Paul Sonneveld
I'm Paul Sonneveld, Co-Founder and CEO of MerchantSpring and host of this weekly podcast. Now, today's episode is a little different. We're not just talking about another round of AVN tactics or price negotiations. Instead, we're going to zoom out a little bit and look at the bigger picture. And that is how vendors can strategically plan, align stakeholders and build the right structures for 2026 success. 

I am absolutely delighted that I am joined by Ant Finch, founder of Vendor Rocket, who has worked with leading Amazon vendors on transforming their approach from reactive negotiation to proactive strategy. And what we're going to try and do today is together we'll unpack a leadership playbook for vendors who want to move beyond sort of short-term AVN tactics into really sustainable growth, especially with our eyes on 2026. 

And of course, as always, this is a live show, so please don't hold back. Share your questions with us in the YouTube or LinkedIn comments section, and Ant and I will do our best to answer them during the course of this live show. All right. Without further ado, Ant, so great to have you here. Welcome to the show.

Anthony Finch
Hello, Paul, and thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Paul Sonneveld
Now, as I mentioned in my introduction, we have done a lot around AVN negotiations, preparations, tactics, and they're all great topics. And certainly, if you're a vendor listening into this and you're about to start your rounds for 2026, there's some great resources to check those out. There can be a little bit of a danger, right, around vendors just getting so focused on sort of the negotiation round, you know, and sort of, you know, going to go down and then hopefully come up for oxygen a bit later. You know, let me just start off with, you know, why do you think so many vendors really default to focusing purely on AVN negotiations? You know, what risks does it create?

Anthony Finch
Yeah, so I think first and foremost, the AVN time of year is a really tough pressure point for many brands. There's an expectation from Amazon, there's an expectation internally, and most negotiations with Amazon are pretty tough. So it's first and foremost, it's a challenging situation. But the thing that vendors and brands need to remember is the AVN is a process. It happens every year. Amazon are reasonably consistent in what they ask for and how they ask for it. 

So that planning and preparation should really start almost the moment you've closed the first AVN, so that you can go, OK, what do we need? And what are Amazon likely to need? And I think a lot of that pressure does come from actually, Amazon tend to want more than what you're willing to give. And you can't quite work that out. So you know, it's always going to be a really tough situation. What I encourage brands and vendors to do is to think about what do you need from that negotiation. What's working for you? What's not working for you? And what do you need that set of terms to look like for you to hit your aspirations? 

Amazon are very clear about what you need to do for them. You need to be clear back with them as well and make sure you stand by that. The terms are important. That process is important because it will set the pace and the energy of that trading relationship, the business for the following year. So I think for me, it's always about planning for it. It's always going to feel a bit painful because of the nature of the negotiation. Um, but you can plan for that pain and have a route through of what good should look like for you and also for Amazon.

Paul Sonneveld
Absolutely. So, I've had a week off from podcasting, and I forgot to don't know what my headphones not working and everyone's feeling a bit feeling a bit rusty here. So yeah, you make some really great points there. And I think really, like, trying to go a bit wider than just to AVN, right, and their cost expression, and really around, we talk about AVN preparation, kind of with a short-term horizon. 

But here's, we're also talking really about, you know, just doing a check of your business, you know, doing an overall business health check, making sure, really understanding where you are as a vendor, and as a business overall, because Amazon might be just a single part of your business. But in terms of that broader piece of preparation, and specifically conducting a business health check, what are the sort of things that you find when you do those things with clients, particularly in margin leakage? What does it look like once you look at the business more realistically within the context of AVNs coming up?

Anthony Finch
Yeah, so I think when you come to auditing a business on auditing your Amazon business, it's important, first and foremost, to understand the role that you need Amazon to play for you and your brands, because Amazon will either be a significant chunk of your business, maybe all of it, or it will be a smaller proportion. And it's thinking about what good looks like for you on Amazon versus your overriding business performance and other distribution points in the market. So I think that's always the first question. I think it always helps when you go into an audit to have real clarity over the objectives, so whether that's revenue, margin, that could be conversion rate, traffic, whatever it is you're choosing to track that will give you an indication that your business is going in the right direction because they become your anchor points for your audit. 

