Why the Amazon Vendor Central Software Ecosystem Is So Limited Compared to Sellers… and What to Do About It
The importance of Amazon vendor software can't be overstated. It's what helps you analyze business trends, automate manual tasks, and run your business more efficiently.
Unfortunately, vendors have far fewer options when it comes to software than sellers do. For example, on the software review site G2, there are 119 listed products that mention "Amazon seller" but just 16 that mention "Amazon vendor."
This guide breaks down why that is, what kind of Amazon Vendor Central software options are out there, what kind of tasks they can help you with, and how to figure out what kind of software you need.
Why the Lack of Vendor Central Software Options?
The biggest reason for the lack of software options for Amazon vendors is that traditionally, there has been no API for vendors. With the emergence in October 2020 of Amazon's Selling Partner API (SP-API) that caters to vendors as well as sellers, this may mean the software landscape could change in the future to include more vendor options. However, it may take years for the vendor software ecosystem to be as large as on the seller side.
A second possible reason is that vendors tend to be larger brands with big, legacy systems that don't have as much of a need for the offerings of small software companies. The seller ecosystem, by contrast, includes many more companies that tend to be smaller and have more use for software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings at reasonable prices.
What Can Amazon Vendor Central Software Do?
There are multiple types of software out there that integrate directly with Amazon Vendor Central so you can perform certain tasks that are important for your business. This Amazon vendor software can help you collect, visualize, and analyze your data. Conducting Amazon vendor analytics is vital for a business because it allows you to:
Do ad-hoc analysis of the current business atmosphere and your company’s performance
Create regular, automated reporting and improve organizational access to data.
Use large, unified data models to identify new historical trends to inform future business strategy
Forecast future business performance and trends using algorithms and machine learning
But there are other things that Amazon Vendor Central software can do other than break down data. For example, some software options help with Amazon Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) integration, inventory management, and shopping carts. Others allow vendors to track and fulfill dropship orders. Still others use automation to do things like real-time inventory tracking and management of SKUs across multiple channels.
Current Amazon Vendor Central Software Solutions
The following is a list of the best Vendor Central software tools available to Amazon vendors, and what services they provide.
TPSynergy: Provides Amazon EDI integration, inventory management, and shopping carts
Vendorauto: Offers services for tracking and fulfilling dropship orders that is integrated with the user's Vendor Central account
Jazva: Multi-channel ecommerce software that uses automation to do real-time inventory tracking and management of SKUs across multiple channels.
Reason Automation: Allows the user to easily access their data housed in Vendor Central so they can do whatever they want with it
eZCom: Automates many vendor tasks, like manual data entry, validation checks, shipping, and more
Acctivate: Offers inventory, fulfillment, and business management for vendors
Super Disty: A software automation solution for vendors that includes full EDI integration
Amalytix: Creates dashboards for vendors that integrates Brand Analytics data
You can read more about these software options in depth here.
How to Do Amazon Vendor Central Analytics on Your Own
The process for doing Amazon vendor analytics with data collected in Vendor Central takes the following steps.
Step 1: Decide on the Data Needed
Before analysis can begin, you must decide what data you need and will be most valuable. It could be something like, "How many widgets did we sell over the past month?" or "How many weeks left of inventory do we have?"
Step 2: Find the Data in Vendor Central
Now that you know which data you need, you must log in to Vendor Central and find those specific reports. For information on where to find these reports within Vendor Central, check out our Vendor Central Help Center and click on the report you want to download to see its report path.
Step 3: Download Between One and Hundreds of Reports
Unfortunately, Amazon's reports are fairly restrictive and limited to one specific date. If you only need data from that one day, you only need to download one report. But many businesses are interested in watching trends stretched over weeks, months, or even years. To do that, you will have to manually download every single report from every single date of interest.
Step 4: Stitch All of the Reports Together
Now that you have downloaded all of these reports, you will need to combine them. This means creating your own spreadsheet and manually plugging in the numbers from each report. As you can see, between downloading the reports and combining them, this is a long, laborious, and time-consuming process.
Step 5: Choose an Easier Method
Once you get to the point where taking steps 1 through 4 are no longer practical, you will need to hire a third-party service to pull the data for you so you can more easily access it. There are a number of possible methods to do this, from hiring virtual assistants to using a third-party service. To help you choose, we have created a free whitepaper, which you can download below.
By far the easiest method, in our view, is to have a service collect your data and provide it to you so you can plug it into your favorite data visualization tool – whether it be Tableau, Google Data Studio, Power BI or something else. This is the service we provide at Reason Automation.
Here's an example of a Vendor Central reporting dashboard built in Power BI. As you can see, it allows a business to break down ASINs by 4-week averages, gross profits and margins, and more. This kind of data visualization makes it easy to spot trends for individual products and make informed business decisions using that information.
Reason Automation offers a Vendor Central dashboard template to all clients at no cost. It helps visualize sales, traffic, and inventory performance and growth over time.
H2: Learn More About Owning Your Data
If this sounds like the kind of solution that makes the most sense for your company, the next step is to set up a demo with us to talk about what your company’s needs are and if this solution would make the most sense for you. Otherwise, we strongly recommend downloading the free whitepaper below to determine what method of data extraction and analysis will best suit your company.
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