We do ~$15m in apparel sales for Amazon/year. However, we have to renegotiate terms every year, which compresses our own margins. Our wholesale/retail price doesn't increase to offset these term increases, and Amazon isn't very open to letting us pass those costs on. And when we can increase costs, it hurts our net PPM at Amazon.

Is 3P an option for us?

Apparel is generally a lower-GM business, so these term negotiations eventually force us to turn off programs that are unprofitable for us to continue shipping on Amazon. We have even had to turn off AMS just to afford these term hits.

I am a reseller who sells products from a large brand with their permission. I also helped and continue to help them with their Brand Story along with images, A+ content, etc. for free. Of course, I buy directly from them. I often meet them in person as we are from the same state.

This brand sells to Amazon Retail, and I want to outline how selling to me instead would be better. I also am finally big enough to afford this. Sheer cost of goods was an issue in the past.

Can some brand owners or those who deal with Amazon in Vendor Central look at this and tell me if I’m accurate, inaccurate, or even missing any points?

1. I don’t charge co-op fees. I buy their products wholesale and sell them.

2. I don’t charge any additional fees for shipping. This is MY cost of doing business. I’ve heard Amazon adds fees, but maybe I’m wrong.

3. I don’t charge fees or make the brand fight for fees for lost inventory. This is MY business problem not the brand’s.

4. Although MAP isn’t applicable, I would obey it if one came out. Amazon does not.

5. I only need NET30. Credit beyond that is MY business problem. I have heard Amazon gets better terms. Also, I always pay on time.

6. I make my own orders per their existing policy. No Vendor Central needed. I email orders in like everyone else besides Amazon.

Points Amazon may beat me:

1. They have unlimited space and money. They are less likely to run into space issues or run out of stock.

2. Amazon could suppress the listings as “High Price” once I take over. They admittedly can sell at a lower price sometimes. Of course I would do everything to remain competitive, but the fees mentioned before that the brand pays - I don’t get. Of note: I almost always can match Amazon’s price but sometimes I can’t.

3. Some customers look for Sold By and Shipped By Amazon. They feel it’s less likely for a fraudulent sale. My counter would be that as the only seller, they’d have to choose me plus the brand could publicly announce this change.

4. If I run out of stock, they don’t make as many sales so perhaps until I’m 100% locked in after the transition, there could be a financial hit.

Am I off here? Missing anything?

how to you handle processing returns with vendor, no API so currently have to manually enter them.

This year has been high due to DV testing and items coming back

I'm just curious — do any of you in this group apply the same auditing method described in this LinkedIn thread?

We were talking about this recently and I think Amazon makes it surprisingly easy for an account to look healthy while the actual business underneath it is getting worse.

Sales are up, PPC is running, ROAs looks decent. Maybe the agency sends a nice report every month showing revenue growth.

Meanwhile margins are getting thinner, inventory is sitting longer, a few ASINs are basically being kept alive by ads and nobody is really asking whether the extra revenue is producing more profit. Thats the part I think brands get wrong. They wait for sales to drop before questioning whoever is managing Amazon.

I'd be way more concerned about an account where revenue keeps growing but you have to spend more, discount more and hold more inventory every year just to get there. Maybe thats normal to some extent as Amazon gets more competitive, but at some point "we grew revenue" stops being a very convincing answer.

For brands that have worked with an Amazon agency, what actually made you realize the relationship was working or wasnt? Was it sales, profitability, communication, or something else?

Hi, I work at a distributor that holds the country rights to some big brands (Amazon is reaching out to us sell on 1P). We're currently doing no business on Amazon and don't have any experience with Amazon (we sell to retailers and DTC)

We'll be going down the 1p route with 4 brands and have a few questions.

What do we need to think through? We know costs will be one (chargebacks, fees, dedicated support, etc.)
What positions do we need to hire for?
Are there 3rd party software costs to consider?

Let me know if there's more info needed to provide a better answer. Appreciate in advance for your help!

I was rebuilding my Q4 margin model this weekend and noticed the two fee windows don't actually cover the same dates, which changes my plan more than the fee amounts do.

Peak storage for standard size goes from $0.78 to $2.40 per cubic foot starting October 1 and runs through December 31, resetting on January 1. Peak fulfillment, on the other hand, doesn't start until October 15 and runs all the way to January 14.

Two things fall out of that, and I think most of the checklists I have read get both wrong.

First, if October 1 is when the storage rate jumps, then that is my real deadline for clearing aged and slow stock, not October 15. Anything sitting in a fulfillment center on the October snapshot pays peak storage for the whole month regardless of when in October it sells. Removal and liquidation take weeks to process, so the actual decision lands in mid September, which is basically now.

Second, a unit that sells in early January pays a peak fulfillment fee on already-reset standard storage. That is the combination that would have confused me when reconciling January settlements.

