An Amazon vendor purchase order is a document that says what Amazon will buy, how many, at what cost price, where it must arrive and when. You confirm it, you ship against it, and you invoice it. Every one of those four steps has a deadline, and missing one costs money through a deduction or a scorecard entry that reduces future orders.
For an Amazon seller moving into the vendor relationship, the purchase order is the object that replaces the listing as the center of daily work. You no longer optimize a title and a bid; you confirm a quantity and hold a ship window. This article walks a purchase order from arrival to payment and puts a number on each failure mode.
What is on the purchase order
Open one and you will find, in some layout or other: a purchase order number, an order date, a ship window with a start and an end date, a delivery window, a destination fulfillment center code, and a line per ASIN with the quantity requested, the cost price and the unit of measure.
Two fields deserve more attention than they usually get. The destination code is not negotiable and drives your freight cost, because a purchase order routed to a distant fulfillment center costs more to serve than one routed nearby. And the unit of measure decides whether "600" means 600 units or 600 cases, which is a mistake that only has to happen once to be memorable.
Purchase orders arrive on a cadence Amazon sets from its own forecast. You do not control the volume, the timing or the destination, which is the structural difference between being a vendor and having a customer you negotiate with.
Confirming: the first place money is lost
You have a window to confirm each line, accepting the full quantity, accepting a reduced quantity or rejecting it.
The metric that matters here is fill rate: the share of requested units you actually confirm and ship. A vendor who confirms 600 of 600 and delivers 600 has a clean record. One who confirms 400 because stock is short has a fill rate problem that shows up in the category team's reporting and eventually in how much they order.
The instinct is to confirm everything and sort the stock out later. That is worse than a reduced confirmation, because a confirmed line that does not ship becomes an on-time accuracy defect and a shortage claim at once. Confirm what you can actually put on a truck inside the window.
There is a real arithmetic cost to under-confirming as well. A line you reject is revenue that does not exist: 200 units at a $15.00 cost price with a $6.20 contribution is $1,240 of margin you declined. Over a year of chronic stock-outs that number gets large quietly, which is why vendor relationships reward inventory planning far more than FBA does.
Shipping: window, routing, labeling
The ship window is a range, not a deadline. Arriving before the start is a defect in the same way arriving after the end is, because receiving capacity is booked.
Three things go wrong here routinely.
Routing. If the shipment is collect, Amazon arranges the carrier and you must submit a routing request and wait for the assignment. Shipping before the assignment arrives, or with a different carrier, is a compliance defect.
Labeling. Each carton needs a compliant label in the right place with a scannable barcode, plus carton content information. Pallets have their own build and labeling specification.
Advance shipment notice. The electronic notice has to be transmitted before the truck arrives and has to match the truck's contents exactly. A missing or mismatched notice is one of the more expensive deductions in the schedule.
Each of these has a per-carton fee attached, and the fees add up faster than brands expect. The full schedule and how to budget for it is in Vendor Central chargebacks.
Invoicing and getting paid
Invoice after shipping, against the purchase order number, with quantities that match what you actually sent. The invoice has to reconcile with what the fulfillment center receives before it becomes payable, so the receiving scan is really the event that starts the payment clock even though the terms are written from the invoice date.
Then you wait out the terms, typically net sixty. On a 3,000-unit purchase order at a $15.00 cost price that is a $45,000 receivable landing two months after receipt, whether or not Amazon has sold a single unit. That is the genuine advantage of the model against third-party selling, where the same 3,000 units release cash only as they sell through. The full cash comparison is in Vendor Central terms.
Reconcile every payment against every invoice. Deductions arrive without much explanation, and a brand that does not reconcile discovers at year end that its average contribution was well below the model.
Running the numbers on one purchase order
Take a realistic order and follow the money the whole way.
Amazon requests 3,000 units of a $29.99 retail product at a $15.00 cost price, one destination, ship window ten days out. Gross value: $45,000.
- Landed cost of goods at $6.50: minus $19,500
- Freight to the fulfillment center, prepaid: minus $2,250
- Accrued allowances at roughly eight cents on the dollar: minus $3,600
- Chargebacks and shortages at $0.35 a unit: minus $1,050
Net contribution: $18,600, or $6.20 a unit.
Now change one variable. Suppose a labeling defect and a missing advance shipment notice push the deduction line to $1.20 a unit. Contribution falls to $16,050. One afternoon of process discipline is worth $2,550 on this single order, which is the most persuasive argument for buying a thermal printer that anyone will ever make to a warehouse manager.
Compare that with the same 3,000 units sold to two distributors at $14.00: $42,000 of revenue, minus $19,500 of goods, minus about $2,700 of pick, pack and outbound freight, giving $19,800 of contribution on net thirty terms with no deduction schedule. Slightly better money, considerably faster, and split across two customers instead of one. That comparison is the subject of Vendor Central vs wholesale.
Building an operation that holds
Four habits separate vendors who make the model work from vendors who quietly lose money on it.
Keep a purchase order log with confirmed quantity, shipped quantity, ship date and invoice number in one row per order. Everything else depends on this existing.
Photograph sealed pallets with the labels visible before loading, and keep the signed bill of lading. This is the evidence that wins shortage disputes, and it cannot be created after the fact.
Set a weekly review of open purchase orders against available stock, so that confirmation decisions are made against real inventory rather than optimism.
Reconcile remittances monthly and file disputes inside their window. An unappealed shortage claim is simply a donation.
That discipline is the underrated benefit of the vendor relationship. It is the same discipline a regional chain or a distributor expects, applied by a customer that grades you automatically. Brands that build it tend to find the next channel easier, which is the path described in from FBA to wholesale and Amazon seller channel expansion.
If you want to know which distributors and retailers would plausibly place orders like these for your product, paste the listing into WholesalePilot and the preview shows the ones that stock your category.
Questions vendors ask about purchase orders
Can I ask Amazon to change a ship window? Occasionally, through your vendor manager, and rarely at short notice. Plan around the window rather than negotiating it.
What happens if I reject every line for a season? The forecast adjusts downward and the purchase orders shrink. Rejection is not free even though it carries no direct fee.
Do I have to accept the destination fulfillment center? Yes. You can raise persistent routing inefficiency with your vendor manager, but the code on the order is the code you ship to.
Is there a minimum order value? Many categories apply one, which is why small purchase orders sometimes get consolidated or cancelled. Ask what yours is before modeling freight.
Should I take Direct Fulfillment orders too? They behave differently, arrive per customer order and have their own economics, set out in Amazon Direct Fulfillment.