Amazon Vendor vs Amazon Seller: A Performance Comparison

There has always been an ambiguity in the minds of Amazon merchants that whether they should opt for a vendor account or a seller account to sell their products through Amazon for best performance. Although, both have its own pros and cons, we at m19, conducted a real-time performance comparison between the two types of accounts to answer the confusion.

To omit the comparison errors to the maximum, we took the following measures:

1. We selected one of our clients, having both vendor and seller accounts.
2. Then we observed 3 similar best selling ASINs for both of the accounts.
3. The considered campaigns were only ‘Sponsored products’ with similar Amazon PPC strategy.
4. We took a period of one month (27th April ‘22 - 27th May ‘22) as the comparison timeline and France as the main location.
5. Then we considered 4 comparison parameters; No. of clicks, Average impressions per click, Cost per click, and Weekly conversion rate.

(PS: To be noted that both the accounts were advertising the 3 selected ASINs at best)

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Observations and Comments

No. of clicks generated on Amazon

Total no of clicks for Vendor account for the month = 3619

Total no of clicks for Seller account for the month = 1274

The no of generated clicks were uniformly higher for the Amazon vendor account in comparison to the Amazon seller account for each date of the concerned month. It may (or may not) happen because of the higher impressions of the Amazon ads for vendor account. Another reason for the same can be that vendor account won the Amazon buy box more frequently than the seller account. And since we are only considering the Sponsored Product campaigns, it is necessary to win Buy Box in order to get Amazon sponsored ads service.

To sort out the above confusion, we calculated the average no of impressions for each click for both the accounts. The graph we plotted for the same is provided below.

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Average impressions per click

Average impressions per click for Amazon Vendor account for the month = 57.08

Average impressions per click for Amazon Seller account for the month = 82.14

Now, looking at the average number of impressions per click, we can say that the customers tend to click on the vendor’s ad impressions more frequently than on the seller’s ad impressions, since the average impressions per click is lower for the vendor account by a good margin. Although, occasionally the seller account also performed exceptionally good, but broadly speaking, the vendor account leads here too.

Also, one thing to jot down here is that the number of impressions per click is sort of uniform for the vendor account which implies a stable performance throughout the month.

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Cost per click (CPC)

Average cost per click for Vendor account for the month = 0.38 Euro

Average cost per click for Seller account for the month = 0.33 Euro

One of the hard-managed task is to maintain the desired cost-per-click for an account. In the provided graph, it can be easily observed that the CPC is very stable when it comes to the vendor account in comparison to the seller.

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Weekly conversion rate (WCR)

Conversion rate for Vendor account for the month = 0.0

Conversion rate for Seller account for the month = 0.05

Now, the last parameter, the weekly conversion rate, it is non uniform for both type of accounts, but overall it also shows the vendor account to be in the lead with the monthly conversion rate being 0.8 and the same for seller account being 0.05.

One of the expected reasons for this gap between the vendor and seller account conversion rates can be devoted to the brand trust Amazon has earned overtime. Customer prefer to buy from the Amazon (Vendor’s products are sold as the Amazon’s own products) even when the seller is selling the same product.

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Conclusion

Now to conclude the analysis, we found the vendor account is performing better than the respective seller account. But to keep in mind, these parameter depends in a lot of other arguments like the bids, the ACOS one aims for, the product page design, the rating and reviews etc. Therefore, the result can defer for different scenarios.