The Amazon Vendor Central Manual: Which One You Mean, and Where to Find It

Someone on your team needs the rule for a carton label, a PO confirmation deadline, or a freight booking, and the answer they get is "check the Vendor Central manual." That's where the hunt starts, because Amazon has published more than one document that fits the description under names that changed over the years, and the copy that turns up first in a search is often an old one. A packing SOP built from an outdated manual means your warehouse follows rules Amazon has since rewritten, and you find out when the chargebacks arrive.

This guide sorts out which document people mean, what each edition covers, how to tell whether the copy on your shared drive is current, and where InsightLeap's step-by-step guides pick up from Amazon's text.

Two things people call "the Vendor Central manual"

The first is a manual for the console itself: where Reports, Purchase Orders, Invoices, Catalog, and Support sit, and what each area is for. If that is what you are after, our Vendor Central console map walks through it area by area and links to the deeper guide for each one.

The second is Amazon's own published operating manual for vendors: the PDF that sets the rules for confirming purchase orders, packing and labeling freight, documenting a shipment, and getting it into a fulfillment center. It's the document your warehouse, 3PL, and EDI provider are expected to work from. That document is the subject of this guide, and it has gone through three generations.

Three generations of Amazon's vendor manual

The 2016 combined manual. The North American Vendor Shipment Preparation and Transportation Manual was last updated on September 1, 2016, and describes itself as a playbook of 30-plus pages. It covers fulfilling the PO, packing, labeling, the bill of lading, the ASN, Collect and Prepaid transportation, loading, safety and quality requirements, returns, and international shipments, and it closes with a glossary, FAQs, and a quick-reference shipment checklist. Its cover sends readers to the Resource Center, under Operations, then North American Vendor Shipment Guidelines, for the latest version. Copies of this edition are still publicly available, which is why it so often comes up first.

The 2020 split. As of May 1, 2020, Amazon split that manual into two documents. The North American Vendor Transportation Manual took the transportation content, and the NA Vendor Prep and Receive Manual took the prep content. Every addendum was renumbered in the process, and the frustration-free packaging and SIOC guidelines became Addendum 5 of the prep manual. At the time of the split, both documents were filed in Vendor Central under Support > Resource Center > NA Vendor Shipment Guidelines. The same update set a 64-character limit on BOL numbers through Vendor Central and EDI.

The North American Vendor Manual. The most recent edition we have found is a single document of about 105 pages titled North American Vendor Manual, with a change log that runs from March 2024 to October 2025. It covers the whole vendor supply chain, from catalog setup through payments and returns, in one place. Its introduction tells you to download the most recent version from the Vendor Manual support page in Vendor Central, so treat that page as the source of truth over any copy you find by searching.

How to tell whether your copy is current

1. Read the title on the cover: "Shipment Preparation and Transportation" means the 2016 manual, "Transportation Manual" or "Prep and Receive Manual" means one half of the 2020 pair, and "North American Vendor Manual" means the current family.
2. Open the "Summary of latest changes" table near the front. The 2016 manual and the current manual both open with one, and its newest row tells you the last change your copy includes.
3. Look for the July 1, 2024 labeling change. The current manual's change log records that, starting that day, North American vendors must follow new guidelines for labeling pallets and cartons. A copy without that entry predates the license-plate rules, and any labeling template built from it needs checking.
4. Download the latest edition from the Vendor Manual support page before you revise an SOP, and replace the file on your shared drive so nobody keeps working from the old one.
5. Send the new edition to every third party that touches your freight. The manual asks vendors who use outside partners for warehouse operations, distribution, data integration, or product setup and packaging to share it with them.

The differences between editions reach rules you work with every week. Under the 2016 manual, you had to accept, reject, or backorder a PO within one day of the order date. The current manual gives you two calendar days, lets you change the confirmation up to two days after the order date or 14 days before the ship date on your ASN (whichever comes later), and lets you lower quantities during that grace period without quantity-related chargebacks. The program the old manuals call Ships in Own Container (SIOC) is now Ships in Product Packaging (SIPP); the SIPP glossary entry has the current definition.

What the North American Vendor Manual covers

The current manual follows the order a shipment moves in, and each section ends with a printable checklist of the details for that phase.

