Automated Content Push into Amazon Vendor Central

Not only brand owners but also distributors or wholesalers can use Icecat’s automated content push into Amazon Vendor Central. They are all potential sellers on Amazon. To list their products, they are obliged to submit the product content of their assortment into Amazon Vendor Central as well. Either using the user interface or using NIS (new item setup) templates or the Amazon Feed Specification (AFS) API.

What challenges do non-brand vendors face?

Distributors and wholesalers normally list a far larger number of products than brands do. Because their assortments typically carry products of hundreds of brands. Filling in detailed Amazon templates on the product level is therefore too resource-intensive to be a viable option. To make matters worse, non-brand vendors typically have access to a limited set of product content, and obtaining the required data from brand owners is a challenging process for them.

How to optimize the content push?

Icecat automates the content submission into Amazon Vendor Central via its AFS connector. Not just for brand owners, but also for distributors and wholesales. The first step, is that the Icecat system matches the vendor portfolio with the Full Icecat catalog. After that, the Icecat-AFS module imports matched Full Icecat data, applies mappings, transforms it into Amazon format, and submits it to Amazon Vendor Central. This process completely replaces NIS template filling or usage of the manual Amazon Vendor Central interface. Thus, our AFS API enables non-brand vendors to submit thousands of products in bulk.

What are the advantages for non-brand vendors?

To sum up, the advantages of the AFS interface for non-brand vendors are:

• Full automation of content submission improves time to market and reduces resource requirements significantly.
• Co-ordination efforts across 100s of brand owners are dramatically reduced by submitting Open Icecat or Full Icecat data to Amazon Vendor Central.
• Icecat’s free PIM cloud is available to increase coverage and improve content quality. Non-brand vendors can invite any of their brands at no cost.
• Icecat’s Brand Authorization tool supports online permission management in the case of brand owners with restrictive syndication policies.

Contact us for an analysis of your portfolio and more details!

Emre Tan

Managing Director of Icecat, MSc. in International Finance, investor via E-nvest., ex- IBM, PwC, McKinsey