Most writing about Amazon Vendor Central EDI stops at what the documents are. This post is about running it: what the two Vendor Central connections look like once they live inside your ERP, how a Wholesale order moves through it document by document, and how to trace a rejection when Amazon sends one back.
It is based on the Vendor Central connections we run for a US consumer electronics brand. If you are still deciding which Amazon program you need, start with Amazon EDI integration instead.
Two connections on one Vendor Central account
Vendor Central is where Amazon buys from you as a supplier. On that one account, Amazon EDI runs as two separate connections.
Wholesale. Amazon buys your stock and you ship it to Amazon fulfillment centers. The connection we run exchanges the 850, 855, 856, 810, 846, 997, 824 and 812, plus the 753 and 754 routing request and routing instructions.
Direct Fulfillment. Amazon takes the customer’s order and passes it to you as a dropship order, and you ship it to the customer’s door. It is its own connection, with its own transactions and its own rules.
Because they are separate, they get separate mappings. A rule change in one should never put the other at risk. The service side of each is covered in Amazon Vendor Central Wholesale EDI and Amazon Direct Fulfillment EDI.
Seller Central is not part of this. It is a different Amazon account, where you sell on Amazon yourself, and it integrates through SP-API rather than EDI. If that is your side of Amazon, see Amazon SP-API integration.
How the files move
Every X12 file in both connections is read and generated inside the ERP using the EdiFabric .NET library. The mapping lives in the ERP’s own C# code, next to the order, stock and shipment records it describes.
Amazon Vendor Central connects directly over SFTP, with no network or third party in between. Scheduled EDI jobs poll on schedules as short as every ten minutes, and every job’s run status and exceptions show on a monitoring dashboard.
The wider case for building EDI this way, for Amazon and for retailers that require a network, is in EDI inside your ERP.
A Wholesale order inside the ERP, document by document
850 purchase order. Amazon orders stock. The ERP parses the 850 into a real order, with Amazon’s item numbers mapped to your own.
855 acknowledgment. Someone has to decide whether you can fill it. In the ERP we built, Vendor Central purchase orders are accepted or rejected back to Amazon from the same screen that shows system, 3PL and allocated stock. The decision is made against real stock, not a separate spreadsheet.
753 and 754 routing. On a collect shipment, Amazon arranges the freight. You send a 753 routing request describing what is ready to ship, and Amazon replies with a 754 routing instructions naming the carrier and pickup. Only then does the shipment move. The documents themselves are explained in EDI 753 and 754 routing.
856 advance ship notice. Sent when the goods ship. It has to describe what physically left the warehouse.
810 invoice. Bills Amazon for what shipped.
Alongside the cycle. The 846 reports inventory to Amazon. The 997 confirms that a file was received and could be read. The 824 is Amazon telling you a document was rejected at the application level, and why. The 812 adjusts a billing amount after the fact.
Direct Fulfillment: its own connection, and a fallback
Direct Fulfillment orders arrive one customer order at a time, and each one ships to an individual address rather than to an Amazon warehouse. That is why it runs as its own connection rather than as a variation of Wholesale.
It also needs a way to keep shipping when something goes wrong. If Direct Fulfillment orders have a problem on the EDI side, there is a fallback: the orders can be downloaded from Vendor Central as a CSV and imported into the ERP, so customer orders keep moving while the EDI issue is fixed.
When a document is rejected: a short troubleshooting map
Most rejections are a disagreement between two records, not a broken file. Start from the document that failed:
- Routing request rejected. On the Amazon connection, the delivery appointment slot on a routing request did not match what was actually scheduled, and Amazon rejected it. Compare the slot on the transaction with the scheduled appointment, correct it, and resend.
- No 997 at all. Usually connection or file naming rather than data. Check the stored outbound file and where it was sent.
The same diagnose-and-correct pattern applies to the other retailer connections on the same ERP. On one of them, a ship notice was rejected because the order called for one carrier and the warehouse shipped with another, and an invoice was rejected because a warehouse substitution never reached the order record. In both cases the fix started by putting the document next to the order and the shipment.
More on diagnosing ship notice rejections is in why an 856 ASN gets rejected.
What makes rejections quick to trace
Two things do most of the work.
The first is keeping the raw inbound and outbound files next to the parsed result. A rejection can then be traced to the exact segment that caused it, by comparing what was actually sent with the order and shipment records behind it. Nobody has to reconstruct what the file probably said.
The second is the monitoring dashboard. When every job’s run status and exceptions are visible, a rejected document is something you diagnose from your own data, rather than something you hear about from Amazon later. The system behind these connections is described in our multi-marketplace ERP case study.
Where to start
Begin with the program Amazon has enrolled you in, Wholesale, Direct Fulfillment or both, and the current specification for your account. Then decide where the documents will be built. If the answer is your own ERP, the work is the mapping, the monitoring and the raw-file logging that makes rejections traceable.
We build this as part of our EDI integration services. Which Amazon transaction is giving you trouble? Tell us the document and the rejection message, and we will tell you the likely cause.
Common questions
Is Seller Central the same as Vendor Central EDI?
No. Seller Central is a different Amazon account and integrates through SP-API, not EDI. Vendor Central, where Amazon buys from you, is the EDI side. They are separate integrations.
Are Wholesale and Direct Fulfillment one connection?
No. They can run on the same Vendor Central account, but each is its own EDI connection with its own transactions and rules, so each gets its own mapping.
What does it mean when no 997 comes back?
Usually a connection or file-naming problem rather than a problem with the data. With the raw outbound file stored, checking what was sent and where is a quick lookup.
Do we need a third-party provider to connect to Vendor Central?
Not necessarily. Vendor Central can connect directly to your system over SFTP, with every file read and generated inside your ERP.