We get a lot of questions about the difference between Vendor Central and Seller Central. We created this guide to help.
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 official FBA calculator to determine 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 use 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 method for fulfillment
- Allows you to list your products and directly fulfill from your warehouses
- Does not give you Amazon prime which does negatively affect performance
- Avoids FBA fee
- Potential for approval for Seller Fulfilled Prime (Prime shipping without using the Amazon warehouse network
- Program where you are able to 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
- Ostensibly better advertising rates
- 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