In terms of, I would always encourage brands to focus on revenue and profitability and get down to that real net level of profitability once you've paid for all of the cost of overhead to staffing, warehousing, etc., to go, okay, is Amazon fundamentally making me money based on where I am from a revenue perspective? And then you work back from that point. The standard framework for any audit that I run will always go through a series of points that will be looking at the retail metrics. So conversion rate, glance views, ship costs, net PPM, all of those base-level retail metrics that you can follow. Then look at product, not every product, it'll probably be your top 10, 20 products and look at the retailer state, look at the conversion rate of that product, are you using A+, are you doing all of the imagery, videos, etc. 

Then it will go into operations and normally that's where you'll start to find a lot of the leakage. It could be chargebacks that are sneaking through. That's a really common one for vendors because it's very difficult for Amazon or to get that money back off Amazon. But I always maintain the basics of a relationship with Amazon or any customer is you agree a price. They order the product, you charge them that price, they pay for it on time, or you deliver it and then they pay for it. As long as those fundamentals are being delivered, you go, okay, well, that should be fine. 

But looking at how you service the account, look at the order days, looking at the charge back amount, looking at any of that product level detail, so quite often you'll go, well, hold on, my pack size hierarchy is not quite right, and therefore that's causing me problems. And that could be a really small tweak that gives you massive returns back in terms of your chargebacks. So getting into that granular level detail and identifying where that leakage is coming at product level is actually sometimes quite a fruitful exercise to go through. 

Ads is a big one. That's always the next step, is Ads doing what you need it to do. One of the things I look for is quite often you find that ads is a separate strategy to your overriding business on Amazon, whereas ads should contribute and complement your existing retail strategy. So, making sure you're looking at the right product, make sure you're spending on the right search terms or keywords, so that quite often overturns a bit of wasted spend there that you can go look, how can we better use that to boost the overall business or profitability. 

And then a big one is terms, the Amazon terms are really complex, we know they are there's lots of different buckets of money, Amazon sell you the vision of what you can get for that investment, you need to make sure that that's actually happening. So make sure you keep an eye on those. If it's not, that's part of your variable toolbox that you can take to the AVN the following year round. And also making sure that Amazon are claiming the correct amount when they invoice. So if you've got base terms of 10%, are they claiming the 10% and keep those accruals in place so that there's no surprises towards the back end of the year, basically. You'll generally you'll find a bit of money and margin improvements through all of those areas, whether it's through focusing on different products with a higher margin, or it's going how you service the account. There will be small tweaks for all of those, those marginal gains that help improve the bottom line. 

The big one that always works and will find improvements is take your top probably 10 to 20 products and do a product level P&L and get down to that net level and go, Are my lead products that drive the bulk of my sales, are they profitable? And if they're not, what can you do to change it? So it almost becomes a product level fix to improve that margin. That could be a redesign, it could be distribution challenges and changing the pricing structure. But that's a bit more the longer term burn to be able to do that. But if you can fix it at the root cause, then ultimately that's going to give a massive impact onto your bottom line.

Paul Sonneveld
I think that's a great way of laying out like all the different facets of performance. Right. And really, I think I mentioned it, kind of, you know, business health check to me, it's almost like a baseline where you are as a vendor, what's working well, what's not working well, and really have a good perspective on that. I'm just curious. I mean, you must get involved in doing these sort of audits, health checks with your clients. How, if they were to, do this themselves or someone like yourself in, I mean, just how much time should you set aside for this? Is this a kind of get it done in a week? You know, what is it? Obviously, you know, forget about the fancy presentation that you put at the end of it. In terms of elapsed time, I mean, because I know a lot of vendors are about to do AVN, right? Is there time left to just do this thoroughly right now?

Anthony Finch
Yeah, I think so. I mean, the frequency of doing this, I would say you probably want to be dipping in on this at least once a month to go, is everything doing what it can do. The big challenge for vendors is when you're hit with something that you didn't know. So Amazon have claimed some money, you didn't know they were going to claim a product being suppressed, or your Ad spend's gone a bit A1, or your credit card payment or deductible invoice on your ads are stopped, so you've stopped serving advertising for a couple of days. They're kind of painful things. So I would be going. An audit should be done at least once a month and it can be done as granular or as top-level as you need. 

