Overview: Vendor Central vs Seller Central

by Jake Schwarzbaum

We get a lot of questions about the difference between Vendor Central and Seller Central. We created this guide to help, and if you’re looking for expert Amazon account management support, we’ve got you covered, too.

Seller Central

• You are the retailer: Amazon provides logistics and access to customers
• Potentially increased margins
  • Different fee structure.
  • 15% Referral fee (of retail)
  • FBA fees or Drop Ship fees
  • Payment from Amazon every 14 days
  • Use an official FBA calculator to determine the approximate profitability

• More control over pricing
  • You set the retail price.
  • The only uncontrollable factor here is if other 3rd party sellers start undercutting your price.

• Complete control over inventory management
  • You manage your own projections and shipments
  • There are no PO’s

• Improved sales and marketing data
  • Includes details about product page traffic and conversion rates

• Access to more customer and purchase data
  • Access to data such as conversion rates, impressions, and Buy Box %
  • Better advertising data in some cases
  • Access to customer emails and shipping addresses from order reports
    • Cannot be used for direct marketing but can be used on Facebook Lookalike Audiences for retargeting

• More control over customer experience with the brand
  • Directly manage customer service by e-mail using Amazon’s platform

• Review follow-up campaigns
  • Provide support and request honest reviews from customers with automated follow-up emails to customers

• Ability to use Merchant Fulfilled as a method for fulfillment
  • Allows you to list your products and directly fulfill from your warehouses
  • Does not give you Amazon Prime which negatively affects performance
  • Avoids FBA fee
  • Potential for approval for Seller Fulfilled Prime (Prime shipping without using the Amazon warehouse network
    • The program where you can be seller fulfilled but have the prime badge
    • After trial period

Vendor Central

• Selling Wholesale to Amazon
  • You negotiate rates and terms with Amazon

• Net 60 or Net 90 payment terms
• PO’s are automated by Amazon’s ordering algorithm
  • There are no guarantees of a PO from Amazon for certain products
  • These are based on past performance

• Access to Amazon Vine
  • Giveaway program that exchanges free products to customers in exchange for reviews.

• Access to AMS and additional ad features
  • Ostensibly better advertising rates
    • From our personal experience, we have seen better pricing from Amazon on PPC bids on Vendor Central

• No control over retail price
  • Amazon decides on the retail price and there is no way to control it as the brand owner.

• Buy Box competitive advantage
  • Amazon manages the retail pricing for you. This means that

• Fee advantages for certain product types
• Advanced Retail Analytics for superior competitive intelligence when you spend extra
• Vendor Premium Services includes an Amazon-facing account executive