• Catalog Fundamentals for Shipping. Case pack hierarchy and product identification standards, with catalog setup content added in October 2025.
• GTIN Management. The GTIN Gold List and maintenance practices for it.
• Purchase Orders. How POs reach you (Vendor Central > Orders > Purchase Orders, EDI 850 and 855, or the procurement APIs), the confirmation rules, WePay (Collect) versus TheyPay (Prepaid) freight, and the Pending Cancellation PO Items page where you update dates before a PO is cancelled.
• Preparing Your Shipment. Item packaging and labeling under SIPP, carton packaging and labeling, pallet building and pallet labels, floor-loaded freight, and small parcel.
• Documenting Your Shipment. The routing request, TheyPay shipping, consolidating POs, PRO numbers, the bill of lading, and the ASN, including the data required for EDI, API, and Vendor Central submissions.
• Transporting Your Shipment. TheyPay freight requirements, dock safety, loading, small parcel and direct import shipments, tracking, and transportation issues.
• Processing Payments, Filing Disputes, and Resolving Returns. Invoices, disputes, and return merchandise authorizations.
• Online Resources and a Glossary of Terms.

The manual tells you what Amazon requires, and our guides cover how to do that work in the console:

• Most of the day-to-day work sits in the documenting and transporting sections, and our guide to shipping a PO to Amazon as a vendor runs that sequence step by step, from the routing request through Carrier Central, the ASN, and carton and pallet labels.
• The packaging rules connect to SIOC and frustration-free packaging for vendors.
• The payments section connects to Vendor Central invoices, rejections, holds, and getting paid.
• The returns material connects to how Amazon vendor returns work and what they cost.

The other documents the manual points to

The North American Vendor Manual is the hub, and it hands specific topics off to separate documents. If you are assembling a full set for a new warehouse lead or a 3PL, these are the ones it names:

• North America-US Amazon Carrier Central Manual. Carriers working for TheyPay vendors are expected to follow it, and if you ship TheyPay, you're responsible for how the carriers you choose behave.
• Amazon Import Transportation Vendor Manual, for direct import shipments.
• Amazon Vendor Intermodal Loading Guide, also listed as Addendum 3.
• Addendum 1: Product Restrictions and Prep Instructions and Addendum 1.1: Softlines Packaging Guidelines.
• The Vendor Central Shipments AMZNCC (Amazon Container Code) Labeling Guide.
• The GTIN-14 Gold List template.

What the manuals leave to you

Alongside the rules, the current manual lists the chargeback types tied to them, including ASN Visibility, No Carton Content Label, Carton Content Accuracy, Confirmation Rate, No Show, PO On-time Accuracy, Oversized Carton, Overweight Carton, Prep, Pickup Accuracy, Ship in Product Packaging, Overage PO, and Unconfirmed PO. It also recommends reviewing the Operational Performance Dashboard weekly to see which of those chargebacks you've incurred.

How to defend against those charges isn't in the manual, and neither is most of the commercial and reporting side of running a vendor account, so these guides pick that up:

• Understanding and disputing deductions: the chargebacks guide, how to dispute vendor chargebacks, and disputing shortage claims.
• Profitability: finding and tracking Net PPM.
• Terms: preparing for Annual Vendor Negotiation.
• Catalog upkeep: auditing catalog and content changes.
• Reports: Vendor Central report definitions.

Quick reference

What Vendor Central will not give you

The manual is a static rulebook, so when Amazon changes a rule, the change arrives as a new edition you have to go and download, and the change log is the only record of what moved. Nothing in Vendor Central tells you that your SOP now disagrees with the current edition.

You find out from the consequences instead: a missed rule shows up as a chargeback on the Operational Performance Dashboard or as short or late receipts against your POs, and tying those back to the ASINs and orders behind them is a manual job you repeat every week. InsightLeap does the data side of that continuously: it pulls product-level sales, inventory, traffic, returns, and open POs from Vendor Central on a schedule and keeps historic Vendor Central reports past what Amazon's own interface shows, so you can compare ASIN performance before and after a process change.

Before your next SOP review, open the change log of the manual your team actually uses. If its newest entry is older than the July 2024 labeling update, download the current North American Vendor Manual from the Vendor Manual support page and work from that.