I would say a really granular audit, you should be doing that probably once a quarter just to make sure that you're on schedule and you're keeping an eye on what's happening. It probably, if you sat down to pull all of that information together, because most brands will be sitting there and they will have a version of a P&L. They will know what they're spending. They will be able to look at their top 20 products. You should be able to pull that together in less than a week to go, look, a rough view of what the world looks like. And most brands now, if they're running their financial year from Jan through to December, they will now start their budgeting process for 2026 anyway. 

So they're going to have visibility of some of this data. And also it's it's good to go into the avn right now having that information because amazon will tell you that you're not profitable enough well what if amazon's not profitable enough for you? Amazon rely on your innovation, your Ad spend, your investment into promotions it you've got to be profitable, otherwise you can't give amazon what they want so it It's important, I would say, to do it, but it doesn't have to be low to detail. It can be very top level. Is Amazon doing what I need it to do for it to be successful? If it's not, you focus on those issue areas.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Just on that, actually, I've had some really interesting conversation with some of our vendor clients who are asking us, because we've got all the data, right? You know, to plot their ASINs, right, by their own profitability versus Amazon's net PPM and ideally have a view of, you know, what's growing, what's declining, get a bit of a portfolio view. Really insightful to understand, you know, hey, do you have any products where both you and Amazon are happy about the profitability, you know, and obviously that's an area where you can invest more and drive harder and vice versa. Are there areas where, you know, you can trade things off, right? very high profitability on Amazon, and you're just not making any money, maybe it's time to delist those and vice versa. Really interesting to do that.

Anthony Finch
Yeah, absolutely. More often than not, the top product for you on Amazon will probably be your worst margin one. So, you know, it's that one where most of the fallout with Amazon is probably going to occur. But you can think about how you create Amazon exclusive products that hits their margin and your margin aspiration. Absolutely, you can use the metrics to identify what products Amazon are likely to want to remove or suppress for certain periods of time because ultimately, I think if a vendor or brand can be a bit more in control of their fortunes on Amazon, that gives you the confidence to go and have those robust conversations with Amazon. I mean, it absolutely stands that the vendor has to make money as well as Amazon. 

Otherwise, it doesn't work. And Amazon, I mean, quite often, I mean, in the past, I have gone, actually, Amazon, I'm going to crap my own products. because you're not profitable for me. And it's like, well, hold on a second. You're turning the tables and using that same process. But ultimately, you can be in control of that. It might be painful, but in some occasions, it has been beneficial to suppress certain products, reassess it, and then relaunch it and make sure it's profitable on both sides.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, sure, sure. Can I ask one other aspect in terms of this diagnostic, right? Like we spoke about a lot of the metrics that vendors can sort of literally spool out of vendor central, right? With a little bit of kind of, you know, spreadsheet skills. But there's this broader question, which is how, I mean, I think very useful to understand the context of before you go and talk to Amazon, you know, how are we comparing to other vendors in the market? How do I benchmark my performance as a vendor against some of my industry peers? What frameworks or tools do you recommend in this area, or how would you approach that question?

Anthony Finch
Well, there's two approaches I take. The first one is Are you going to use your competitors' performance to gauge how successful you should or shouldn't be on Amazon? That's the first one. It's nice to know what everyone else is doing, but is it fundamentally going to change your approach? Maybe, maybe not. There are different tools out there from different providers that let you have a bit of a view on market share. I think you can identify who your top competitors are. You'll know who they are because you'll see them on Amazon, and you'll probably see them in the wider market. And then understand what they're doing and what they're not. Amazon can, of course, give you some insight into your competitor performance. I'm not sure how reliable that's always going to be, but they will give you a bit of insight occasionally. 

