Manufacturing vs Sourcing View

Manufacturing View and Sourcing View are the two settings of the Distributor View control in Vendor Central’s Retail Analytics Sales and Inventory reports: Sourcing View counts only the ASINs Amazon bought from you under your own vendor code, and Manufacturing View counts every ASIN carrying your brand, whatever vendor code Amazon bought it through.

What it is

Distributor View decides which population of ASINs sits underneath the numbers on a Sales or Inventory report. Switching it leaves the report and its columns exactly as they were and changes only which ASINs get counted.

• Sourcing View: the narrower setting. It covers your own POs and your own shipments, meaning the ASINs Amazon purchased from you under your vendor code.
• Manufacturing View: the brand-wide setting. It covers every ASIN carrying your brand, including volume Amazon bought through another vendor code or from a distributor.

Amazon reserves Manufacturing View for the registered brand owner, and a vendor who isn’t the brand owner of record sees only Sourcing View. If the Manufacturing option is missing from your account, check brand ownership first.

Where it lives in Vendor Central

Open Reports, then Retail Analytics, and pick the Sales report or the Inventory report. Distributor View is one of the report settings on that page, next to the granularity and date range you set before reading anything. Those two report families are the only ones that carry it, so there’s no point hunting for the toggle on the Traffic, Forecasting, Net PPM, or Catalog reports, which have no distributor view at all.

Why it matters to a vendor

Each view gives a correct number for a different question: Sourcing View tells you what Amazon bought from you, while Manufacturing View tells you how your brand did on Amazon across every route the product took to get there.

When a brand sells through more than one vendor code, or its products also reach Amazon through a distributor, Manufacturing View shows the larger number. The gap between the two is volume Amazon bought from somebody other than you, so if it appears or starts growing, another supplier is selling your brand’s ASINs to Amazon. It also means two people quoting the same week’s sales can disagree because they pulled different views. Note which view was set before you export, and name the view whenever a figure leaves Vendor Central.

Related terms

• How to use Vendor Central Retail Analytics: the full walkthrough of the report controls Distributor View sits among, including granularity, comparison periods, and ASIN filters.
• Purchase Order (PO): the orders Sourcing View is built on.
• Shipped COGS: a Sales report measure whose total depends on which view is set.
• Net PPM (Net Pure Product Margin): one of the reports that carries no distributor view.
• Glossary index: the rest of the Vendor Central terms and InsightLeap metrics.