Amazon Vendor: retail procurement

About this article

This article describes how to manage bulk shipments to Amazon Vendor.

Table of contents

Introduction

Supported features

Requirements

Setup

Managing orders

Managing shipments

Introduction

Selected manufacturers and brand owners are invited by Amazon to sell products in bulk directly to Amazon, as vendors. Amazon takes ownership of the inventory, handles storage, shipping to customers, customer service, and sets the retail price. Vendors receive purchase orders (POs) from Amazon and fulfill the purchase orders via ChannelEngine.

As an Amazon vendor, your products appear as though they are shipped from and sold by Amazon, which builds trust with your end buyer and leads to better visibility of your products on Amazon.

Supported features

• Purchase orders (POs)
• Shipments (multiple, single, and partial POs)
• Cancelations (partial)

Requirements

• The Amazon Vendor plugin is activated on your ChannelEngine environment.

• Manage shipments via the Merchant API's /v2/purchase-orders endpoint.

Setup

With Amazon

Ensure that you are an official participant in Amazon’s Vendor program.

On ChannelEngine

In your Amazon Vendor channel plugin, enable the retail procurement program:

1. Go to Setup, Plugin-specific settings.
2. In Programs enabled, select Retail procurement.
3. Click Save.

Managing orders

Your purchase orders do not appear on the ChannelEngine web interface. You must manage these retail purchase orders exclusively via the Merchant API’s /v2/purchase-orders endpoint.

To track purchase orders that come from Amazon Vendor, your external management systems must have an active API integration with ChannelEngine or a plugin that allows you to retrieve orders and submit shipments to and from the channel.

1. Amazon Vendor submits a purchase order to the vendor (you), and the PO is available for your external systems to consume via API.
   1. The total price of the purchase order is equal to the sum of the purchase prices of the products in the order.
   2. The purchase price is pre-agreed between you and Amazon Vendor, and it is different from the selling price that is published on Amazon.
2. Decide from the GET /v2/purchase-orders response if you can fulfill the order, based on the order quantities and the requested delivery date.
3. Acknowledge which lines you can fulfill via POST /v2/purchase-orders/lines/acknowledge. Each line must have an acknowledgement code.
   1. If you can fulfill a given line, set the AcknowledgementCode to ACCEPTED.
   2. To place a line on backorder, set the AcknowledgementCode to BACKORDERED.
   3. To reject a line, cancel the line by setting the AcknowledgementCode to REJECTED.

Managing shipments

Create your bulk shipments with POST /v2/purchase-orders/shipments. When you create your initial shipment, decide which items go on a pallet and which items go into a carton. Additionally, one shipment can ship parts of multiple purchase orders; keep adding items to your shipment to optimize your logistics.

To avoid chargebacks from Amazon, the details in your digital shipment need to match 1:1 with your physical shipment. Cross-check the following shipment details:

• All relationships between pallets, cartons, and items.
• All identifiers that are printed on shipping labels.

For detailed guidance on creating bulk shipments for purchase orders via the Merchant API, check out Merchant API: purchase orders.