So I think it's, for me, I always go, well, it's fine what your competitors are doing or not doing, but it will come back to what do you want Amazon to do for you? And what role do you want Amazon to play for you? Because it kind of doesn't matter what anyone else is doing. And, you know, so I'm almost a firm believer of do what you need to do to make it work for you, not what works for everyone else. And it, it's a lot of really challenging yourselves internally, rather than going, Well yeah, but they're underperforming by 5% there, so I'm underperforming by 5% so it's okay, but I don't think you should settle for that. I mean, if your aspirations are to grow by 5 or 10% how do you make that happen? Is it possible? What do you need to do? What products do you launch? What Ad strategies do you use? What do you do with your content? What do your terms need to do to be able to accelerate that? So, I think, understanding the size of the prize or the market and what your competitors are doing is fine if you're not really focused on growing, I would say.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. So this actually, I mean, this is a really interesting point in terms of what's the vendor strategy, right? Because we talk a lot about Amazon's strategy, you know, one year they're about top-line growth. Then they're talking about margin expansion. Then it's about, I don't know, no getting better payment terms or cash flow. That's Amazon's strategy. Right, and I appreciate there's no, not one vendor, the same as another, but in terms of, in your discussions with, with vendors, maybe this year, maybe compared to previous year, what, what are you hearing in terms of vendor strategy in terms of, you know, let me give you some sort of, you know, markers in terms of, you know, how much is it about, hey, we want to, you know, Amazon is the growth channel for us. So it's all about growth versus, hey, we're too reliant on Amazon, we want to pull back in terms of we want to diversify versus, you know, it's about, we need to try and grow our margin, profitability is not where it needs to be. I mean, as you're talking to vendors, you know, I guess, you know, bringing a particularly European perspective there. But what are you hearing about their strategy for Amazon? And, you know, I appreciate that every vendor is different, but are there any themes you're picking up this year?

Anthony Finch
Margin for sure. Margin for sure is one that, you know, Amazon keep asking for more, and the expectation is they will want more. So, naturally focus for vendors moves to profitability at the ASIN level. So that, for me, kind of is, it runs across pretty much all vendors. The other one is how they diversify, the role of 3P versus 1P, what should they do, and how should they do that? Will it impact profitability in the right way? And so normally it's going to be those areas. A lot of it is, a lot of it, the strategy is about being more in control rather than being at the whim of what Amazon want and feeling like they're constantly pushed from pillar to post by Amazon with no real control over what they're doing and the future direction of their Amazon business. And logically, that then flows back to how you service the demand on Amazon and are you making money when you do so.

Paul Sonneveld
Very interesting. I thought there might be a shift there. It's going to be interesting because both Amazon and the vendors want more margin, right? Actually, it's not impossible, even though it sounds like it. But that's probably for another day.

Anthony Finch
Just on that, I mean, I've been negotiating and working with Amazon directly as a vendor since 2011. They've always been pretty consistent. They want more in terms of more margin, a higher net PPM. I mean, what we're now facing is brands in the past have probably been able to give that, but moving the margin from the vendor's pocket to Amazon's pocket is just now tougher because it's not sustainable. So the battleground for the AVN is it's much more focused, much more sharper, and margin is harder to come by, but by being in the detail, you can do that. But Amazon have always been very consistent, I would say. I've never known them not to go, it's okay, we're all right, we're making loads of money. They'll never tell you that.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, you've got to be more creative than just ask for margin back. 

Anthony Finch 
Yes. 

Paul Sonneveld
For sure. Hey, I want to talk a little bit about the internal alignment within Amazon vendors, right? So there's obviously the strategy as an Amazon vendor, the importance of Amazon to you as a business and what role Amazon plays. The AVN is obviously the commercial outcome of that for the next 12 months. But there's also the piece around, how do you set yourself up for success internally? Now, we could do a whole different kind of episode on this, but even how internal Amazon teams, I'm talking about the teams within the vendor organisation itself, how they set themselves up, it's certainly evolved. I was speaking to someone, actually, at Accelerate last week. It's no longer just It's the junior salesperson that's come in. They're not senior enough to manage the Tesco account or the Sainsbury account, so we'll put them on Amazon or emerging channels. That used to be the banner of all these things. We're well beyond that now. I'd love to just get your perspectives on what are you seeing these days in terms of internal structures, and maybe what have you seen are some really effective ways of structuring your internal Amazon teams?

Anthony Finch
Yeah, I mean, you're back to this debate of whether it's in-house, whether it's an agency, whether it's a mix of both. I think a lot of it depends on the complexity of your catalogue and the turnover that you're delivering. I think the most effective ways for me that I've seen is where you're balancing out your internal resource, focus probably on the commercial element, and then you're supported in the background by agencies that can support on sponsored ads, DSP, maybe a bit of content. That tends to work in terms of the day-to-day running of the account. And it becomes a bit more scalable without burdening the P&L too much with too many people. 

