Your Amazon Vendor Central Account: Vendor Groups, Vendor Codes, and Who Can Get In

You accepted the Vendor Central invitation, or you inherited an account someone else set up, and now you need to know what you actually have. The answer is less tidy than the word "account" suggests. Amazon gives you one sign-in, and behind it sits something Amazon calls a vendor group, which can hold several vendor codes. Nobody else at your company is inside it until someone with the right permission invites them, and if your brand already sells through Seller Central, that account carries on exactly as it did, on its own login.

This guide covers that layer: what the account is made of, how to get the right people into it, and how it sits next to Seller Central. If you haven't been invited yet, start with how to get invited to Amazon Vendor Central. If your account is already set up, your team is in it, and you want to find your way around the console, the Vendor Central console map picks up where this one stops.

What you sign into: a vendor group

Amazon's Selling Partner API documentation gives the clearest public definition: a vendor group is the account you log in to, and it can include multiple vendor codes. When people on your team say "our Vendor Central account," they almost always mean the vendor group, the thing tied to your sign-in credentials.

The vendor codes underneath it are how one vendor group lists products in specific categories, carries different business agreements, and manages different brands. Each code stands for one relationship with Amazon, so a company with one brand and one agreement may only ever see a single code, while a company with two brands, or a second agreement covering another category, can hold several codes under the same login.

That structure has two practical consequences you'll want to know about before you connect anything to the account.

1. When you authorize a third-party application through the Selling Partner API, it gets access to the vendor group tied to your credentials and to every vendor code inside that group. Before you approve an app, know which codes the group contains and which business each one represents.
2. When a tool, an integration, or a report asks for a single vendor code and you pick the wrong one, you get data for a different brand, category, or agreement than the one you meant, and every number that follows describes the wrong relationship.

Finding your vendor codes

The list of vendor codes sits under Settings > Contacts, where you can view them By Vendor Code or By People. Amazon's own help for that screen is behind the login, so check that the labels match what your account actually shows. The vendor code glossary entry covers what the code looks like and where it lives in more detail.

Once you can see the codes, write them down somewhere your whole team can reach, so whoever connects the next integration or builds the next spreadsheet can pick the right code without guessing:

1. List every vendor code in the group.
2. Next to each code, note the brand, category, or agreement it covers.
3. Note who on your team works with each code.

Adding people and choosing a permission level

Amazon's invitation brings one person into the account. Everyone else, whether that's a colleague in finance, a supply chain lead, or an agency you work with, gets in through an invitation sent from inside Vendor Central, and two independent operator guides describe the same path:

1. Open Settings (the gear icon) and select Manage Permissions.
2. Click Add Another Person.
3. Enter the person's details.
4. Choose the permission level.
5. Click Send Invitation.

The permission levels you choose from include Contributor, Administrator, and Global Administrator. A Global Administrator has all administrator privileges, including inviting users, editing permissions, and merging the global accounts they manage. Separately, a Global Account lets a vendor manage operations across multiple regions from one interface, and according to the same guide, setting one up doesn't affect your existing day-to-day operations, your vendor codes, or your access to reports.

For an outside party such as an auditor, the recommended role is Contributor, with only the specific permissions that person needs. Whatever the role, never assign banking permissions to anyone outside your company, because an agency running your catalog or advertising has no reason to see where Amazon sends your money.

The same Manage Permissions page handles everything that happens after the invitation goes out:

• To cancel an invitation nobody has accepted yet, click the Pending Invitations link under Manage Permissions.
• If an invitation expires or isn't accepted in time, resend it.
• If the person says the invitation never arrived, ask them to check their spam folder and make sure mail from @amazon.com isn't being blocked.
• To change someone's access later, click Edit next to their name.
• To take someone out of the account, click Edit next to their name, then select Remove This Person.

Make that last step part of your offboarding checklist, so that when someone leaves the company or an agency engagement ends, their Vendor Central access goes with them.

If you came from Seller Central: the hybrid account

Accepting a Vendor Central invitation leaves your Seller Central account exactly where it was. A brand that sells through both is what operators call a hybrid account, but there's nothing to apply for: you hold two accounts and run the two Amazon relationships side by side.

Amazon never presents them as one thing, so you get no shared login, no combined dashboard, and no report that covers both sides. Each account keeps its own credentials and its own reporting, which means the people who work in your Seller Central account have no access to Vendor Central until you invite them through Manage Permissions as well.

The hybrid account glossary entry covers what running both sides means in practice, including how your two channels can end up competing for the same SKU and why reporting across them turns into a manual job.

What Vendor Central will not give you

Once the account is set up and the right people are in it, two pieces of the picture stay on you:

1. A map of the group. Vendor Central shows you the codes, but the record of which code is which brand or agreement, and who works with each, is a list you keep yourself. Whenever a report or tool takes one code at a time, comparing two brands means pulling each one and lining them up by hand.
2. A view across 1P and 3P. Because Amazon never combines a hybrid brand's two accounts, reconciling sales, inventory, and financials across them means pulling exports from two consoles and matching them yourself, every period.

InsightLeap does that pull on a schedule. It connects to Vendor Central, Amazon Advertising, and Amazon.com and pulls product-level sales, inventory, and open PO units, with brands and regions managed together in one login. Brands that sell both ways connect each side as its own account under one team, and Seller Central accounts get their own weekly and monthly reports with fees, net proceeds, and FBA inventory.

Where to go next

Before you connect any tool or invite anyone, write the list: every vendor code, what it covers, and who works with it. Then send invitations from Manage Permissions at the narrowest level that does the job, and keep banking permissions inside the company.

If you're still waiting on Amazon, how to get invited to Amazon Vendor Central covers the signals Amazon watches and what changes financially when you say yes. Once the account is in order, the Vendor Central console map walks through Reports, Orders, Payments, Catalog, and Support.