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This article is mostly alarmist nonsense. Vendors would welcome the addition of Seller tools to Vendor Central. Vendors do not have access to the Marketplace AP
by zebrafish 8y ago
This article is mostly alarmist nonsense. Vendors would welcome the addition of Seller tools to Vendor Central. Vendors do not have access to the Marketplace APIs, get watered down reporting, and are generally treated like suppliers where Sellers are treated like customers.
In addition, this is not a new shift in policy for Amazon. They have never allowed a product sold by Retail to be sold by the same Vendor on Marketplace. They would have to compete on price with the Vendor for that item and would win absolutely zero buy-boxes. If anything, Amazon has softened on this stance recently. They now are open to "hybrid" sales models which allow the Vendor to sell & fulfill items that Amazon cannot profitably sell itself because of the always on price-matching in Amazon's pricing engine.
One gripe that many have about Amazon is their hands-off approach to policing non-authorized listings of products. Many small time players will simply purchase products through a myriad of channels and sell them on Amazon, sometimes attaching them to the Vendor listing, and sometimes creating fake UPCs and listing the product as a separate item. This causes customer confusion and a bad customer experience because of duplicate listings or unknown sellers & fulfillers on a Vendor's listing. Of course, Amazon has no incentive to police these listings because they still collect the $99/yr fee from these sellers as well as 15% of any buy-boxes they do happen to win. Amazon makes money on these sellers for the cost of the hosting the minute traffic that ends up on these listings.
- ikeboy 8y agoThis is very much a new policy. There was never a written requirement for brands not to sell both through VC and SC, until a few months ago. Also, the fee is $39/month, not $99/year.
- zebrafish 8y agoIt may be a new written policy for certain categories, but I haven't been exposed to such a policy. A VM would have scoffed at the idea of allowing their vendor to sell the same product through Seller Central for years now. A vendor could discretely do this by setting up a 3P account and not telling their VM about it, but that's dishonest business and to be completely fair, you cannot honestly expect Amazon to allow that. In the case of CRaP items, it's actually become a new strategy for VMs to allow some hybrid selling to keep assortment on the site while still allowing the company to turn a profit on the sale. My mistake on the pricing of Seller Pro, but the point still stands.
- ikeboy 8y agoIn the OP, they stopped selling to Amazon and then sold to a 3p seller who Amazon then blocked from selling
- 8note 8y agoaren't vendors suppliers?
- zebrafish 8y agoYes, however the burden of success on the platform is placed on the vendor, much like it is with sellers. Those sellers have access to many more tools which makes being successful much easier and allows for automation of most tasks on the platform (or integration with other specialized third-party tools.) Vendors are unable to do any of this despite the fact that they're responsible for many of the same tasks. Much of this is due to the fact that Amazon takes on the inventory risk, handles fulfillment, and has tight control over pricing. These tasks are up to the 3P seller to figure out on their own. However, being able to handle these tasks does nothing for you if you are unable to generate sales. This burden falls on both Vendors and Sellers. Amazon's Retail team does absolutely zero merchandising, product management, or market analysis. They are simply worried about monitoring profitability in their category and pitching Vendors on programs involving lots of clawback. The tools available to Sellers to manage their products and traffic to their pages are much better and more complete than those available to Vendors.