Here's a question we ask every brand we meet who sells to Amazon directly: why are you on Vendor Central?

The honest answer, more often than not, is some version of "Amazon emailed us." A vendor manager got in touch a few years ago, it felt like being picked, someone signed the terms and the business has run that way ever since. Nobody modelled it. Nobody compared it to the alternative. It just happened.

That's the real story behind the Vendor Central vs Seller Central debate. It's rarely a decision brands get wrong so much as a decision they never actually made. And once you're in, the net-60 payment terms, the annual negotiations and the fear of starting over keep you there, whether or not it's still serving you.

There's nothing wrong with being a vendor. There's plenty wrong with drifting into it without a plan. So let's do the comparison properly, the way you'd want it done before signing anything.

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Vendor Central vs Seller Central in one minute

On Vendor Central, you're a supplier. Amazon sends purchase orders, you ship stock to them at wholesale prices and Amazon retails it. The listing says "Sold by Amazon". This is what people mean by 1P, or first-party.

On Seller Central, you're the retailer. You list the products, set the prices and sell to the end customer yourself, usually with Amazon handling storage and delivery through FBA. This is 3P, third-party, and it's how the majority of sales on Amazon now happen.

Same warehouse, same customer, completely different business.

Control: the difference that actually matters

Start here, because everything else flows from it.

As a vendor, Amazon owns the retail price. Not influences. Owns. You can set an RRP and watch Amazon ignore it the moment its algorithms find your product cheaper somewhere else on the internet, including from some grey-market seller in another country you've never heard of. If a discounter in Germany slashes your product, your amazon.co.uk price can follow within days and there is no button you can press to stop it.

As a seller, you set the price. You still have to defend it, because unauthorised resellers undercutting you will drag the buy box down in a different way, but the lever is in your hand. Pricing on Amazon is really a distribution question in both models, which is a subject in its own right, but only 3P gives you a steering wheel at all.

Content is more even than people think. Brand Registry now gives vendors and sellers broadly similar access to A+ content and brand stores. But inventory decisions are not even at all. Amazon orders what its forecast fancies, and a vendor can watch a hero product sit unavailable for weeks in Q4 because a purchase order never came. A seller decides their own stock depth.

Now do the sums, with real numbers

Vendor margin looks simple. Amazon pays you a wholesale price and that's your lot. Except it isn't, because then come the deductions. Co-op fees. Damage allowances. Marketing contributions. Chargebacks for labelling infractions you'll spend hours disputing. Brands routinely find that the wholesale margin they agreed and the margin they actually receive are several points apart, and the gap widens at every annual negotiation, because negotiating terms upward is what vendor managers are paid to do.

Then the payment terms. Net 60 is standard on Vendor Central, sometimes with a small discount dangled for faster payment. Sixty days is a long time to fund someone else's shelf. For a growing brand, that's working capital you're lending to one of the richest companies on earth, interest-free.

Seller Central charges differently: a referral fee, typically 15%, plus FBA fees per unit, plus storage. It often looks more expensive on a spreadsheet. But you're selling at retail price rather than wholesale, you're paid out every two weeks and there's no annual meeting where the terms mysteriously worsen. For most products we model, the 3P route puts more actual cash in the brand's account. Not all. Most.

The only honest advice here is to run your own numbers per SKU, with the deductions included, not the headline terms.

Who owns the customer relationship

On 1P, Amazon is the retailer, so the sale is Amazon's in every sense that matters. On 3P you're closer to the customer, but be realistic about what that means. You still don't get their email address. What you do get is control over how you show up: your storefront, your pricing, your promotions on your schedule rather than when Amazon decides to fund a deal with your margin.

The deeper point is about data. A seller sees their own sales, traffic and conversion numbers daily and can act on them. A vendor sees what Amazon chooses to share and acts on Amazon's timetable. Over a few years, that difference compounds into two very different levels of understanding of your own business.

The traps on each side

The vendor traps are mostly the ones above. Price you can't hold. POs you can't predict. Terms that creep. And a quiet one: CRaP, Amazon's charming internal label for products it "Can't Realise a Profit" on. If deductions and price-matching squash Amazon's margin on your product, Amazon can simply stop ordering it, and your best-seller goes dark through no fault of your own.

But Seller Central has traps too, and anyone who tells you it's the promised land is selling something. You inherit real operational work: forecasting, FBA shipments, compliance, customer messages, account health. Your revenue line drops even when your profit rises, because you're now booking retail sales minus fees instead of clean wholesale invoices, and that conversation with your board needs preparing. And if your channel is leaky, with a dozen resellers fighting over your buy box, moving to 3P just gives you a better view of a fight you're still losing.

Which points at the actual truth. The model matters less than the control. A brand with a tight channel can do well on either. A brand with a messy one will struggle on both.

When "switch to Seller Central" is a red flag

Now the uncomfortable bit, because we sit in the industry that does this.

Agencies earn their fees on 3P accounts. Seller Central is where the tooling lives, where the ad consoles are friendliest and where a monthly retainer is easiest to justify. So when an agency's very first recommendation is "leave Vendor Central", before they've looked at your terms, your margins or your operational capacity, that advice may be about their business model rather than yours.

We've told brands to stay on Vendor Central. Genuinely. A heavy, low-priced, fast-turning product with brutal FBA fees and a stable vendor relationship can be better off 1P, especially where the brand has no appetite for retail operations. The right answer is the one the numbers support, and any partner who won't show you the numbers both ways hasn't earned the recommendation.

The questions to answer before you move either way

If you're weighing this decision, or making it for the first time properly, work through these before anything else.

• Per SKU, what do we actually net on each model once every fee and deduction is counted?
• Can we hold our price across all channels, everywhere Amazon's matching bots can see? If not, 3P pricing power is theoretical.
• Do we have, or want to build, the operational muscle 3P demands, or a partner who brings it?
• If we left Vendor Central, what happens in the transition, to stock in Amazon's warehouses, to our listings and to cash flow during the gap?
• And the one almost nobody asks: why are we on our current model at all, and would we choose it again today?

A hybrid answer is also legitimate, and increasingly common: some SKUs 1P, some 3P, chosen deliberately per product rather than by historical accident.

The decision, decided on purpose

Vendor Central vs Seller Central isn't really a battle with a universal winner. It's a decision, and decisions want owners.

The brands that do well on Amazon are the ones where somebody can explain, today, exactly why the channel is set up the way it is and what would have to change for them to move. The ones that struggle are the ones where the answer starts with "well, a few years ago Amazon emailed us."

If you're on Vendor Central and you're not sure why, that's worth working through before your next annual negotiation, not after it. Deductions in, no assumed conclusion, workings shown. Sometimes the answer is stay. Either way, you'd finally know.

Have us model it both ways