Seller, Vendor or Amazon Retail — pick the model before you build the listing.

Walk down a busy aisle of Amazon and every single product you see is sold by one of three operators. Most shoppers never notice the difference. For anyone building a listing, it is the most consequential decision you can make.

The three models in plain English

• Seller (3P / "Sold by <your brand>"). You — or your distributor — list the product in Seller Central, set the price, ship via FBA or your own warehouse, and Amazon takes a referral fee on every sale. You own the listing and the customer-of-record from a marketplace perspective.
• Vendor (1P / "Ships from and sold by Amazon"). You sell the product wholesale to Amazon via Vendor Central. Amazon places purchase orders, takes ownership of the stock, sets the retail price, and resells to shoppers. The detail page says "Sold by Amazon".
• Amazon Retail (Amazon's own private labels). Amazon manufactures or sources its own brands (Amazon Basics, Solimo, Pinzon, etc.) and sells them like any other Vendor product, only without an external supplier.

Most brands will only ever operate as a Seller or a Vendor. Some operate as both — Vendor for their bestsellers, Seller for the long tail. The third row is here for completeness; it almost never applies to a brand reading this course.

What changes between Seller and Vendor

The Vendor model trades margin and price control for operational simplicity and a "Sold by Amazon" badge that modestly lifts conversion. The Seller model gives you full commercial control but forces you to do the operations work. Neither model is universally better.

Why this decision sits in Module 1

Three of the four most common questions we field about listings collapse into "which model are you operating under?":

• "Why did Amazon change my price?" — You're a Vendor; Amazon owns the retail price.
• "Why did my title revert?" — You're a Seller without Brand Registry, and another contributor overwrote it.
• "Why can't I see my unit margin in Seller Central?" — You're a Vendor; that data lives in Vendor Central's CoGS view, not Seller Central.

From Module 3 onwards, every workflow we teach will be labelled "Seller" or "Vendor" or "both" so you know which screen you're meant to be looking at. The course works for both — it just helps to have the model named.

Brand Registry — the third axis

Independent of Seller vs Vendor, Brand Registry is the layer that grants a brand authoritative control over its own listings. Once a brand is registered, Amazon's tooling treats your edits as the source of truth and blocks most third-party "improvements" from overwriting them.

For the purposes of this course we will assume Brand Registry whenever we talk about content control. If you don't yet have it, fix that before working through Module 4 — without it, every listing edit you make in Seller Central is at risk of being silently overwritten.

What to take into Episode 04

Hold three things in your head:

1. Which model your brand operates under today (and which model each ASIN belongs to, if you operate hybrid).
2. Whether you are Brand Registered.
3. That the next episode — the Buy Box — only fully makes sense once you know who is allowed to compete for a given ASIN under your model.