Managing Ecommerce Vendors

If you can’t prove your supplier can be verified, whether by contacting them by phone or finding their website, you’re at high risk of having their invoices rejected by Amazon. This, in turn, could quickly lead to account deactivation. This trend has been building since earlier this year and peaked over the summer. Amazon wants to avoid issues with counterfeit, mislabeled, or improperly packaged products entering the U.S. market. They’re also not interested in letting resellers determine which suppliers are “reliable” for sourcing legitimate items. To minimize counterfeit and IP complaints, Amazon is pushing resellers to source directly from brands (with their own LOA) or from authorized distributors who can provide their own LOA for resale. In some cases, you may also need to provide your "supplier's supplier" invoices to trace the supply chain back to the brand itself. In Amazon’s ideal future for the 3P marketplace, most resold items will come directly from brands or authorized distributors, avoiding the risk of inventory changing hands multiple times through “middlemen.” They want fewer resellers sourcing from general wholesalers or suppliers without direct brand or manufacturer relationships. Long term, it appears Amazon is moving toward cutting ties with sellers lacking LOAs for the brands they sell. This approach may reduce counterfeit claims, IP complaints, negative reviews, and the perception that Amazon can’t regulate its own marketplace. However, it may also lead to the suspension or permanent closure of sellers without a solid history of compliance. Take this trend seriously: Avoid suppliers without an established online presence, and don’t buy from sources lacking a direct link to the brand or an authorized distributor. Anything less is now extremely high risk. Amazon is clearly doubling down on requiring “verifiable suppliers” and top-notch invoices to keep their marketplace clean.

Not all labs are meeting Amazon’s standards, and starting July 13, that will matter more than ever.   Not all compliance documents are created equal and it is easy to assume that if a lab can give you a certificate, you’re good to go.   However, Amazon is changing how it validates risk by tightening control over where your compliance documentation originates. If your lab is on the suspended list, even if your product is safe, your document will be rejected.   Starting July 13: • Amazon will only accept product test results from labs that meet internal safety and authenticity standards. • Documents issued by labs flagged as non-compliant will be automatically rejected. • Sellers who previously used banned labs may be required to resubmit documentation to avoid listing removal. • The list of suspended labs will continue to evolve, it's your responsibility to monitor it.   Two suspended labs already include: • Bay Area Compliance Laboratories Corp. (Dongguan) • Shenzhen LCS Compliance Testing Laboratory Ltd.   Amazon is no longer treating compliance as a check-the-box exercise. They’re treating it as a trust signal, a way to score your product, your supplier, and your risk to the platform.   So it's time to think of it from the safety and defensibility side, because the wrong lab doesn’t just slow your listing approval, it signals to Amazon that your documentation chain is weak, and we all know how bad it can turn.   So what should sellers and agencies do? • Review your past compliance submissions. If they came from now-suspended labs, be proactive. • Bookmark and regularly check Amazon’s approved lab directory: https://lnkd.in/gU2pAgeG • When sourcing new documents, confirm the lab meets Amazon's current requirements before you pay.   The cost of using the “easy” lab isn’t worth the operational risk, if your backend can’t stand up to audit, your brand won’t scale.   #AmazonCompliance #MarketplaceOps #AmazonSellers

Prime Day's best-looking day is a lie, and it's about to cost brands real money. We pulled our Prime Day 2025 data across accounts. Day 1 had the highest revenue and the highest traffic. Sessions then declined every single day after. But Day 4 came in with the second-highest revenue of the entire event. Low traffic. High revenue. On paper it looks like a wave of free organic sales rolling in at the finish line. It isn't. Amazon credits a sale to the day of the ad click, not the day of the purchase. Someone clicks your ad on Day 1, takes a few days to decide, and buys on Day 4. That sale gets attributed back to the Day 1 click. So most of your "Day 4 organic revenue" is just Day 1 ad spend converting late. Read it wrong and you dump budget into Day 4 chasing demand that already happened, paying a second time for clicks you already bought. 2 days before prime day - Raise budgets to catch early browsers filling their carts. Day 1 - 2.5x your normal budget. This is where the demand actually lives. Day 2 - 2x. Day 3 - 1.6 to 1.7x. Day 4 - Your lowest spend of the event, not your highest. The week after - Drop to ~80% of normal for about 7 days. Conversion rate craters post-event, and your bid tools will overcorrect if you let them. One more: raise budgets, not bids. Competition pushes your CPCs up on its own during the event, and the higher conversion rate pays for it. Manually jacking up bids on top of that just overpays for the same clicks. The brands that win Prime Day aren't the ones that spend the most. They're the ones that spend on the right day. Mansour Norouzi and I discuss prime day readiness, link in the first comment.

