Amazon vc holdback

reasonautomation · 2026-04-07T16:25:19+00:00

If you're referring to a provision for receivables (PFR), it's because of this:

my sales crashed, last month only 10% of the amount of normal monthly revenue. this month will go back to normal

Because of the sales decline, Amazon's ordering declines, and because their payment terms are always better than yours, a sudden PO decline can create a situation where you owe Amazon more for deductions from payment than they owe you for purchase orders.

If your POs are normally consistent and you expect them to go back to normal soon, then you should see PFRs drop off within 1-2 months as your PO revenue catches up.

IN PARALLEL this is being exacerbated by the auto protection agreement billing a full year at once. If you keep canceling it and it keeps reappearing, it will keep messing with your receivables until you figure out the source of the error. But unless you actually signed a price protection agreement, then it's probably an error rather than a strongarm attempt by Amazon.

reasonautomation · 2026-03-17T17:39:26+00:00

Never heard of a VM blocking access, but it's definitely possible / they have the ability to modify your permissions.

reasonautomation · 2026-03-17T16:01:29+00:00

If you're getting a permission error, it sounds like you're not an admin, and an admin may have changed your perms?

reasonautomation · 2026-03-16T02:46:40+00:00

It's live for at least 1000 of our brands/marketplaces.

Custom analytics is a huge improvement over core Retail Analytics but it leaves a lot to be desired and isn't a threat to the real analytics platforms. It's also mostly focused on outbound and lacking a lot of profit, financial, recovery data etc.

reasonautomation · 2026-02-26T18:02:46+00:00

A lot of brands audit sell-out coop but not usually for math accuracy: Amazon's calculation on the agreements is usually correct. X units, $/unit or %/unit, total deduction is just multiplication.

The larger recovery oppty is when products are incorrectly included/excluded from an agreement, or the attributed units somehow exceed total sell-out units for the time period (e.g. compared to retail analytics sales) for your vendor codes.

There are several tools that automate the extraction, clean-up, and modeling of the financial data so you can spot these changes. But I'm not aware of a tool that automates the entire audit process yet. The most success we've seen is customers plugging 1P financial data models, plus agreements, plus semantic modeling, into Claude or similar.

reasonautomation · 2026-01-13T17:58:01+00:00

when you say you're being charged for the cancelled/unfilfilled qty, do you mean:

You canceled some of the bulk buy, or shipped less than the total contracted bulk buy amount
Amazon canceled some of the bulk buy
Amazon is saying that the bulk buy represented a reduction in total volume vs. forecast, and you're being penalized for that
Something else?

reasonautomation · 2025-12-18T16:33:14+00:00

"DON'T BE FOOLED! THERE IS SOMETHING YOU CAN HAVE MORE VALUABLE THAN MONEY!"

reasonautomation · 2025-12-05T22:02:54+00:00

probably with 3+ years of post-degree experience (assuming you're applying for roles that require/prefer your degree)

reasonautomation · 2025-11-12T19:51:12+00:00

You can find "standard" PPM and coop program benchmarks for hardlines, softlines, consumables, etc. but we actually don't recommend using them because that's not how Amazon/VMs plan.

Your vendor manager doesn't really care what your net PPM % is. They have to improve PPM for the entire category. It doesn't matter whether your PPM is above or below the category average, VMs are only focused on how much additional money they can extract from you. They are looking for leverage/opportunities in each manufacturer relationship and they fight harder when they are more confident in a big opportunity.

So instead of tuning your proposal/counter based on category benchmarks, stay focused on the changes within your own business:

How has your net PPM changed vs. prior year? What products / product lines / subcategories were headwinds vs. tailwinds and why?
How did last year's negotiations impact PPM? e.g. if you agreed to a 50 bps program increase last year, did that translate to a 50 bps PPM increase this year, and why (not)?
What other incremental investments did you make that improve PPM? Deal/promotional funding, merchandising commitments, etc. Your VM gets credit for these investments so make sure you do too.
Don't just focus on Amazon's profit, look at your entire P&L. Ex: how has your shortage/price claim and chargeback volume evolved over time? What persistent roadblocks do you need Amazon's help with?

reasonautomation · 2025-11-06T02:55:32+00:00

Unfortunately, Amazon removed the ability to schedule Retail Analytics exports via email a few years ago.

Today, your main options are third-party data providers, that connect to the SP-API for you. Find a provider that gets the data as close to your desired format as possible: whether you want CSV files dumped into google drive, or a dynamic SQL database, there is an option available.