The flip side to that is how you create those cross-functional teams. Normally, my first start point with a business on alignment on Amazon is I will ask the stakeholders from each department, whether it's finance, supply chain, sales, marketing, whatever department it is, I'll ask them when they're all together to tell me what the top-level objective is for Amazon, for the business. And you'll get completely different answers. And that's because everyone's kind of rowing their own boat. Someone's got to figure out how quickly they get the stock to customers to Amazon. Sales have got to think about the revenue, marketing are thinking about the brand, which is absolutely right, but they need to think about in the context of the overriding business objectives. So the brands that I see or the vendors that I see that really set themselves apart are the ones who have got that alignment, whether you come in at the bottom, the side, the top, everyone's rowing their boat towards a consistent goal so that every action then feeds into it. 

So if you can, then have that internally, and then you bolt an agency on or you bring new people in, having that clarity of, where you're going or where you are, where you're going and how you're going to get there and what specific actions you're going to take is massively important. Just in terms of the who, and I've posted about it a few times on social media, on LinkedIn, the days of the one-man band on Amazon, they're a million miles away. You will not be able to scale with one person. It's too complex, you'll be skimming, you'll create issues. 

So I would always encourage brands to think about scale the team in line with scaling the business. And if you do put a junior in there, because I started on Amazon in 2011, I didn't have any experience on Amazon, I was experienced selling elsewhere. But in give them support, give them tools, give them the support that they can go and find a way to make that work. Because it's a tall order for anyone coming into the Amazon space if they're just on their own, trying to manage all of that. So yeah, we're definitely well past that one-man band approach, I would say.

Paul Sonneveld
And do you find that there is, in terms of the C-suite or, you know, the executive of these organizations that have pretty big remits, particularly, you know, multi-channel distribution or like, do you find there are still, you know, is there still kind of a a level of skepticism or a lack of buy-in in terms of what Amazon is, just seeing it as just another channel. How would you characterise that now? Is that mindset still there in some vendors? And if it is, how do you combat that? You might be a wonderful vendor manager, you've organised your cross-functional team, everyone's singing off the same hymn sheet, we're aligned, but the guy upstairs, the top floor, he's not bought in. He just thinks we should be dealing with Amazon in the same way we're dealing with, I don't know, Waitrose.

Anthony Finch
Yeah, look, I mean that that does still exist in pockets right but I think generally people now accept the certainly seniors accept that the Amazon is slightly different, it can feel annoying and it can be frustrating and also if Amazon is a significant percentage of your business, it can feel a bit risky, probably. So when I talk to people about communicating in total, there's a couple of things I've found that have really worked. The first one is people naturally, when you're running an Amazon business, you naturally tend to communicate what's working and not share what's not working. So you need to share everything in balance. So be consistent and unbiased in your communication of this is working, this isn't, this is what I'm sorting out, these are the key challenges and these are the risks. From my experience, those senior leaders tend to get frustrated when they don't really understand or they don't know if it's in control or being taken care of. So just make sure you oversteer on the communication. 

Another thing you could do is you can spend time educating, and what different acronyms mean on Amazon, how Amazon works. But ultimately, if you go up to that C-suite, they'll be looking at the broader world. And just thinking about how Amazon wants to operate, again, causes that frustration and that concern. So you need to read the room and think, OK, what's going to get the best engagement or understanding from the people I'm talking to? So quite often I would then go, well if you can't educate them on Amazon, actually you're going to have to convert the Amazon language into the internal language to help with the understanding. And that also works quite well to be able to bring people on board is rather than trying to get them to understand where you are, just do the conversion for them and help them understand in pure business terms. And sometimes that really helps. But a lot of that angst about Amazon and that frustration or that annoyance, it comes from lack of clarity and lack of communication. So where that's present, if you're feeling that in your business, oversteer on communication. And what you might not get any questions, you might not get any engagement. But what it's doing is showing that you're in control. And you're telling people what's happening. And that has always worked really well for me in the past.

