Amazon Vendor Economics · Glossary

Vendor Central

Updated October 25, 2026

Vendor Central is Amazon's first-party (1P) portal, where a brand sells wholesale to Amazon instead of selling to shoppers itself. Amazon sends purchase orders, takes ownership of the inventory, sets the retail price and resells the goods as "Sold by Amazon". Access is by invitation, and in practice Amazon has not stopped offering invitations. What earns one differs by category: it generally rests on the brand's revenue and sales velocity, on Amazon and off it, and on its potential, and the bar sits lower in a category Amazon is building out than in an established one.

Seller Central (3P) is the other model: there the seller sells to shoppers and sets the price. The Vendor Central versus Seller Central article compares the two side by side. In Vendor Central, every purchase order, invoice, payment, deduction, EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) message and dispute runs against a vendor code, Amazon's supplier number for the brand. Every Amazon vendor deduction exists only on the Vendor Central side, and the deduction ledger is visible only in the Vendor Central interface: no API (application programming interface) returns it.

Where does a vendor find the money in Vendor Central?

In four places, each tied to one kind of question.

• Payments, then Dispute Management: where a vendor contests deductions such as shortage claims.
• Reports, then Operational Performance: where chargebacks appear.
• Reports, then Retail Analytics: seven report families, namely Sales, Real-time Sales, Inventory, Traffic, Forecasting, Net PPM (Net Pure Product Margin, Amazon's per-product margin metric) and Catalogue.
• Payments, then Co-op: where co-op invoices sit.

Because the deduction ledger lives only in the interface, Vendor Central deduction recovery starts inside the portal, not from an API export.

The relationship can also end from Amazon's side. In September 2024 some vendors received notices reading "We've made the decision to stop sourcing products from your company". Amazon gave no revenue threshold. Its only on-record statement on dropping vendors, from 2019, says it reviews "selling partner relationships on an individual basis".