Vendor Central gives you shipped revenue and net PPM for every ASIN. It does not tell you what you actually made on a product, and the two numbers it does give you are easy to mistake for profit.
The reason is structural. Vendor Central is Amazon's view of the trade: what it ordered, what it received, what it sold and what it earned. Your margin depends on things it never puts in one place: your cost of goods, the deductions taken off your invoices, the co-op you agreed in your trading terms and your advertising spend. This guide sets out which number answers which question, and how to build the profit view Vendor Central leaves out.
Net PPM, contribution margin or profit before ads: which number matters
For the question "am I making money on this product", the number that matters is your own profit before advertising, and then after it. Net PPM answers a different question, and contribution margin sits between the two.
Net PPM measures Amazon's margin, not yours. Amazon's own developer documentation describes its Net Pure Product Margin report as data "on Amazon's net pure product margins for selling a vendor's items" (Amazon Selling Partner API, analytics reports). It looks at the trade from Amazon's side: what Amazon earns selling your product at retail compared with what it paid you, after the funding it recovers from you. Look at it when you want to understand how Amazon sees your catalogue. A falling net PPM is the number that precedes requests for more funding, lower cost prices or fewer orders.
Contribution margin measures what a product leaves you after the costs that move with it. Start from what you invoiced Amazon, take off deductions and your cost of goods, then take off the variable costs that scale with sales, co-op and allowances among them. Look at it when you decide which ASINs deserve stock, promotion or a cost renegotiation.
Profit before ads is contribution margin with nothing left out except advertising. It tells you whether the product earns its keep on its own terms, before you decide how much to spend promoting it. Subtract advertising and you have the figure that answers the original question.
In short: net PPM tells you whether Amazon is happy, contribution margin tells you where to put effort, and profit before and after ads tells you whether you are making money. A product can carry a healthy net PPM while it loses money for the vendor who supplies it, because none of your own costs enter Amazon's calculation.
Sell-in and sell-out never match, and only one of them is your P&L
Your P&L runs on sell-in, because sell-in is the sale you made. Sell-in is what you invoiced Amazon, recorded at the invoice date and valued at your cost price to Amazon. Sell-out is what Amazon shipped to shoppers, recorded when it shipped and valued at Amazon's retail price.
The two never match, for three reasons: they are valued at different prices, they happen at different times because Amazon holds stock between buying it and selling it, and Amazon can discount, promote or stop selling an item without changing what it already owes you.
A vendor still needs both. Sell-out is the demand signal. When sell-out slows while sell-in stays high, Amazon is building stock it will have to work through, and the purchase orders that follow will be smaller. Sell-in is the revenue line every deduction, cost and allowance is measured against. If you also sell on your own account, keep the two sides apart: 3P sales are booked at the shopper's price and 1P sales at your invoice price, so adding them into one total mixes two different bases. The trade-offs between the two models are covered in our guide to choosing between 1P and 3P.
The deductions that decide your margin
Deductions are amounts Amazon takes off what it pays you, and they decide your margin because they arrive after the revenue has already been counted. Invoiced revenue looks complete on the day you bill. The deductions turn up later, on remittances, one line at a time.
Shortage claims. A shortage arises when an invoice is sent to Amazon "for a quantity of items that is higher than the quantity received", as Amazon's shortages training puts it, quoted by SPS Commerce. Amazon withholds payment on the missing units. A claim you dispute successfully is reversed; one you do not dispute, or lose, is settled and becomes a permanent reduction. Withheld and settled claims belong in different places in a profit review: settled claims are a cost, withheld claims are money still in play.
Price claims. A price claim arises when the cost on your invoice does not match the cost Amazon has on file for that item, typically after a cost change that did not go through everywhere. Amazon pays the lower figure and deducts the difference.
Quick-pay discount. If your terms include early payment, Amazon pays sooner in exchange for a discount on each invoice. It is easy to treat as a finance detail, but it is a reduction in revenue on every invoice it touches.
All three are easy to miss for the same reason: none of them changes the invoiced revenue figure that most reports start from. Unless deductions are matched back to the invoices and ASINs they came from, the P&L overstates every product they touch. Operational chargebacks for how goods were shipped are a separate family again, with a different cause and owner, covered in Amazon chargebacks and deductions.
Co-op and allowances
Co-op is the agreed share of your invoiced revenue that Amazon takes under your trading terms. It is negotiated, usually once a year, often split into named allowances, and applied to every invoice that follows.
It usually outweighs claims, because claims hit some invoices and co-op hits all of them. It is also the cost most often missing from the operating budget. It is agreed in the annual negotiation, often by a different team from the one that owns the budget, and it never appears as a price on the invoice itself. A forecast that starts from invoiced revenue and takes off cost of goods without co-op overstates margin before the year has started. Put the percentage from your own terms into the model, line by line.
What Amazon still owes you
Receivables belong in a profit review because a sale is not finished until it is paid, and with Amazon the gap between the two is where deductions are decided. Amazon's payment view sorts what it owes you into states such as open, queued for payment, past due and withheld.
Open and queued invoices are the normal pipeline. Past due invoices are a conversation to have now. Withheld amounts are the ones to watch: money held against claims or disputes, which either comes back to you or becomes a deduction. Reviewing withheld amounts next to margin, product by product, shows which ASINs carry revenue that is not yet safe. Left only in the finance team's inbox, the same number turns up months later as a write-off nobody can trace to a product.
Purchase orders and fill rate tell you about next quarter
Purchase orders and fill rate are your leading indicators, because a vendor's revenue is whatever Amazon decides to order. Two ratios matter. Confirmation rate is the share of ordered units you confirm you can supply. Fill rate is the share of confirmed units you actually deliver.
A falling confirmation rate signals a supply problem on your side that Amazon will notice before you do: short confirmations reduce what Amazon expects to receive and, over time, what it chooses to order. A falling fill rate tends to bring shortage claims and operational chargebacks with it. When the orders themselves shrink while sell-out holds, Amazon is usually working through stock or reconsidering the item, and that shows in next quarter's revenue before it shows in this quarter's P&L. How to read those replenishment signals early is the subject of knowing what Amazon will reorder. Our short reference on Vendor Central retail analytics basics covers where these reports sit.
Putting it together: the 1P profit ladder
A vendor's profit is built by taking each cost away from invoiced sales in a fixed order, so every step answers one question:
- Invoiced sales: what you billed Amazon at your cost price.
- Minus Amazon deductions: settled shortage claims, price claims and the quick-pay discount.
- Equals net sales: what Amazon actually pays for what you shipped.
- Minus cost of goods: what the product cost you to make or buy and deliver.
- Equals gross profit.
- Minus co-op and allowances: the funding agreed in your trading terms.
- Equals profit before advertising: whether the product earns its keep on its own.
- Minus advertising: what you spent promoting it. A vendor's break-even on this rung is not a seller's, as explained in break-even ACOS for vendors.
Run the ladder per ASIN and per period, not only for the account, because a healthy total hides products that subsidise others. If you are still deciding whether a product belongs on 1P at all, the Amazon 1P vs 3P calculator puts both models on one unit and gives the wholesale discount at which 1P stops paying.
Doing this without a spreadsheet
Most vendors build the ladder by hand: export invoices, match remittances, look up co-op terms, add cost of goods and advertising, then repeat it next month. It works until the catalogue grows or a second account is added.
Nova turns Vendor Central data into P&L, inventory and advertising analytics, with a Channel filter to look at 1P on its own or alongside 3P. The Vendor Central page shows how it lays out the trail from purchase order to what Amazon actually paid.
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