Vendor API (Selling Partner API for Vendors)

The Vendor API is the vendor-scoped part of Amazon’s Selling Partner API (SP-API), a free service that lets a Vendor Central account pull its retail reports and exchange purchase orders and invoices with Amazon programmatically, as an alternative to EDI.

What it is

Three separate systems travel under the Vendor API name, and each one is registered, scoped, and permissioned on its own:

1. Vendor retail analytics reports: the programmatic version of the reports you download from Retail Analytics today.
2. Retail Procurement APIs: purchase order receipt and acknowledgment, shipment confirmations, and invoice submission for standard vendors who ship to Amazon’s fulfillment centers. Calls require the Amazon Fulfillment role.
3. Direct Fulfillment APIs: order acknowledgment, shipping labels, shipment confirmation, invoicing, and inventory updates for drop-ship vendors, gated by the Direct-to-Consumer Shipping role. The Direct Fulfillment entry covers the program itself.

When a vendor asks about “the API,” they usually want the reports first and end up needing procurement later. EDI and the Retail Procurement APIs carry the same kind of documents, but an SP-API integration doesn’t run through an EDI connection, so treat them as two separate paths.

Where it lives in Vendor Central

No Vendor Central menu opens the API, because it’s a developer integration. Access starts from an existing, active Vendor Central account: the primary account user registers as a developer, registers a private or public application in the Solution Provider Portal, requests only the roles the use case needs, and tests in the sandbox before moving to production calls. The Vendor Central API guide walks through each of those steps.

Why it matters to a vendor

Without the API, you download each Retail Analytics report by hand from the console. The Vendor API replaces that routine and gives you a programmatic path for POs and invoices alongside EDI.

Its coverage stops at your own account’s reports and procurement documents. Buy Box ownership, third-party offers, live listing content changes, and history past each report’s lookback window sit outside it, whichever of the three systems you register for, so check that what you need falls inside that coverage before you commit engineering time to a build.

Related terms

• Direct Fulfillment: Amazon’s vendor dropship program and its own Orders, Shipping, and Payments API family.
• Purchase Order (PO): the order Amazon issues to a vendor against its own demand forecast, whichever channel moves it.
• Amazon Vendor Central API: How to Get Your Data: the full walkthrough of access, report types, procurement operations, and what the API leaves out.
• Vendor Central report definitions: fields and lookback windows, report by report.
• Glossary index: the rest of the Vendor Central terms and InsightLeap metrics.