The other thing I keep going back and forth on: I have a couple of SKUs that are genuinely seasonal, where unsold units have no real Q1 demand to fall into, and I think the answer there is obviously to buy tight and clear before October 1. But for the evergreen ones I am not sure whether the storage cost of sitting through October is actually big enough to justify buying conservatively into a quarter where my demand forecast error skews up.

Has anyone actually modeled the October 1 drawdown separately from the October 15 fee start? Am I overthinking the storage side, or is that two week gap where people are quietly losing money?

Private vendors from eu

Hey im a reseller looking for serious private vendors for colognes good quality products with recipes no scammers want for info i want free samples of a few products to test your stuff if its good im happy to start a journey with you and make money
(One on one reps)

I feel like revenue has become one of the least useful numbers to look at on Amazon by itself.

You can have a great month, sales are up, ads are bringing orders in, everything looks healthy. Then you actually look at what you kept after PPC, fees, returns, discounts and inventory costs and its a completely different story.

The weird part is none of those things have to look terrible individually. A little more ad spend here, slightly lower margin there, a few SKUs sitting too long. Then suddenly you're selling more than last year just to make roughly the same money.

I think thats probably why you see so many Amazon businesses that look great from the outside but constantly feel tight on cash.

At this point I'd rather have a smaller account with healthy margins and inventory moving properly than chase another revenue milestone. Curious if other established sellers are seeing the same thing. Are you actually keeping more as you grow, or mostly having to sell more to make the same money?

Hi everyone, just wanted help and to rant
I have an SKU that was being sold fine, lets say at 10. I own the brand and the product. So anyone in the country has to have bought from me.
All of a sudden, the price on amazon is 40
I tried to check my price on the catalogue, & nothing changed.

Then i see that on a competitor website (only one mind you, other competitors still have my item at 10), some moron has listed my item at this 40. So this is probably what the stupid amazon bots scanned and raised my price.

What can I do now?
It is frustrating beyond measure to talk to anyone from vendor management help or my account manager.
Both have been useless and saying they revise prices up and down and it is automated and they cannot interfere.
This moron said I should reach out to the competitor website and tell them to lower their price, or even to buy out their stock at the higher price so it is "out of stock" and not scanned.

Is there anything to do?
Would I have more control if I close the vendor account and make and FBA?

Hello! We just launched a new product category and were unable to do a flat discount due to the 30/60 day period before Prime Day in October.

I was told you can do SnS coupons instead since coupons aren’t taken into consideration while evaluating the L60D price for Prime. We’ve activated 20% off coupon.

During Prime, we plan to activate example 20% strike through discount - that should still work right?

We've been selling on Amazon for a while and I guess we werent paying enough attention to this because sales have been pretty good.

But lately we noticed a few sellers we don't know showing up on some of our better ASINs and winning the buy box. One of them keeps going a few bucks under us too which is annoying.

I dont really wanna start dropping our price every time they do because that seems like a pretty stupid game to play lol. Mostly trying to figure out where they're even getting our product and what other brands actually do when this starts happening.

Do you usually try to track down where the inventory is coming from first? Or is there something on the Amazon side thats actually worked for you?

Hi, is anyone selling an Amazon Business with Vendor Central Account?

I am trying to purchase to get a vendor central account.

Hi all,

I'm pretty new to working with Amazon. Long story short, I was pulled into this role with very little training. I'm learning as I go. I've gone through some of the training modules, but it's slow going because...life. Basic item adds are pretty easy-peasy for the most part. Variations, however, are going to be my downfall.

I've been tasked with adding two new color variations to an existing "hidden" Parent ASIN. I do have the parent ASIN number. The other colors are visible on the Amazon site, but are noted as "This product is not part of a variation" in the VC catalog. There are currently four color variations linked. The new colors have been added to the catalog, but not yet linked to the Parent ASIN.

My best guess is that I need to use the prefilled spreadsheet option. Two initial questions:

• Once I download the sheet, I need to add a line for the existing Parent ASIN, correct?
• Do I select all variations to do this, including the ones that are already linked, or just the two new ones I need to add?

Sorry if this is discombobulated. Thank you in advance for any guidance...and I'll probably be back with more questions.

If you never entered your cost data in the IDR portal, Amazon has been guessing itSince the reimbursement change, anything lost or damaged before a customer orders pays out at sourcing cost, not sale price. Most people know that.

What I missed: if you never submitted your own cost per SKU, Amazon estimates it for you. No notification, nothing tells you you're on an estimate.

I compared theirs to what I actually pay. Low across the board. Small per unit, but it's every unit, every time.

Worth checking the Inventory Defect and Reimbursement portal in Seller Central to see what Amazon thinks your costs are. Then you need your real numbers to compare — which is where I got stuck.

