Amazon Annual Vendor Negotiation (AVN): How to Prepare With Your Own Numbers

Your vendor manager has put a kickoff call on the calendar, and Amazon will open it with its view of your business: the margin it earns on your items, your operational misses, and the terms it wants changed for next year. If all you bring is a few weeks of console exports and a general sense that the year went fine, you'll spend that call reacting to Amazon's numbers instead of presenting your own.

This guide covers what the Annual Vendor Negotiation is, what Amazon usually puts on the table, and the specific numbers to bring, with where each one lives in Vendor Central so you can start pulling them now.

What AVN Is

The Annual Vendor Negotiation is the yearly review in which first-party (1P) vendors and their Amazon Vendor Managers go over the past year's sales performance and set the trade terms, cooperative marketing budgets, and freight allowances for the next twelve months. That definition comes from SoldScope's glossary, which places the kickoff meeting in Q4.

Feedvisor's Vendor Central guide gives a fuller timeline: Amazon's kickoff typically lands in November, the average negotiation runs about 3.2 months, and outcomes finalize in Q1 or Q2. Feedvisor recommends starting your own preparation by mid-August. If your kickoff is already scheduled and you haven't started, the numbers below are still the right ones to pull, you'll just be pulling them on a shorter clock.

What you agree to sets the rates in your co-op agreement, and those rates apply to everything you ship until the next negotiation.

What Amazon Typically Asks For

Amazon doesn't publish an AVN playbook, and terms vary by category and by vendor, so treat the list below as what third-party sources report seeing and confirm the specifics with your own vendor manager.

• Co-op and marketing accruals. Feedvisor lists higher base accruals and increased promotional spending among the most common asks. MerchantSpring names marketing accruals alongside cost price increases and revised trade terms.
• Freight and damage allowances. Bellavix describes both as accrued against net receipts into Amazon's fulfillment centers every month, and reports that each typically falls between 2 and 5%. Bellavix also notes that a vendor isn't required to accept a damage allowance and can instead pay the costs of returning damaged products.
• Payment terms. Bellavix puts the usual range at 30 to 90 days, and notes that a vendor can offer an early-payment discount, typically 1 to 3%, to be paid sooner.
• Supply chain and Amazon Vendor Services. Feedvisor also lists supply chain improvements and participation in Amazon Vendor Services (AVS) among the asks.

Ranges like Bellavix's are only indicative, and where you land depends on your category and your history with Amazon. Each of these asks takes a percentage off every unit you ship for a year, which is why the case for or against it has to be made in your own numbers.

The Numbers to Bring

Feedvisor's first piece of advice is to present your numbers before Amazon frames the conversation, because a vendor who lets Amazon set the frame spends the whole negotiation defending against Amazon's proposals. MerchantSpring puts it as "negotiation is not the start, but the end", meaning the meeting is where months of preparation get used. Here is what that preparation should produce.

Net PPM by ASIN, paired with the deductions it leaves out

Net PPM is Amazon's own margin calculation on your items, so it's the number Amazon's side is reading when it argues for more co-op on an item. Pull it from Reports > Retail Analytics at the ASIN level. Weekly periods are available by the end of the day Monday, 48 hours after the week closes.

Bring it with context, because as our Net PPM glossary entry explains, the metric excludes chargebacks, freight costs, and recovery amounts. A catalog can show a healthy Net PPM while the remittance says something else entirely. Put each ASIN's Net PPM next to the chargebacks and remittance deductions you paid on it over the same weeks, so the discussion covers what the item costs you as well as what it earns.

Fill rate and PO on-time history

Supply chain asks get argued on your operational record. Pull your accepted confirmation rate from the Operational Metrics report (our glossary covers fill rate, accepted and its counterpart, fill rate, backordered), along with your PO on-time accuracy history. Bring each as a trend across the year with every bad stretch explained. A year of clean confirmations is your evidence against a supply chain ask, and if you had a run of misses you've since fixed, it's better to raise it yourself with the fix attached than to wait for Amazon to bring it up.

