
- Less of the data. Search and shopper reporting is limited, which makes it harder to see why sales move.
- Different levers entirely. Purchase orders, chargebacks, co-op terms and Amazon's own pricing decide much of the result, and they're easy to treat as admin rather than performance.
Fifteen minutes, no call required
Ask whoever manages Amazon three questions:
Where do our top five products rank for the searches that matter most?
What did chargebacks and co-op cost us last quarter, as a share of Amazon revenue?
What is Amazon charging for our best seller today, and why?
If the answers take days, or come back as a sales figure, the account is being managed as a relationship, not a channel.
How we fix this
- We come in as a consultant alongside your team. Your account manager keeps the relationship. We bring the Amazon side of it.
- We map the full opportunity. What's possible for your catalog on Amazon, including what Vendor Central makes harder and how to work within it.
- We translate Amazon for the business. What's moving the numbers, in terms your leadership and your retail team can act on.
- We work the levers vendors do have. Purchase orders, chargebacks, co-op and pricing, treated as performance rather than paperwork.
- Tracked every week, on every call.
A Vendor Central account, run as a channel
A Vendor Central account with an advertising agency already in place. The account was managed as a channel, the agency was held to performance, and gross profit grew alongside revenue.
Read the full case →What it needed was someone who ran the account as an Amazon channel and kept the plan together.
Let's see what Amazon could be for you
We'll audit the account and show you what's possible for your catalog, what Vendor Central is holding back, and what to do about it. If it's a fit, we talk about working together. If it isn't, you keep the audit.
Book a call (opens in a new tab)Engagements start at
$2,000/month
Month-to-month for the first three months.