How to Sell to Amazon Directly (1P)

Selling directly to Amazon means becoming a 1P vendor: Amazon sends you purchase orders through Vendor Central, buys your inventory at wholesale, and resells it as "Ships from and Sold by Amazon." There is no application form. Vendor Central is invitation-only, the invitations come from Amazon's retail organization, and in 2026 Amazon is extending fewer of them, not more.

That last part changes what this article needs to be. Most "how to sell to Amazon" guidance is really about opening a Seller Central account, which anyone can do today. This is about the 1P route: how invitations actually happen, who realistically gets one now, and the question almost nobody asks in the excitement of being courted by Amazon: whether you should say yes.

How do brands actually get invited to Vendor Central?

Through Amazon's retail teams, not through any process you can file into. The realistic paths:

1. A Vendor Manager or category buyer reaches out because your brand shows demand signals Amazon wants supply control over: strong 3P sales velocity, brand search volume, category share, or retail presence elsewhere.
2. Trade shows and category recruiting, where Amazon's retail organization actively sources vendors for categories it is investing in (grocery, CPG, consumables, essentials).
3. Existing-relationship expansion: brands already selling Amazon in one region or category get invited into others.

What does not work: emailing support, filling out forms, or paying anyone who claims they can get you in. If an "invitation" asks you for money to join, it is not from Amazon.

Who qualifies for 1P in 2026?

The bar has moved up sharply. Since late 2024, Amazon has been terminating vendor relationships with sub-enterprise brands, roughly those under $5M to $10M a year, and pushing them to the 3P marketplace. What remains on 1P skews to brands with $20M+ in Amazon-relevant revenue ($5M+ as a practical floor), categories where Amazon's supply chain adds real efficiency, and operations that can hold strict EDI, ASN, and PO-accuracy compliance without bleeding penalty deductions.

So the honest 2026 answer to "how do I sell to Amazon directly" for most brands under that scale is: you build the demand signals on 3P first, and the invitation finds you if the economics ever justify it. Direct outreach does not accelerate this; category-leading velocity does.

What happens after you accept an invitation?

Three onboarding realities most first-time vendors underestimate:

• Item setup and EDI. Your catalog goes through Amazon's new-item-setup process, and ongoing operations run on EDI documents (purchase orders, ship notices, invoices). The compliance bar starts on day one; ASN errors are the single most common chargeback trigger for new vendors.
• The terms are the business. Your wholesale cost is only the visible part. The Vendor Agreement layers co-op, freight, and damage allowances on top, revisited annually in a negotiation where Amazon proposes and you counter. In the 2025 cycle, 64 percent of vendors received cost-decrease requests and total trade terms averaged roughly 18.6 percent of net sales. Model those before signing, in dollars, not percentages.
• Payment terms lengthen. 3P pays out on a roughly 14-day cycle; 1P runs net 30 to 90. The working-capital difference is material at any scale.

What if the purchase orders stop?

Plan for this before you accept, because 1P has no tenure. Amazon can slow or stop issuing POs without notice or explanation, and the 2024-2026 vendor purge showed it exercising exactly that option at scale.

The pattern is older than the purge. I saw it from the inside in 2019, on the opening morning of a vendor summit my category team had spent weeks preparing: attendees' inboxes filled with Vendor Central termination notices before ours did. Mass terminations are a central-team decision. The vendor manager who wants your catalog in the category is often the last to know, and can at best argue for exceptions for the vendors they consider strategic.

Two protections belong in any acceptance decision: keep (or be ready to open) a 3P selling capability, and understand that the transition back is not automatic; inventory sitting in Amazon's network as 1P stock does not simply convert to your FBA inventory, so an exit involves liquidation or return logistics you should price in from the start.

Should you accept a Vendor Central invitation at all?

Sometimes. The genuine 1P advantages are real where they apply: Amazon's PO volume, the "Sold by Amazon" badge where it lifts conversion, and supply-chain scale in categories Amazon invests in. But for most brands under roughly $50M in Amazon revenue, 3P delivers more net profit per unit, commonly 2 to 3 times more, because you keep retail margin and pricing control.

The decision framework we walk brands through is the subject of its own article, Vendor Central vs Seller Central, including the hybrid pattern that is increasingly the norm: hero ASINs on 1P, long-tail and margin-sensitive SKUs on 3P, reviewed quarterly against real margin data.

One warning either way: do not model 1P margin on the invitation-call numbers. The wholesale price you agree to is the top line of your 1P economics; the deductions layer (co-op accruals, compliance chargebacks, shortage claims) is what determines the bottom, and it is where new vendors most often discover their modeled margin was 2 to 4 points optimistic.

If you are already 1P, or weighing an invitation, and want the deduction layer quantified before it becomes a surprise, the Margin Recovery Audit does exactly that from your own remittance data. It starts with a free scan.