Talk about a few things you must know about operating an Amazon VC account

Vendor Central (VC)

The account is a direct sales account provided by Amazon to high-quality supply chain merchants, allowing sellers to sell under the official name of Amazon. After Amazon closed the Vendor Express (VE) account in early 2018, the VC account once made hundreds of thousands of RMB per account because of its high authority:

VC accounts have always been used by unscrupulous merchants to "do evil", and due to the technical loopholes of Amazon's VC accounts, many VC sellers have also taken advantage of the loopholes and caused Amazon to suffer heavy losses.

Recently, the trend of VC accounts has become popular again. What is the application process for a VC account?

When the BSR category ranking of related product sales in an SC (third-party seller self-operated) account increases rapidly, you will receive an official invitation from Amazon.

Different people have different attitudes towards VC accounts, mainly because of the difference between them and SC.

Image source network

From the comparison, we can see several issues that we need to pay close attention to in VC account operations:

Amazon has absolute pricing power when selling through VC accounts. The lowest suggested selling price provided by everyone is just a suggestion to Amazon, and Amazon can adjust the price to a lower level at any time. At the same time, Amazon can ask suppliers to reduce prices again at any time.

VC accounts have a longer payment cycle and higher operating risks than SC accounts;

VC accounts still require you to pay for promotion. Since AMS has more promotion functions, your promotion fees may be higher.

There are some hidden charges in VC accounts, such as Slot Fee and Co-Op Fee, which you will only know after receiving the bill;

For sellers, the biggest risk of VC accounts is chargeback (credit card rejection). If there is a shortage of goods, your account is likely to have a large amount of chargeback.

In short, Amazon's original intention in designing the VC account was to provide a large-scale wholesale channel for manufacturing sellers with strong supply chain advantages. It is more like a traditional supermarket purchasing products from China, but the requirements for product quality inspection and factory compliance investigation are very low. At the same time, suppliers themselves need to spend money to do more promotion work on Amazon to increase sales.

Regarding how to apply for a VC account, I have found relevant information here:

Step 1: Go to the website: https://ams.amazon.com/

Step 2: Click Register

Step 3: Select I want to request an invitation to represent a vendor to register, and then wait for Amazon to contact you;

Finally, I want to say that everyone should apply for or purchase a VC account according to their own needs, and don’t be ripped off!