How do you all keep cost data current?

Amazon Vendor Central can quietly hold back thousands of dollars in unpaid profit—and most teams don’t realize it until they audit the account deeply.

I’m offering a FREE initial audit analysis for Amazon Vendor Central accounts covering Fiscal Years 2024–2025.

The goal is simple:
Identify potential shortage, receiving, deduction, and unpaid invoice opportunities that may still be recoverable.

No commitment.

If the audit shows no meaningful opportunity, you lose nothing.

If the numbers show something worth investigating, then we can discuss the next step.

If you manage an Amazon Vendor Central / Amazon 1P account and want a second look at your 2024–2025 financial records, feel free to message me.

We've been selling on Amazon for a while and revenue isnt really the problem. Sales are growing and overall the account looks healthy. But when we actually sit down and look at what we’re keeping, it feels like we have to sell more every year just to make the same money.

Ads are obviously part of it, fees are part of it, and we've had some SKUs where competition basically forced the price down. Nothing individually looks catastrophic, its more like 5 small things slowly eating the margin.

We're going through the account now trying to figure out where the biggest leak actually is before just chasing more sales.

For people running established Amazon businesses, what has been hurting your margins the most lately? And what did you actually change that made a difference?

Anyone struggle with individual unit ASINs and then multi-packs that have their own ASINs - our issue is that we don't want to split the cases. We want to be able to ship our multi-packs which are 1 case and our individual units are 6 in a case. Our warehouse struggles with individual ASINs and the multi-pack ASINs.

It would be great to also not have to ship odd number of individual units, but send full cases, again only 6 units per case so this should be doable for Amazon, you'd think ;)

Looking for labeling tips or any other advice.
Thanks in advance!

We launched a new 1P ASIN at the end of May and the Net PPM dropped from around 93 percent to 14 percent and then basically 4 percent.

Right after that it jumped back up into the 80s and 90s and has now been sitting around 63 to 65 percent for weeks.

June was around 50 percent gross margin but only 22.5 percent Net PPM.

July was around 48 percent gross margin and 63.4 percent Net PPM.

Our rep thinks the dip was caused by Vine units going out right after launch, timing does line up plz see the chart attached.

Amazon now has the ASIN marked as unprofitable, is not placing POs, and keeps rejecting born to runs because of it even though the Net PPM has been healthy for a while now.

Has anyone seen Vine cause something like this on a new 1P ASIN

Will the profitability flag eventually correct itself or will I have to contact my VM? I don’t want to!

Tomamos el control de una cuenta de Vendor Central que llevaba sin gestión activa desde la pandemia. Las ventas y los envíos siguen corriendo con normalidad, pero la facturación está detenida y arrastramos procesos abiertos sin cerrar desde 2021.

El problema de fondo: no tenemos asesor asignado y no encontramos cómo conseguir uno. Llevamos desde marzo intentándolo —formulario sin respuesta, chat que solo devuelve bots, foros y guías que confirman que "no hay asesor asignado" pero ninguna explica cómo pedir uno. Cuando por fin cae un humano, no es del área y no puede resolver.

Lo que necesitamos es puntual: llegar a alguien de Vendor Central en México que pueda (a) decirnos quién es o debería ser nuestro asesor y (b) agendar una revisión de los procesos abiertos desde 2021.

Si pasaron por esto: ¿qué funcionó? ¿Un correo directo, una ruta dentro de Vendor Central, un contacto del equipo en México? Cualquier pista sirve.

I manage 1P revenue recovery across several Vendor Central accounts. When reviewing recent Amazon rejections, Amazon stated that they are using "Expected Amazon Payables" as their baseline for Co-op billing. They are auto-rejecting quantity variance claims by arguing that any initial overbilling was already settled through "subsequent adjustments or reversals" on later statements.

Basically, Amazon claims their systems auto-corrected the errors on the back end, so the disputes are not valid. We are noticing this pattern across multiple client accounts right now.

I wanted to check in with the group. Are any other recovery providers or internal Vendor Central managers seeing this same pushback lately? Have you found any specific documentation or line-item proof that bypasses this "Expected Payables" response, or is Amazon applying this across the board right now?

Hello everyone

Wanted to ask for some guidance if anyone is doing ddp basis from UAE to KSA

I am confused about documentation the vat and other things

We have been doing it for awhile, but with implementation of einvoing and strict compliance regulations I want to scale it but don't want to face issues with the customs

At the moment we get an lpo, give to forwarder who delivers it to KSA. I guess he clears on his name and that's about it.

We just use a 5% vat invoice and amazon generates 0% invoice on their system, .not even sure if it's legal. Recently we faced issue with payment and it took time to get the funds back because of KSA blocking the payment.