Purchase Order (PO)

A purchase order (PO) on Amazon Vendor Central is the order Amazon issues to a vendor against its own demand forecast, naming the items and quantities Amazon wants shipped and the window it wants them in.

What it is

Amazon is the buyer in the first-party model, so a PO originates on Amazon’s side: its forecast pulls together sales history, current inventory levels, and demand signals on the ASIN, and the order that falls out of that lands on you. You can decline what an order asks for or reduce it, but you can’t write one yourself, and you can’t edit the forecast sitting behind it.

Most accounts never see a PO on a screen at all, because they arrive as EDI documents. The 850 carries the order from Amazon to you, and the 855 carries your answer back line by line, marking each one accepted, backordered, or rejected.

Guides ranking for “amazon purchase order” often describe an order a buyer drafts in Amazon Business or a procurement tool, with status labels of its own. That is a different system from the PO that arrives in a vendor account.

Where it lives in Vendor Central

Open Purchase Order Quantity, the count of confirmed quantities still pending receipt, sits under Reports, then Retail Analytics, then Inventory. Read it as the running total of what you have committed to and Amazon has not yet taken in.

Your answers to the orders themselves show up on the Operational Metrics report as “Accepted confirmation rate” and “Backorder confirmation rate”, which are the same two values the glossary carries as Fill Rate - Accepted Rate and Fill Rate - Backordered Rate.

The PO list itself lives inside Vendor Central rather than in a report, so confirm the menu path and the status-filter labels against your own account before you write them into a process.

Why it matters to a vendor

Accepting a PO late draws a chargeback on its own, whether or not the units eventually ship correctly, and whatever you accept, backorder, or reject on it feeds straight into your fill rate.

Your answer also feeds the model that generated the order in the first place. Backorder a quantity Amazon asked for and the next forecast reads that the demand it predicted can’t be filled at that level, so it adjusts down, and nothing tells you it happened. A backorder you enter to clear the queue quietly lowers what Amazon will ask you for next time.

InsightLeap reports the inventory position, including Open Purchase Order Quantity, alongside your fill rate and chargeback states on a fixed schedule.

Related terms

• Fill Rate - Accepted Rate and Fill Rate - Backordered Rate: the two metrics your PO answers feed.
• Chargebacks: what a late confirmation turns into.
• Amazon Inventory Management on Vendor Central: the full cycle, from how Amazon generates an order through the penalties each step can draw.
• Glossary index: the rest of the Vendor Central terms and InsightLeap metrics.