Getting to grips with the nuances of Vendor Central is no easy feat. It’s a complex platform with hyper-specific data points and terminology. Failing to understand how Vendor Central functions will negatively impact your brand’s relationship with Amazon, the integrity of your catalog on the marketplace, as well as your channel profitability, market share and revenue.
As a top Amazon agency (according to Business Insider), Bobsled has been smashing sales targets and maintaining operational excellence on Vendor Central for years. In this tutorial series, we’ve broken down all the different aspects of selling via Vendor Central.
Over the last few weeks, we discussed:
Find our Integration, Settings, Payments & Support breakdown below.
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Integration
The Integration page has four subsections:
- Getting Started
- EDI Integration
- Direct Fulfillment API
- Operational Analytics
‘Getting Started’ acts as a homepage to the different integration options that Amazon provides, and a link to the Operational Analytics Dashboard. The page provides useful information on EDI and API integrations and also includes a FAQ subpage.
EDI Integration and Direct Fulfillment API are self-service portals that help set up your EDI/API with Amazon, including connections and business document relationships. You can manage orders, shipments, inventory and payments automatically through the Amazon Direct Fulfillment API.
On the Operational Analytics page you can search for your company’s transmissions to and from Amazon, determine and troubleshoot transmission or transformation failures, and redeliver failed or missing transmissions.
Settings
Under Settings, vendors are able to adjust the following:
- Bank information
- Account Info (email, phone, password)
- Warehouse information (add/remove or edit warehouses for fulfilling Amazon POs and direct customer orders)
- Purchase Order Outages page – used to set dates when your office is closed and you are unable to process Amazon purchase orders. Amazon is unlikely to send you purchase orders if you are within an outage period.
- Return Addresses – use this page to add/remove or edit your return addresses
- Manage Permissions – used to add/remove users in your account and edit their permissions
- The Contacts page determines who the main POC Amazon reaches out to for specific account updates, changes or issues (e.g. warehouse contact, chargebacks, financials etc.). Use this page to add and remove people under the relevant sections.
- The Notification Preferences page is used to subscribe, unsubscribe, and add new recipients to make sure notifications are sent to the right people in your organization.
- The Agreements page has two sections:
- Pending: shows agreements that have been prepared for your company but still haven’t been reviewed and/or accepted
- Accepted/Rejected: shows agreements you’ve accepted or rejected. You can also review your purchasing terms on this page.
- Vendor Setup page – used when the vendor account is being set up.
Payments > Dashboard
This page provides an overview of your finance metrics. It’s where you keep track of the payable balance, future in progress payables, and other financial issues such as invoices, status of PODs (Proof of Delivery) submissions, and other payables you owe to Amazon for CoOp, other agreements and product returns.
Payments > CoOp
CoOp deductions are promotional funds vendors set aside to help retailers sell their products by subsidizing the cost of advertising. Here you can review all the payments related to the CoOp program.
Payments > Invoices
Review the status and any issues surrounding invoices, such as rejected invoices, POD (Proof of delivery) rejections and shortages on invoices processed. You’re able to dispute invoice shortages on this page too.
Payments > Remittance
On this page you can see the status (successful/failed) of any individual payment events within your account.
Payments > Product Returns
This is the place to review any deductions related to Amazon-initiated item returns that we have discussed in the Orders > Returns section of this Vendor Central series.
Payments > Dispute Management
If you have submitted any disputes e,g. in regards to shortage invoices, you are able to review their status here, as well as initiate new disputes.
Payments > Financial Scorecard
A place to review the overall state of your transactions with Amazon. It’s important to review this page on a weekly basis at the very least to manage your profitability and resolve any pending missing invoices, shortages, unit/product issues.
Check out Successfully Negotiate Vendor Terms with Amazon
Support
On the Support link, located at the top of the Vendor Central dashboard, you can find training pages which are particularly useful for new vendors, as well as help pages that provide more insight about VC processes which help guide you through your work. The Resource Center is useful for getting various files, templates and PDFs as required. The Case Log is where you can keep track and follow up on Vendor Support cases that have been opened.
Support > Contact Us
On this page, you can open a support ticket (which you can later find in the Case Log) for issues that you are unable to resolve on your own and need Amazon to advise or make updates on your behalf. When opening a new case, select the most relevant category for your question to ensure that your question gets forwarded to the most relevant support team.
Part 1 – Orders
Part 2 – Items
Part 3 – Advertising & Merchandising
Part 4 – Analytics & Reports
Part 5 – Payments & Settings
Need Strategic Support?
Understanding your Vendor Central account is the first step towards success as a vendor on Amazon. For more insight, book a consultation with a Bobsled expert below.
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