To be accepted as an Amazon first-party vendor can even feel like a privilege. After all, if Amazon itself is selling your brand, you must have a leg up on your competition, correct?
But for most brands that want to win, it usually ends up being a bad long term option. Here’s why selling to Amazon first-party might be holding you back.
You lose control over your brand’s representation.
In Vendor Central, Amazon operates as a retailer, not a strategic partner.
Famously, they set the retail price and don’t respect MAP policies. When they want to win the Buy Box, run a promotion, or if they want to price match, they’ll drop the price without hesitation.
Other retailers get undercut, straining your relationships, and your product positioning suffers as customers get used to lower prices.
It’s not just pricing: Amazon often controls your listings and product content, with updates going live slowly or rejected altogether. They can change images, copy, and variations without input from you, and they’ll decide which SKUs to stock and how much, leaving you with holes in your catalog or a suboptimal SKU selection.
The result? You lose the ability to run a coordinated, premium positioning strategy across the channel.
You shoulder fees, ad spend, and risk.
The margins you see on paper in 1P rarely survive Amazon’s deductions. Their terms are designed to push as much risk back to you as they can, in exchange for the privilege of selling on Amazon.
Vendor Central terms often include:
- Over 40 different types of chargeback fees for minor compliance issues, which can easily add up to churn your margins.
- Hefty CoOp and AVS fees, charged directly on Amazon’s payments to you, which can easily end up cutting your gross by 15-25%.
- And of course, if you want to grow, you still need to put up the ad spend budget yourself in full.
On top of that, Amazon orders based on its own forecasts, without regard for your growth plan or planning needs.
And if your margins get too thin, sales drop, or the category shifts? They are famous for unilaterally cutting brands from the program or delisting SKUs overnight, leaving you scrambling.
You can’t pursue a winning strategy.
As a retailer, Amazon 1P’s mission is to maximize profitability, not your long-term market share.
- They won’t build a growth strategy around your brand, or get on board with yours.
- They won’t coordinate content, promotions, and traffic efforts into a unified plan… even if you’re the one funding it all.
- They won’t share detailed marketing and sales data with you, with limited visibility into what is really going on.
The result is that you can't execute on a winning strategy on a crucial channel, can’t move fast on opportunities or problems, and your brand’s growth suffers.
Does selling 1P ever make sense?
For some brands, absolutely.
If you’re selling high-volume, commodity products where price is the main differentiator, then 1P’s large purchase orders and hands-off logistics may be appealing.
But for high quality brands that want to grow on Amazon, climb to the top of their market, and protect their brand equity, the trade-offs are often too costly.
The alternative is a key strategic partner.
An exclusive seller partner solves all of these problems in one move.
The beauty is that from your side, not much changes. You fulfill your partner’s purchase orders, same as ever, and let them take care of the rest… but with alignment and accountability.
If you choose the right partner, you get control back:
- They strictly adhere to MAP, protect your brand, and work with you to resolve issues, without any hidden fees that kill your margins.
- They invest their own resources in your long term growth, with full visibility on data and accountability for results.
- They operate as an extension of your team to execute on a winning Amazon strategy, with shared goals and strategy.
All this unlocks the potential for growth on the platform.
Why would you satisfy yourself by being just one of thousands of brands, when you can get more by being a true partner?
At Zoplenti, we’ve built our entire model around solving this problem. As strategic key partners, we commit to our brands and own the outcomes on the platform. That’s how we scale brands faster, cleaner, and with less risk than the first-party path ever could.
