From DigiDay, March 12:
Amazon has walked back the decision to terminate a majority of the vendor purchase orders it stopped fulfilling last Monday, but the action has served as a bit of a wake-up call to sellers who are now planning how to protect their businesses by relying less on the e-commerce retailer.
On Saturday, after a sudden decision to stop filling weekly purchase orders from tens of thousands of vendors on Vendor Central, Amazon’s wholesale business, Amazon sent another email out to vendors. In the email, which was sent to Digiday by a vendor who received it, Amazon said ordering would resume following a “temporary pause.”
More importantly, it pushed the vendor to sign up for Amazon’s Brand Registry enrollment, a program that lets brand owners and licensees submit proof that they are authorized sellers of a brand’s products, which then grants them protection from unauthorized sellers on Amazon. The vendor who received the email is not a brand owner.
The kicker: Going forward, only Brand Registry-enrolled vendors will have access to automatic purchase-order fulfillment from Amazon. It’s giving vendors 60 days to enroll. Non-brand owners are being directed to Seller Central, where they can sell products directly to customers in Amazon’s third-party marketplace. (See the full email below.)
The emphasis on Brand Registry suggests that Amazon’s Vendor Central purge was a move to eliminate vendors that not only aren’t profitable for Amazon to manage, but in some cases are also low quality, selling counterfeit goods or branded products without authorization. According to Juozas Kaziukenas, the CEO of retail data analytics firm Marketplace Pulse, Amazon is weeding out the vendors that are tainting the purchase experience for customers, compromising brand positioning and costing the company valuable resources to maintain, at lower profitability than if they were third-party sellers....MORE