Paul Sonneveld
That is a great tip. Absolutely. We've just gone past the half an hour mark. So we are out of time. I'm trying to be really conscious of people's time. So I was just going to maybe wrap up with a final question, which was, what are you talking to your clients about or are excited about when it comes to 2026 in the context of Amazon Vendor? Beyond, I guess, I just want to move people's perspective sort of beyond the AVN process, you know, it's going to finish, you know, and then we'll sort of get back to kind of running the business. Hopefully, sometime in Q1, I know for some of you, it won't be until well into Q2, but it will come to an end at some point. What are the things in 2026 that you that you're excited about or you want to put on people's radar to start thinking about in the context of Amazon and Amazon Vendor?

Anthony Finch
It's a good question. So I mean, I'll answer that in two ways. The first one is the new year. And once we get through the AVN, the new year is an opportunity to reset what good looks like on Amazon for you as a vendor. And that could be small improvements in your conversion rate, traffic, ship cog, whatever it is that you're using to gauge your performance or your profitability. But January is, once the ADA closes, a chance to reset and go, OK, we're now going to fine-tune. So I get particularly excited about this point in the year, because the actions and the planning you take now will have a massive impact on what 2026 looks like. 

So I think that's the first part. I think those end of the year, roll into the new year, is always that opportunity to reset. I think with promotional campaigns as well, I think they, whether or not you discount, whether or not you engage in them, I think there's always going to be an element of Amazon wanting to improve their deal ops and visibility of brands. I still think that's a good opportunity for vendors to really make a strong case for visibility and enhanced sales, glance views, conversion rate during some of those peak trading periods of promotions. 

I'm not talking just prime day or what we've got, we've got end of summer sale, back to school. It's those key strategic campaigns that you should start planning now, and probably push into your AVN. So if you're a back-to-school brand, for example, let's say you're in office products, make sure that you've got visibility of your deals through the AVN so that you max that visibility when it comes to that moment of truth when your consumers are on site. The same with Q4. If Q4 is where all your sales are, what are you going to do to make sure that you maximise that opportunity? And I think a lot of brands are, they work from month to month, and then they're then going, right, it's here now, I better do it because Amazon has sent me an email. 

Start that planning now, the quicker you plan, we go, what products, what discount, what do I expect from a revenue perspective? What do I expect for a margin perspective? That, then, for me is actually quite exciting because you're taking control of the situation, not necessarily letting Amazon drive the momentum of your account. And that's the thing that all the brands I work with is, take control. Don't be a passenger in your Amazon journey. Make it do what you want it to do. And if it's not doing what you want it to do, well, maybe it can't, or maybe you need to slightly change your strategy. So, outside of all the normal stuff of AI and all of those different things that are exciting, for me, it's that planning and that structure and that vision of what you're going to get out of Amazon that I personally get quite excited about. And I think vendors should get excited about that as well.

Paul Sonneveld
I'm getting excited just listening to you. The excitement is just, your energy is transferring all the way down to Australia. It's amazing, really, the rich. 

Anthony Finch
Yeah, very good. 

Paul Sonneveld
That is great. Well, we are out of time. So I just want to thank you sincerely for coming on today's show and sharing your knowledge, showing some great examples, sharing some insights and getting us to look a little bit broader than the AVN process we have been focusing on recently. So really, really appreciate that. For those part of the audience that are tuning in live now or maybe watching this on demand later, if they want to get in touch with you, maybe to have some further conversations around these sorts of topics, what's the best way to get a hold of you?

Anthony Finch
You can go to my website, which is vendorrocket.co.uk, and reach out to me there. So I'll answer those very quickly, or just drop me a message on LinkedIn. I quite often post on LinkedIn about various bits and pieces around Amazon and structure and strategy. So yeah, follow me there and drop me a message there.

Paul Sonneveld
Fantastic. All right. Thank you so much, Ant. 

Anthony Finch
Thanks for having me. 

Paul Sonneveld
Take care. All right, everyone, that is it for today's episode. I did see that there's a couple of people that dropped us a couple of questions on YouTube specifically, actually. So we'll try and get to those and answer those straight after the show. I apologise, we didn't have time to get to those today. But yeah, thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of Marketplace Masters. 

If you're looking for additional vendor resources and content, please go and check out merchantspring.io. Go navigate to our resources section, and you will find a wealth of articles, blogs, on-demand videos, ALL FREE for you to use so that you can lift your Amazon vendor skills and improve your commercial outcomes. Thank you so much for tuning in today, and we'll see you again on the next episode of Marketplace Masters. Take care, everyone.