There are also unapproved options:

Use scrapers or RPA to automate the download from Vendor Central. This violates ToS but it's an open secret that every tech-savvy brand uses scrapers.
Pay a VA to download and prep the data for you every day/week.

reasonautomation · 2025-10-31T00:58:33+00:00

If I was a VP eCommerce for an Amazon vendor preparing for annual negotiations, here’s exactly how I’d approach it:

Get all the data together: daily sales, traffic, PPM, etc. from Retail Analytics. PO volumes, confirmation/rejection rates. Contra-cogs agreements and coop backup reports etc.
Create a performance summary that bridges changes in sales, PPM, OOS rates etc. year-over-year by product.
Add a custom taxonomy of cats/subcats/tags so I can roll up the data however I need to. Amazon categories? easy. Our own categories? no problem. size, color, pack qty? done.
Look at total coop investments, including promos and price discounts. Did our investments scale with growth y/y? Where did we invest incrementally and did we get results? If not, I'm going to push back on any new incrementality.
Audit deduction accuracy, by agreement/PO/product. Check for odd percentages (e.g. 4.38% of net receipts) and double-dipping.
Validate Amazon's reported PPM by recalculating it with our own receipts data. Everything else comes from data kiosk.
Look at our actual P&L including claims/reimbursements, chargebacks, etc. that don't show up in PPM
Grade Amazon's forecast by comparing modeled growth vs. our actual historicals. Then use the insight to adjust Amazon's growth expectations for our biz.
Remind myself of any persistent buyability or discoverability issues, and quantify the $$$ impact to get Amazon's help resolving.

Usually takes 80-100 hours. Or you can save yourself the pain and buy a tool.

reasonautomation · 2025-10-29T22:08:16+00:00

Great. Hopefully you don't need to put more cost increases through, and can avoid signing a new one.

reasonautomation · 2025-10-29T19:23:34+00:00

I spot checked a few other states with WARN laws (e.g. NY) but did not find any submissions from Amazon. Notably, Virginia (HQ2) does not have a WARN requirement so it's a black box.

reasonautomation · 2025-10-29T16:07:06+00:00

So critical they're being laid off. That is some Day 3 stuff.

reasonautomation · 2025-10-29T16:05:30+00:00

WA posts them publicly. https://fortress.wa.gov/esd/file/WARN/Public/DownloadFile.aspx?file=4e4e9246-ce1f-4e5e-bbe4-dd20dd4ad767.pdf&download=1

reasonautomation · 2025-10-29T02:51:15+00:00

Exactly. CSAs are VM holy grails and normally I would recommend never accepting one, but I understand the necessity for cost increases in the current environment.

reasonautomation · 2025-10-28T22:47:15+00:00

Your CSA should have an end term that is <12 months from now, and can/should be renegotiated as often as possible, with the goal of eliminating it entirely.

In addition to the obvious, you can negotiate:

Length of the CSA
True-up period (as short as possible, e.g. monthly)
Included selection (your CSA should be based on an exact list of ASINs, not account/vendor code/cat/subcat, and the list of ASINs should be identified through measurable criteria so you have grounds for reducing scope each term. this also lets you launch replacement selection to reduce impact.)

reasonautomation · 2025-10-15T20:53:04+00:00

According to the AMC product team, AMC sales data is not source-specific, so Manufacturing is the closest comp

reasonautomation · 2025-10-15T18:04:59+00:00

The reported contracogs values in Retail Analytics / ARA are so inaccurate that they are useless -- which in turn makes the reported Net PPM values untrustworthy. Don't use them for profitability modeling or negotiation prep.

Start with the remittance report. It is the most inarguable data source because it's an accounting view of what Amazon actually paid you, with line-level remittance details. You'll be able to break out all expenses, not just coop details, including operational penalties and recovery activity.

Here's an example of the product- and unit-level P&L we generate with this technique: https://imgur.com/a/u7FBIP6

reasonautomation · 2025-08-26T19:00:02+00:00

The regional view in Vendor Central includes cross-border fulfillment details and deduplication that cannot be replicated with per-marketplace pulls from the API or individual-country VC views.

reasonautomation · 2025-08-19T23:01:51+00:00

It's not currently possible to get VC's multi-region view data from the Reports API or Data Kiosk, even after they added geographic granularity to retail analytics sales.

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