Co-op (Cooperative Marketing Agreement)

Co-op, short for cooperative marketing agreement, is a vendor-funded share of your Amazon business that Amazon deducts from what it pays you, covering the marketing, freight, and damage terms your vendor agreement commits you to.

What it is

Co-op is an accrual: Amazon calculates it as a percentage of your business and takes it out of the payments it sends you. What that percentage runs against depends on the agreement, since some lines are figured on net receipts and others on net sales or on the purchase price Amazon paid.

Your vendor terms break co-op into separate lines, each negotiated on its own and each carrying its own basis, so the total leaving a remittance is the sum of several agreements:

• Marketing or promotional allowance: the fund Amazon draws on for merchandising and promotional support, and the line most vendors mean when they say co-op.
• Freight allowance: your share of the cost of moving inbound shipments to Amazon.
• Damage allowance: a standing rate covering damaged and defective units, in place of handling each one as its own claim.
• Straight payment: a fixed amount that does not move with volume.
• Price protection: a retroactive credit to Amazon when you lower your price on inventory it is already holding.

Where it lives in Vendor Central

The agreements and the rates attached to them sit under Payments, then CoOp, and that page records only what you agreed to. The deductions themselves land on your remittances, and you can contest a specific one through Dispute Management, which asks for the dispute reason, the justification behind it, and the documentation that supports it.

None of those rates are set in the console, though. They come out of the Annual Vendor Negotiation (AVN), the yearly terms discussion, and they hold until the next one.

Why it matters to a vendor

Co-op comes off the money Amazon owes you the same way a chargeback or a shortage claim does, but the timing works differently. A chargeback traces back to one defect on one shipment, while co-op is agreed once and then applies to everything that ships for the next twelve months, so a rate you accept without modeling what it costs keeps compounding across every PO until the following AVN.

Rates vary by category and by vendor too, so a percentage another vendor quotes tells you little about your own terms. Work from your own agreements instead: pull what is listed under Payments, then CoOp, and match it line by line against the deductions showing up on your remittances. Anything that does not reconcile goes to Dispute Management.

Related terms

• Chargebacks: Amazon’s compliance fee against a vendor, deducted the same way but triggered by a single operational miss.
• Shortage Claim: the deduction that follows when Amazon’s receiving count lands under your invoice.
• Glossary index: the rest of the Vendor Central terms and InsightLeap metrics.