What separates an average Amazon vendor from an exceptional one often isn't the catalogue or the ad budget; it's the relationship with Amazon itself. On an episode of MerchantSpring Marketplace Masters, Travis Chappell, Head of Vendor Services at Venture Forge and a former Amazon vendor-services insider from the UK head office, mapped out who inside Amazon actually matters, how to move past a purely transactional way of working, and how to get real return on Amazon Vendor Services (AVS), which is rarely cheap. Here is the relationship playbook from someone who sat on the other side of the table.

What a Strong Vendor Relationship Actually Looks Like

The buzzwords- transparency, honesty, trust- are real, Chappell says, but the differentiator is proactiveness: is your vendor team sharing market insights and benchmarks with you unprompted, are they open to collaborative conversations, can you pick up the phone or get a meeting and actually have it answered? Underneath sits mutual outcomes and goals, agreed at the very start. And it never stops being a commercial relationship, so if nobody is making money, it will strain no matter how warm it feels.

The foundation is built on the structured cadences, joint business planning, improvement planning, the NPD pipeline, pricing mechanisms and a clear statement of the brand's ultimate goals. Set those up front, and you have something to build the relationship on rather than a series of one-off requests.

Map the Org: Who You Actually Need to Know

You can't build relationships with people you can't name, so Chappell lays out the hierarchy from the bottom up (MerchantSpring keeps a glossary of these vendor acronyms if the alphabet soup is new). If you pay for it, your AVS or brand specialist is the front line and first point of contact. They report into the vendor manager (VM), who owns the commercial evaluation of your account, the AVN and the nitty-gritty. Above the VM sits a senior vendor manager, who you'll rarely reach unless you're an enterprise brand doing north of roughly fifty to a hundred million, and who mainly provides oversight.

Around that spine are others worth knowing. The brand-specialist team lead keeps the AVS accountable for turnaround and dropped tasks, without much commercial input. The category leader is, in Chappell's words, the big dog of the account, and a large brand can request them at quarterly reviews because they know you drive a real share of category revenue. Depending on your logistics setup (WePay, VendorFlex, complex or global operations), you may get an in-stock manager, and on the periphery an ads manager, who doesn't sit in the VM's P&L but whom savvy VMs loop in, since ad spend drives the awareness and traffic that the retail levers then convert. Knowing who does what tells you who to approach, and when.

Moving Beyond the Ticketing System

The core shift is to treat these people as part of your team, not a ticketing system you contact only to scold or request. Invite them to brand-building and new-product days. Chappell describes a large French cosmetics vendor who brought him to their NPD days and gave him samples; he came away feeling he had skin in their success, even though he worked for Amazon. That feeling is the whole game.

From there, give them clear priorities and outcomes, the year's profitability, growth and market-share targets, and treat AVN not as a box ticked in a few weeks but as a continually evolving cycle. Use the business-review rhythm deliberately: weekly reviews for pulse checks, monthly reviews to set the quarter's priorities, quarterly reviews to plan the next season.

Use the relationship for momentum, not admin: Amazon won't hand over raw data, but your contacts can supply benchmarking, where you sit in the category, your share, your contribution, which becomes leverage at AVN and weight behind a request for a senior manager or category lead to join a review. And remember their development depends on yours. Everyone has KPIs and a career ladder (a VM wants to make senior VM; an AVS wants to move up the internal levels), so ask how you can help them get there. Show you'll play the game as long as they will.

The Behaviours That Damage the Relationship

Having sat on the inside, Chappell is clear about what pushes a vendor to the bottom of the pile. First, paying for AVS is not a silver bullet, and expecting it to solve everything sours the relationship immediately. Your contact has many other brands and finite capacity. Be proactive in your comms rather than making them chase you, and keep them in the loop through investigations, tickets and catalogue cleans; a quick 'working on this, back to you in a few days' builds rapport.

Second, don't expect your AVS to fix cross-channel problems. Vendors used to hammer Chappell about Amazon matching a competitor's price, but Amazon is a price follower, not a price leader, and he had no sway over it; keeping cross-channel pricing clean, through selective distribution and not selling below market, is the brand's job.

