Selling on Amazon is always a great way to get your products out there and boost your sales up a notch, but it also gets a bit confusing at times. The globally popular website has two main ways that you can work with: Vendor Center and Seller Center, but you can only pick one. In this article, we'll try to tell you all you need to know about them and show you the differences so you can decide which one would work best for your company.

Amazon Vendor Central & Amazon Seller Central - How are they Different?

Amazon Vendor Central works by an invite-only system and is generally made for the large companies and the popular brands. If you choose to work with Vendor Central, you'll be considered a first-party seller. Where you'll be acting as a supplier and will be selling your products to Amazon in bulk. Amazon takes your product, sells it with a price that they feel is appropriate, and then pay you back.

While Amazon Seller Central allows more of a third-party transaction, where third-party sellers are able to list their products on Amazon's website. Clever sellers tend to use Fulfilled by Amazon, that helps in accessing the Amazon Prime shipping. Seller Central can pretty much be used by anyone. With Seller Central, sellers get to control everything, like their their product listings and pricing.

Other Factors that Differ between Vendor Central and Seller Central

It's not just the pricing and invitation system that makes a difference between the Vendor and Seller central, there are more factors that you need to consider before deciding. Some of them are:

  • Payment

This is a big difference between the two interfaces. While Seller Central offers very fast payment, Vendor Central actually takes from 60 to 90 days in order to send out your money. Which in my opinion, could be a break dealer for a lot of sellers.

  • Inventory Management

With Vendor Central, you don't have much say on your inventory or it's shipment. Amazon gets to decide whether they have sold enough and you could end up with some leftover stock that they return after buying from you. This never happens with Seller Central users as they get to control all of their inventory including the ability to use Amazon repricers.

  • The Amazon Vine

This is a very cool feature that comes with the Vendor Central and is called the Amazon Vine program. Amazon uses it to provide customer reviews for new or pre-released products. Which gives you the chance to have some of Amazon's top reviewers write about your product.

We hope that this article has provided you with enough information that would help you decide on which interface to use for your business.