Direct Fulfillment (Amazon Vendor Central)

Direct Fulfillment is Amazon’s vendor dropship program: Amazon still buys the unit from you, but you ship it straight to the customer from your own warehouse, where it stays until Amazon has a customer order for it.

What it is

Direct Fulfillment leaves the 1P wholesale relationship intact. Amazon purchases the item from you and the detail page still reads “Sold by Amazon.com,” so you are operating as a vendor here, not as a third-party seller who holds the listing and sets the price.

The order itself runs through a fixed sequence, and each step has to land before the next one counts:

1. Amazon issues the order.
2. You acknowledge it, accepting or rejecting, within at most 24 hours.
3. You generate a shipping label.
4. You confirm the shipment.
5. You submit the invoice, which Amazon will only take after that confirmation has gone in.

The label step does not allow partial fulfillment, so one label covers the whole order it was created for. A single purchase order can still carry more than one label when the work splits across shipments.

Where it lives in Vendor Central

Direct Fulfillment orders are managed in Drop Ship Central, a portal separate from the standard order manager. Enrollment is invite-only, so you work these orders only once Amazon has brought your account into the program.

If you integrate programmatically, the same five steps run through Amazon’s Vendor Direct Fulfillment Orders, Shipping, and Payments APIs, in that same order: retrieve the order, submit the acknowledgement, create the shipping label, submit the shipment confirmation, then submit the invoice.

Why it matters to a vendor

Under Direct Fulfillment the unit stays in your warehouse until Amazon has a customer order for it, so the inventory sits on your shelves and the pick, pack, and ship work lands on your operation.

In exchange, the program holds you to its own operating requirements: you have at most 24 hours to acknowledge an order, each order ships as one complete shipment, and Amazon monitors measures including Order Defect Rate and late shipments.

Every Direct Fulfillment order is still a purchase order, and the general definition in Purchase Order (PO) still holds. What changes is where the unit ships from, and which steps Amazon requires from you before it will take your invoice.

Related terms

• Purchase Order (PO): the order Amazon issues to a vendor against its own demand forecast, and the general definition a Direct Fulfillment order still falls under.
• Chargebacks: the compliance deductions Amazon takes out of your remittance, and the five families they cover.
• Glossary index: the rest of the Vendor Central terms and InsightLeap metrics.