Vendor Central: A Map of the Console for Vendors Already Inside It

Whether you just accepted the invite or inherited an account someone else set up, the first problem is the same: finding where things live. Vendor Central spreads the weekly work across separate menus, reports, and downloads, and nothing in the console tells you which screen owns which job. This page maps the five areas you'll work in every week, shows where each one sits, and links the InsightLeap guide that covers it step by step.

Vendor Central is Amazon's invitation-only portal for first-party (1P) vendors. You sell to Amazon in bulk at a wholesale price you propose, and Amazon sets the retail price and makes the inventory and fulfillment calls from there. If you're still deciding whether that model suits your brand, start with the pros and cons of Vendor Central and Vendor Central vs. Seller Central vs. hybrid selling, because the rest of this page assumes you're already in.

Reports and data

The core sales, inventory, and traffic reports live under Reports > Retail Analytics, where each one sits on its own tab with its own download step. These are the report groups you'll open most:

• Sales Diagnostic: shipped cost of goods at ASIN level, day by day.
• Traffic Diagnostic: glance views and conversion against industry benchmarks.
• Inventory Health: your stock position, updated weekly.
• Forecast and Inventory Planning: Amazon's Mean, P70, P80, and P90 demand forecasts for your items.
• Net PPM: Amazon's pure product margin on your items after cost of goods and services are deducted.
• Real-time sales, traffic, and inventory: hourly figures per ASIN.
• Brand Analytics: shopper behavior across the marketplace, available only to brands enrolled in Brand Registry.

Every Amazon Vendor Central report, defined is the full reference, report by report. To get the data out of the console, how to export Vendor Central reports covers the download on each tab and the date windows each granularity allows. If you'd rather pull the same reports programmatically, the Vendor Central API guide explains Amazon's Selling Partner API (SP-API), which needs an active Vendor Central account and a developer registration by the primary account user. For margin in particular, how to find and track Net PPM in Vendor Central goes ASIN by ASIN.

Purchase orders

Most of the week in a 1P account runs off Amazon's purchase orders. You find them under Orders, then Purchase Orders, on the Manage POs tab, where Export PO to CSV gives you the list as a file. Each line carries the order date, the ASIN, the quantity requested, and the answer you confirmed.

What the list can't show you is how your answers trend. Neither the PO list nor the export carries your accepted or backordered rate over time, so orders from three weeks ago usually get looked at again only when a chargeback or a short forecast sends someone back to find out what was ordered and what you answered. How to track purchase order history in Vendor Central shows how to build that history from weekly pulls.

Invoices and payments

Open Payments, then Invoices, to see where each invoice stands. The statuses fall into three groups:

• In progress: Submitted and In Review.
• Action required: Incomplete, Rejected, Credit Memo Required, and Proof of Delivery Required.
• Resolution: Queued for Payment, Paid, and On Hold Due to Matching Issue.

A held invoice hasn't been thrown back to you. It's waiting on invoice matching, which is a different problem from a rejection and needs a different response. Rejections usually trace to a quantity mismatch with the ASN, a price or allowance mismatch against the PO, an item identifier mismatch on the invoice lines, or a missing or incorrect field. Working out which one you've hit is slower than it should be, because the PO, the ASN, the invoice, and the remittance that eventually settles it never appear side by side in the console, and the Paid view only reaches back three months. Vendor Central invoices: submission, rejections, holds, and getting paid on time walks through each status and what to do about it.

Catalog and content

Titles, bullets, image references, A+ Content, and variation structure can all change on your listings, and some changes, such as replenishment codes, happen on Amazon's side of the account without any action from you. Variation breaks are the easiest to miss: a child ASIN ends up orphaned or attached to the wrong parent, and nobody notices until sales on it fall.

The Vendor Catalog Listing report gives you the catalog as it stands on the day you pull it. It carries no change log, so the only way to know what a field read last month is the export you kept from last month. Menu placement for that report differs by account and region, so find it by name and confirm the path on your own screen before you write it into a process. How to audit catalog and content changes on Vendor Central sets up the baseline and the comparison.

Support and cases

When a problem needs Amazon to act, you open a case by clicking Help in the top-right corner of the screen, then Contact Us at the bottom of the box that opens. Menu structure varies between accounts, so write down your own path for the rest of the team.

Every case you submit appears in the Case Log with its case ID, status (open, resolved, or expired), status notes, creation date, and the case owner's email. Your first description stays with the case for its whole life, so put the ask in the opening sentence and include every PO number, ASIN, and invoice number the problem touches. Open cases from an email address someone on the team checks. How to open a case in Vendor Central covers writing the case and the escalation paths when it stalls.

If you came from Seller Central

Most of what you used still exists under a different name:

• Business Reports become Reports > Retail Analytics.
• Page views become glance views, which Amazon is renaming featured offer page views.
• Manage Inventory becomes the Inventory Health report plus the purchase order workflow.
• Payments becomes the invoices you send and the Remittance Advice Amazon sends back.
• Search terms data lives in Brand Analytics, for Brand Registry brand owners only.

Three fields have no Vendor Central equivalent: sessions only exist on the seller side, Buy Box percentage doesn't exist in Vendor Central, and unit session percentage has no proxy. Seller Central to Vendor Central: where your reports went maps the rest field by field.

What Vendor Central will not give you

Each area above works one screen at a time, which leaves three jobs to you:

1. History. A single report export spans roughly two years, anything older than roughly three years isn't retrievable through the interface, the Paid invoice view reaches back three months, and Amazon retains only the most recent demand forecast, so any period you never pulled is gone.
2. One view of an ASIN. Sales, Inventory, and Traffic each come as their own download, tied together only by the ASIN column, so no single report tells you how one ASIN did across all three. How to combine Vendor Central reports into one ASIN view covers the join.
3. The weekly repeat. Every pull, join, and comparison above has to happen again next week, and Vendor Central has no setting that does it for you.

InsightLeap does that work continuously. It ingests your Vendor Central sales, inventory, traffic, Net PPM, and demand forecast data alongside Seller Central, Amazon Advertising, and Amazon.com, tracks Net PPM for every product week by week and month by month, and generates the reports for your team automatically.

If you're setting up a new account, start a weekly export folder this week for Retail Analytics and your PO list, and add the Vendor Catalog Listing report to it. That way the history and the catalog baseline already exist the first time a chargeback, a rejected invoice, or a changed listing sends you looking.