How to Accept a Purchase Order in Amazon Vendor Central

A new PO from Amazon is waiting, and the clock on it started at the order date. Accepting it means answering every line: how many units you'll ship inside the window, how many you'll ship later on a date you name, and how many you won't ship at all. Amazon's vendor manual gives you one day from the order date to send that answer, and any line you leave out of it counts as a no.

This guide walks the decision in the order you make it, both for vendors answering in Vendor Central and for vendors whose answer goes back by EDI or API. The rules come from two Amazon sources: the North American Vendor Shipment Preparation and Transportation Manual, last updated in 2016 and still the copy Amazon hosts publicly, and Amazon's Selling Partner API documentation on order acknowledgements. Screen labels in Vendor Central have moved since the manual was written and can differ between accounts, so check the menu names below against your own account before you write them into an SOP. The purchase order glossary entry defines the document itself.

What accepting a PO means

There's no single accept button for the whole order. Every line on the PO gets one of three answers, and Amazon's acknowledgement codes name them:

• Accepted: you'll fulfill these units, shipping or delivering inside the window in the PO header.
• Backordered: you'll fulfill these units, but on a ship or delivery date that differs from the one on the PO, and you have to supply that date.
• Rejected: you won't fulfill these units. Vendors answering through the API also have to give a reason.

A single line can be split across those answers. Amazon's API documentation lets you confirm a smaller quantity than Amazon ordered and forbids confirming a larger one. Third-party order tools such as Sellercloud lay the split out as quantity columns, Qty to Confirm and Qty to BackOrder, with Qty to Refuse calculated as Qty Ordered minus Qty to Confirm minus Qty to BackOrder. Those are Sellercloud's labels, but the arithmetic is the same on any screen, because whatever you neither accept nor backorder is what you're turning down.

Where the PO lives

In Vendor Central, purchase orders sit under the Orders menu. Amazon's manual gives the path as Orders, then Purchase Orders, which is also where it sends you to update past due PO items. EDI-integrated vendors receive the order as an 850 and send their answer back as an 855, and vendors on the Selling Partner API submit the same answer through its order acknowledgement operation. The Amazon EDI guide covers the 850 and 855 alongside the other documents.

All three routes carry the same three outcomes. The difference is who enters the answer and how the deadline is worded, which the section on the clock below covers.

Answering a PO in Vendor Central, step by step

1. Open Orders, then Purchase Orders, and find the new PO. If your account shows the list under a different tab or filter name, follow your account's label.
2. Read the PO header before you touch any line, and note the ship or delivery window and the freight terms. Amazon sets that window, and updating your expected ship date (ESD) or expected delivery date (EDD) doesn't extend it.
3. For each line, enter the units you can ship or deliver inside that window as accepted.
4. Enter the units you can supply later as backordered, with an ESD or EDD for them. Amazon's manual requires that date on every backordered acknowledgement, and a backorder without one draws a "Backordered without Ship/Delivery date" chargeback. Amazon then expects backordered units to ship or arrive by the date you gave.
5. Mark the units you can't supply as rejected.
6. Answer every line on the PO before you submit. A line you skip is implicitly rejected, so a half-finished confirmation turns down everything you didn't get to.
7. Submit within one day of the order date.

Ship date or delivery date: follow the freight terms

Which date you commit to depends on who moves the freight. On Collect terms Amazon arranges and pays for freight, the manual ties your routing request to the shipping window, and you confirm against the expected ship date. On Prepaid terms you arrange and pay for freight, your carrier books a delivery appointment inside the delivery window, and you confirm against the expected delivery date. Sellercloud's acknowledgement documentation applies the same rule and requires the date to fall inside the PO's Must Ship and Delivery Window.

So on a backordered line, a Collect vendor names the day the units leave the dock and a Prepaid vendor names the day they arrive at Amazon.

The clock, and what happens if you don't answer

Amazon's manual requires every PO to be acknowledged within one day of the order date, and acknowledging later draws a Late Acknowledgement chargeback. Amazon's API documentation states the same deadline as 24 hours, backordered items included.

Ignoring a PO doesn't hold it open for you. The API documentation is explicit that any line item missing from your acknowledgement is implicitly rejected, so if you never answer a PO, you've turned the whole order down.

You can change your answer later, but only inside a short window. The manual permits edits to PO confirmation information up to two days after the order date or 14 days before the ASN ship date, whichever is later, and edits outside that window draw a Confirmation Change chargeback. The API documentation asks for an updated acknowledgement within 48 hours for any change to quantity, price, ship dates, or delivery dates. In either case an edit can lower a confirmed quantity or leave it equal, but it can never raise it, because Amazon may already have ordered the difference from another vendor.

EDI and API vendors: the same answer in codes

If your answer goes back by 855 or through the API, the three outcomes are the acknowledgement codes Accepted, Backordered, and Rejected, and each carries its own requirements.

• Backordered needs a scheduledShipDate or scheduledDeliveryDate that differs from the expectedShipDate or expectedDeliveryDate on the purchase order.
• Rejected needs a rejectionReason. Amazon accepts three values: TemporarilyUnavailable when the item is currently unavailable, InvalidProductIdentifier when the item can't be found, and ObsoleteProduct when the item is no longer sold. Use the one that matches why you're turning the line down.
• Every line has to appear in the acknowledgement. Missing lines are implicitly rejected, the same as in the console.
• A rejection is final. If the first code you sent for a line was Rejected, a later update can't change it to Accepted or Backordered.

If you came from Seller Central

Seller Central has no equivalent of this step. There, the buyer is a shopper and an order is a sale you fulfill. In Vendor Central Amazon is the buyer, and a PO is an offer you answer line by line, committing to quantities and dates before any freight moves. Amazon later measures your shipments and receipts against the confirmation you send here.

Why the answer matters after you send it

Your confirmations feed your fill rate scorecard, which the Fill Rate - Accepted Rate entry explains. Units you accept are then held to the window, and PO On-Time Accuracy tracks how well you hit it. The purchase order glossary entry covers what a backorder does to the next order Amazon sends.

Each misstep in the acknowledgement has a named chargeback in Amazon's manual:

• Answering after one day: Late Acknowledgement.
• Editing outside the allowed window: Confirmation Change.
• Backordering without an ESD or EDD: Backordered without Ship/Delivery date.
• Not delivering the full confirmed quantity before Amazon auto-cancels the PO: Unfilled by cancel date.
• Shipping more than you confirmed: Overage.

Rejecting too much has its own consequence. The chargebacks guide covers the Rejected PO Rate threshold along with the rest of the chargeback families.

What comes next

Once the PO is confirmed, the freight terms decide your next move. The guide to shipping a purchase order to Amazon runs through the routing request, the Carrier Central appointment, and the ASN in order.

What Vendor Central will not give you

You answer POs one at a time, and the confirmation rates come back as scorecard figures. If you want to know which ASINs you keep backordering or rejecting, or whether backordered units arrived by the dates you gave, you have to line up your PO answers against receipts yourself and repeat that every week.

InsightLeap puts product-level Vendor Central PO data next to your sales and inventory data, so the ASINs you keep backordering or rejecting show up without that weekly rebuild.

When the next PO lands, start with the header's window and freight terms, then give every line an accepted, backordered, or rejected quantity and submit within one day of the order date.