Amazon is huge but heavily siloed, so your contact is one cog in a bigger wheel who has to raise tickets to specialist teams, not a magic wand. Third, operations is the biggest crux: if a brand's stock, confirmation rate, fill rate or pricing is poor, it flows straight into the vendor manager's metrics, and they will push it back onto you. Respect that they can only act within their remit, and that things take time.

In Negotiations, Let the Data Do the Talking

When it gets to the pointy end of commercial talks, Chappell reckons the relationship is a small part of the story: come with data and a narrative to back it, and about 75% of the battle is already won, because the numbers don't lie. Amazon thrives on data and will hit you with metrics; if you don't arrive equally armed, you're reduced to a 'trust me' position you never want to be in. Make sure your numbers align with theirs, and audit your results, deadlines and goals continually so there are no surprises.

Focus on the metrics that actually move the needle and matter to the brand, revenue, sell-in, profitability, market share, peak plans, rather than drowning the conversation in everything. And know where Amazon's own priorities sit: selection was once the dominant metric when Amazon wanted to stock everything, but it has spent recent years culling unprofitable products, so profitability is what carries weight today.

Let the data talk, and you can afford to be more bullish; let emotion talk, and it becomes a firefight, which is the last place you want to be with Amazon. For the mechanics of turning that data into negotiating leverage, MerchantSpring's guide on mastering Amazon vendor negotiations with data, leverage and profit is a strong companion.

Getting Real ROI From AVS, and When to Walk Away

AVS specialists are, in Chappell's framing, the front line: they run the catalogue cleanups, ticket-raising, pricing and deal creation that feed the VM. Hamstring them, and you become a deteriorating asset in their eyes; foster the relationship, and they'll drive profitable selection and deals for you. Two underused moves matter here.

Celebrate their wins, tell the VM and category lead when your AVS has done a great job, because everyone wants recognition. And remember they're human, offshored though many now are, so meeting them in person and immersing them in the brand pays off in the time and effort they'll give you, since they're juggling many vendors and you're vying for a disproportionate share of their attention.

Is it ever not worth the money? Chappell's rule is simple: if it doesn't make financial sense, or you can't comfortably afford it, don't take it, and don't be strong-armed into it, or you'll carry resentment all year.

But his honest view, from the inside, is that even an average AVS beats a good ticketing system: more internal mechanisms, access to the right teams, quicker turnaround, especially for complex or logistics-heavy operations where a ticket might sit for days or weeks. If you're stuck with a genuinely poor AVS, manage it factually: keep a shared log of unanswered emails, unactioned requests and no-show meetings, be honest in Amazon's satisfaction surveys with evidence, and bring it all to your AVN, since it's your investment. Escalate to the team lead or category lead only after raising it with the vendor manager first, as the AVS is their direct report.

When Your Vendor Manager Keeps Changing

One challenge came up live from an audience member: three vendor managers in four months, and no way to build a relationship through the churn. Chappell's advice is to stop relying on the VM seat for now and go up. Senior vendor managers and category leaders tend to have been at Amazon for five, ten or fifteen years and aren't going anywhere, so building rapport with them gives you continuity, and they may even explain why the turnover is so high. Come to them plainly: we want to grow, we're willing to invest and play the Amazon game, but this churn is blocking us, and we'd like it remedied.

And don't take it personally. Vendor managers come and go; some carry fifty or sixty brands and simply burn out, and Amazon's broader restructuring has thinned corporate ranks, with around 14,000 roles cut in late 2025 in its largest corporate layoff to date (CNBC). The turnover usually reflects that pressure, not a problem with your account. Anchoring the relationship one level up is the most reliable way through it.

Walk Into Every Review With the Data That Does the Talking

Chappell's whole case rests on arriving armed with numbers, in your weekly, monthly and quarterly reviews and at AVN. MerchantSpring gives vendors and their agencies the profitability, sell-in and performance data Amazon respects, in client-ready visuals you can put straight in front of a vendor manager. See it on your own vendor accounts with a walkthrough of your data.