Your products aren’t CRaP*: the benefits of a hybrid account on Amazon

Selling in two ways is trickier to manage, but has plenty of benefits. Pic by fullvector on www.freepik.com

Brands selling on Amazon are largely split into Vendors and Sellers — but for some lucky brands, the hybrid option is also available: the best of both worlds.

The best of which worlds?

Both the Vendor and Seller programs have their own pros and cons, which suit different businesses.

As a Vendor, Amazon effectively buys your product from you and sells it at a price they decide. In return you get guaranteed distribution, protection from suspension, no VAT headaches, and access to special programs.

Sellers have plenty of benefits too. The main one is being able to control your own prices, but you also get a little less hassle and lower fees, and a vast amount of analytics data from your sales.

They’re pretty much completely separate from each other, run within Amazon by different teams and algorithms.

With hybrid, you can hold a Vendor account and a Seller account together, reaping the benefits from both.

Why would you go for hybrid?

You have more control over your stock and prices. Sometimes, as a Vendor, Amazon decides that your products aren’t profitable (based on the market prices — the buy box is too low, and/or logistics costs are high), and reduces or stops its order. By listing the same products under your Seller account, which you can do relatively quickly, you can avoid *CraP status — ‘Can’t Realise any Profit’ — which is Amazon’s internal term for when they are losing money on a product.

Effectively, you can keep your best selling products on your Vendor side, and use Seller for the ‘long tail’ products and the ‘problem’ products — including the less profitable ones, but also items Amazon classifies as dangerous goods, for example.

If the demand is not high, the Vendor side will not order any — and with no product available, the demand will be even lower. So with the Seller and the FBA option, you can make sure your products are available, and push or create more demands (by using advertising, for example).

Because you can list products so much more quickly as a Seller, a lot of hybrid accounts also find it useful for product launches — and for…