Looking for an EDI Solution with Amazon Vendor Central?

What is Amazon Vendor Central EDI and how does it benefit you?

Vendor Central is Amazon’s web portal which helps in streamlining the business transactions between product sellers and Amazon. This is a platform through which a seller/vendor is able to sell their products to Amazon and in turn Amazon sells them to its buyers. Amazon charges a fee from the seller (manufacturer or distributor) for using the platform and providing a channel for the businesses to sell through an established brand that is popular among large customer segments. As a seller who is using the vendor central platform, you can take advantage of Amazon Marketing Services, Customer Support and their Premium Vendor Services. However, sellers can enroll into this program via an invitation sent by Amazon only. This most likely happens if they have high number of sales with their Sellers Central account or they can request an invitation with no guaranties of being accepted.

EDI integration and automation with Amazon Vendor Central can prove to be a blessing that can make your order-to-cash cycle efficient, minimize errors and save a lot of time for your teams. EDI helps avoid any paperwork and manual downloading of data from the platform and entering data into your system. In fact, Amazon also offers incentives to those sellers who are willing to automate and comply with their EDI requirements. Once you sign up, you need to request the Amazon admin to give you access to the EDI self-service setup. Your team should go through it and complete the information required to connect with the platform. You need item information, product IDs and type of measurement units for accepting Amazon orders. Choose an EDI communication type to use to exchange documents. Amazon recommends the use of AS2 over others. It is not tough to setup EDI with Amazon Central and doesn’t take months but you need knowledge of your internal business processes and how the EDI documents function.

How to become EDI compliant with Amazon Vendor Central?

You will become EDI compliant by using a third party EDI solution (on-premise, managed EDI or cloud EDI) or by having an in-house EDI solution in place to start trading EDI documents with Amazon Vendor Central by following their requirements. Depending on your internal technical infrastructure and resources and the size of your business, you can choose basic EDI software packages or advanced kits that allow you to become EDI compliant with Amazon Vendor Central. If you are a small business, do not forget to checkout EDI software for small business.

If you are using a third party managed EDI service, your EDI service provider should help you with end-to-end EDI implementation starting from obtaining trading partner contact to testing to going live. You will have to go through series of EDI testing with Amazon Vendor Central first before you start sending and receiving EDI documents back and forth. This is to ensure all the connections are working correctly. You are then asked to go live on a decided production go –live date.