How to Transition from Vendor Central to Seller Central

One of the accounts I’m managing is a vendor account or it was until last month when the management decided to move to Seller Central. I’ve also seen several posts on LinkedIn recently where vendor accounts have started receiving agreement termination emails from Amazon and Amazon encouraging these vendor accounts to transition to Seller. Our decision to move to Seller Central was both timely and coincidental.

What triggered the decision?

• The management wants more control of the brand and pricing
• The listings keep getting suppressed due to high cost because Amazon keeps lowering the selling price which we don’t have any control
• Erratic retail price changes that affect advertising strategies as well as strategies of other marketplaces
• Amazon was selling the products at a very low price then forcing us to drop the cost prices
• Given that we’re selling a branded & high quality product under Children’s Furniture category, Amazon’s pricing made our products look cheap instead of premium or high-end

Was it easy doing the transition?

• Recreating the listings from Vendor to Seller was easy using a Listing Loader
• Since the vendor account had a Direct Fulfillment set up (aka dropshipping), order processing and fulfillment were the same so there’s not much change in operations. We just needed to find an API integration between Seller Central and the ERP (MS Business Central) to automate order processing.
• Starting advertising campaigns was also easy. We copied the campaigns that were working well in Vendor and created new campaigns.
• We were able to GO LIVE in Seller in a matter of hours. We just had to mark the ASINs in vendor as ‘OBSOLETE’ so as not to compete with Amazon on the buy box.

Were there any roadblocks?

• Since the products are under a restricted category (children’s furniture), we had to get Amazon’s approval to sell under this category by providing specific documents and images.
• Since the products are under the Disney brand, we also needed approval from Amazon to create new listings and sell under this brand by providing letter of authorization from Disney and specific images. We also had to request from Disney to make our seller account an authorized user in Brand Registry.
• Once we had approval for both the restricted category and branded products, we had to contact Brand Registry team to enable our Seller account to manage all the listings otherwise we will always manage any listing changes on Vendor Central.

I’m not going to lie, dealing with Seller Support never gets easier but resolving all these issues had to be done so we can move forward especially when Q4 already started. Personally, I wouldn’t have done the transition in Q4 but it felt like we didn’t have any choice with Amazon always dropping the prices and requiring us to drop our cost prices.

Any setbacks so far?

We’ve had listings lose the buy box because of Amazon’s price matching. But the listings didn’t get suppressed–the product is still available for purchase. The good thing is, we get immediate notification when any of the listings lose the buy box which allowed us to act promptly. With Vendor, we never got any notification of listings getting suppressed which was mostly due to high cost.

If you’re experiencing the same or if you have questions, drop a comment or send me an email.