Sales directors who have spent careers selling into Tesco, Woolworths, Coles or Bunnings arrive at Amazon with a proven playbook and quickly find it doesn't work. Amazon makes decisions, manages vendor relationships and grows categories on a different logic. On an episode of MerchantSpring Marketplace Masters, Benjamin Bolshinsky, founder of the vendor agency Vendor Launch and a former Amazon AVS brand specialist who spent nearly three years inside the retail team, laid out how Amazon actually thinks, and what that means for how vendors should sell to it.
It's a Numbers Game, Not a Relationship
The biggest misconception, Bolshinsky says, is that established vendors treat Amazon like any other retailer. It isn't one. A traditional buyer relationship is subjective: you get in front of them, tell the story of your product, build rapport, and convince them to give you space. Amazon is objective. With so many vendors, every product collapses to a barcode and an ASIN, and the decision is data-driven and, in his words, democratic. If the numbers support it and customers want it, Amazon will buy it; you don't have to convince anyone.
The structural reason is shelf space. A physical retailer taking on a new product usually has to drop another, because the shelf is finite, so the buyer must choose. Amazon has effectively unlimited shelf space, more so when it isn't holding the stock, so a vendor manager will almost always want more products, not fewer. Bolshinsky's illustration lands the point: vendors used to fly the Amazon team out to their warehouse, and his agency clients still invite them to see a new product in person. In bricks-and-mortar, that ceremony matters. From Amazon's side, the reaction is simpler: if the customer wants it, put it up and let the customer decide.
How Amazon Decides What to Range
Amazon works backwards from the customer, and the single most important metric is selection: simply having the products ranged. A powerful and underused lever follows from that. If a product already sells through other retailers, Amazon wants it too, and ranging it is often written into the vendor manager's KPIs, so a supplier should push exactly the lines they already sell elsewhere. Beyond selection, vendor managers weigh profitability and average selling price (ASP), looking further down the P&L as a market matures.
The deeper mindset shift is to care about sell-out, not just sell-in. Many vendors assume the job is done once Amazon raises a purchase order and the stock lands in the warehouse. It isn't. Amazon will not sell your product for you, arguably less than a traditional retailer will, so the vendor has to drive the sell-through to the customer. That single reframe, from what Amazon buys from you to what Amazon sells for you, changes where a smart vendor spends its energy.
The Retail Moves That Don't Translate
Two habits from offline retail actively mislead vendors on Amazon. The first is ranging narrow. Because shelf space is finite offline, suppliers are used to retailers taking only some of their range, so they self-edit. On Amazon, the instinct should reverse: range wider, adding more of your catalogue as long as each product makes money. The second is where you put trade spend. Tastings, end caps, point-of-sale banners and shelf talkers have no equivalent here; the dominant lever is advertising, paid ads against relevant keywords that put the product in front of more customers.
Bolshinsky's most practical warning concerns incentives. Advertising sits outside your vendor manager's P&L. Spend ten thousand a month on ads, and that is ten thousand your vendor manager never sees, because Amazon's retail buying side and its advertising side are effectively different worlds. So do not hand your whole budget to the vendor manager and expect them to advertise on your behalf; they won't, and it isn't their remit. Content works the same way: on Vendor, as on Seller, the product detail page is the vendor's responsibility, and because customers can't touch the product, accurate images, a brand store and clear benefit communication do the selling. Amazon may throw up bare-minimum content to get a listing live, but waiting for it is a mistake.
How Amazon Judges You, and How That Shifts as a Market Matures
Over the life of the relationship, your vendor manager is assessed on a handful of KPIs: selection (a line ranged at other retailers but missing on Amazon is an internal red flag), top-line revenue and category growth, and margin. The margin figure they live by is Net PPM: Amazon's retail profit after cost of goods, vendor trade terms and discounts, and it is the number that ultimately decides whether Amazon keeps replenishing a SKU (MerchantSpring). Which KPI carries the most weight depends on where the market sits in its journey.
In a newly launched market, Amazon will range almost anything to build selection, largely regardless of profit. As it matures, the emphasis swings toward profitability and margin further down the P&L, which is exactly what many Australian vendors are feeling now. Eight years ago, after Amazon Australia launched in December 2017 (ABC News), the game was pure range and selection. Today, ASP matters: a low-priced item that costs several dollars to ship earns little, so Amazon leans toward bulk listings and larger pack sizes. For vendors, the strategic read is to exploit the early, selection-hungry phase while it lasts.
Is Amazon Vendor Services Worth It?
Amazon Vendor Services (AVS), once called Strategic Vendor Services in the US, is a paid program that gives you an account manager working under your vendor manager to help grow and run the account. The catch is that its role differs sharply by market. In mature markets like the US and UK, where Amazon has thinned the ranks of vendor managers to drive efficiency, AVS is increasingly a substitute for having a vendor manager at all. In an emerging market like Australia, it is more of a complement, an operational layer sitting on top of a vendor manager who may carry fifteen or twenty accounts and cannot get into the weeds.
In practice, in Australia, AVS is largely operational: confirmation rates, how much you are confirming and shipping, and how fast stock moves from your warehouse to Amazon's, since faster shipping means more sales. They will help execute promotions and merchandising, and they are KPI'd on much the same things as your vendor manager, so incentives align. What AVS does not do, in any market, is advertising, which lives in that separate division. And crucially, it will not fix your business. Bolshinsky's guidance is to treat AVS as a resource you actively manage: come with your own initiatives, track the tasks and projects, ask to be introduced to the AVS team lead and to the other Amazon teams they work with, such as the in-stock team, and generally get out what you put in. Brands that show up reactive, waiting for the AVS to do everything, waste the spend.
Playing a New Market Early
For vendors in newer Amazon markets, Australia, Ireland, South Africa, Belgium, Bolshinsky's advice reduces to learning faster than your competitors. Understand how Amazon differs from the retailers you already supply, get products ranged while the selection-first phase forgives thinner profitability, and start advertising early. The advertising point compounds: three years of building a media-buying capability, a team and a body of performance data means that when competitors finally decide Amazon is big enough to take seriously, you are three years ahead on skills and cost. Cost of clicks in a young market like Australia is still comparatively cheap, so leading the pack now buys a disproportionate, and durable, advantage.
One market-specific trap is worth naming. High-low promotional markets, where grocery brands rotate half-price deals across Coles, Woolworths and others in comfortable coexistence, collide with Amazon's pricing engine. Amazon is a price follower: it matches the lowest price it sees at another retailer, never undercutting but always matching, so a promotion running at Coles pulls your Amazon price down too, and keeps it low. Because a matched, unfunded promotion eats into the vendor manager's margin target, the answer is a genuine working relationship with that manager, and, where it makes sense, funding the promotion so the economics still work for Amazon. For a fuller grounding in how the vendor model operates, MerchantSpring's guide on how Amazon Vendor Central works is a useful companion.
See Your Account the Way Amazon Does
Amazon judges vendors on numbers: selection, sell-through, operational metrics and Net PPM. MerchantSpring puts those same numbers in front of you, tracking profitability, advertising and the operational signals across your vendor and seller accounts, so you can walk into a vendor manager or AVS conversation with evidence rather than opinion. See it on your own accounts with a walkthrough of your data.