Chargeback totals by category

From Reports > Operational Performance > Chargebacks, total each chargeback category for the year, month by month. Our chargebacks guide covers what each category means. MerchantSpring recommends auditing chargebacks together with order processing days, packaging, pack size mismatches, invoice accruals, and supplier defects, and observes that a small operational tweak can pay back substantially in chargebacks. These totals matter in AVN for two reasons: they're money Amazon has already taken from you, and they don't show up in the Net PPM figure Amazon is reading.

Sell-through by ASIN

Sell-through rate appears in the Inventory Health report and in the Vendor Analytics Dataset. Bring it by ASIN for the year, since it's the plainest evidence that what Amazon bought from you actually sold and it's where you show which items deserve deeper buys next year.

The full-year retail analytics trend

MerchantSpring's list of retail signals to bring is conversion rate, glance views, Net PPM, ship cost, and returns rate. Pull the Sales and Traffic reports from Retail Analytics for the full prior year at weekly granularity, so the trend shows growth and also the weeks a promotion or a stockout moved it. Our Retail Analytics guide walks through where each report lives and how to export it cleanly.

A P&L for your top products

MerchantSpring suggests skipping the full catalog and building product-level P&Ls for the 10 to 20 items that drive revenue or carry strategic weight. You're looking for volume drainers, the high-sales items with low or negative margins. Those are the ASINs where a bigger allowance or a longer payment term hurts most, so they're the ones to model before you agree to anything.

Turning the Numbers Into a Position

MerchantSpring recommends modeling three scenarios (best, base, and worst case) and defining the range within which you can give and take, with fallback proposals already prepared and anchored in your data. Feedvisor adds that every co-op increase should come with measurable growth targets or promotional support from Amazon in return.

None of this guarantees a result, and Amazon weighs plenty of things you can't see. What the preparation does give you is a set of specific numbers to trade on and a floor you settled on before the meeting started.

What Vendor Central Will Not Give You

Every number above lives somewhere in Vendor Central, but getting a year of it into one place takes more than a few downloads, for three reasons.

1. History runs out. Each Retail Analytics report has its own lookback window, and once a date falls outside it the console stops showing it. Weekly inventory in the Vendor Analytics Dataset covers eight weeks including the current one, and Amazon keeps no history of its own demand forecast, only the latest version. Our report definitions guide lists the window for each report. If you never exported a full year of weekly data, you may not be able to retrieve it by the time the kickoff arrives.
2. Nothing is joined. Net PPM sits in Retail Analytics, chargebacks in Operational Performance, and deductions on the remittance, and the console never puts them side by side for one ASIN.
3. It repeats every week. A year of AVN evidence is 52 weekly pulls of each report, and a gap in any of them shows up as a gap in your trend.

InsightLeap does this work continuously. It keeps historic Vendor Central reports beyond what Amazon lets you see in the console, reports Net PPM at the product level, tracks Amazon's demand forecast week over week with a forecast history per product, and flags products at risk of delisting, so the year of data is already collected when the kickoff lands. The features page covers what it includes.

AVN Prep Checklist

• Pull Net PPM by ASIN for every week of the prior year, and pair each ASIN with its chargebacks and remittance deductions over the same weeks.
• Chart accepted and backordered fill rate and PO on-time accuracy across the year, with each miss explained and each fix noted.
• Total chargebacks by category and month, and list the operational causes you've already fixed.
• Export sell-through by ASIN from the Inventory Health report.
• Pull the year's weekly retail signals: glance views, conversion rate, returns rate, and ship cost.
• Build P&Ls for your top 10 to 20 ASINs and flag the high-volume, low-margin ones.
• Check the co-op rates you agreed to last year against what actually came off your remittances.
• Model best, base, and worst case, set your give-and-take range, and pair every concession you might make with what you'll ask for in return.
• Confirm the kickoff date and timeline with your vendor manager.

Start the weekly pulls now and keep them running after the negotiation closes, so next year's preparation starts with twelve months already in hand.