AI adoption is failing at most companies. (it's not the technology) You use ChatGPT daily. Your team has random AI tools. No unified strategy. No measurement. Your VP keeps asking: "What's our AI plan?" You need frameworks, not more tools. 9 AI Adoption Frameworks: 1/ Workflow Audit Before Tool Selection → Map your team's top 10 daily tasks first → Flag repetitive work worth automating → Identify judgment calls for AI augmentation 2/ Build vs Buy Decision Matrix → Buy for standard ops (scheduling, emails) → Build only for competitive differentiation → Partner for specialized expertise gaps 3/ Pilot Program That Actually Scales → One department, one use case, 90 days → Define success metrics before you start → Document every lesson for VP presentation 4/ Executive-Ready Training Strategy → VP briefing: ROI projections and risks → Manager training: implementation roadmaps → User training: hands-on, role-specific 5/ ROI Measurement That VPs Care About → Track hours saved per employee per week → Measure quality improvements and accuracy → Calculate revenue impact, not just savings 6/ Data Governance Framework → Audit what data touches AI tools now → Create approval process for new platforms → Set data retention rules before scaling 7/ Change Management for AI Rollouts → Address "will AI replace me?" fears early → Show augmentation wins before automation → Create AI champion roles for career growth 8/ Smart Automation vs Augmentation Rules → Automate: data entry, report generation → Augment: strategy, creative work, decisions → Never automate: customer relationship calls 9/ VP-Level Adoption Mistakes to Avoid → Don't chase every shiny new AI tool → Never skip the governance foundation step → Stop letting AI adoption happen randomly AI adoption isn't a technology problem. It's a leadership strategy problem. Twice a week I send frameworks like this to 15,000+ operators in Tactical Memo. Join free: https://lnkd.in/eFNHsxmh

GRC vendors are playing the wrong game. The losing strategy: Be everything for everyone. Compete on dashboards, workflows, integrations, AI features. Result: Feature parity race. Acquisition or death. The winning strategy: Be a lego-block. Own ONE vertical so completely that you're embedded in 80% of companies without competing directly. Examples? Assurance-driven TPRM - Telemetry nobody else captures, insights nobody else offers, integrate to procurement for tracking Workflow orchestration - Focus on getting work done, not reporting work done Data transformation - AI-ready GRC data at scale (framework become only translation layers) Agnostic trust networks - Verification infrastructure making third-party attestations obsolete The protection: Companies use you PLUS whatever else. You're infrastructure, not application. They can vibe-code dashboards. They can't vibe-code your proprietary telemetry or deep vertical capability. Like Stripe for payments. Everyone uses it. Nobody competes with it. Too embedded to replace. If your main USP is "GRC automation platform with AI," you don't have a USP. Own a vertical. Become infrastructure. Be a lego-block. Which vertical is most defensible? #GRCEngineering #VendorStrategy

The Untapped Risk in Marketplace-First Brands... Marketplace Dependency Risk — and it quietly compounds as you scale. Here’s the math: 1️⃣ Topline Fragility  If 70–80% of your revenue comes from Amazon, Flipkart, or Myntra... One algorithm tweak, penalty, or policy shift — and your revenue can drop by 30–40% overnight. 2️⃣ Pricing and Margin Squeeze  Marketplaces push for discount parity.  They want the lowest prices and commissions.  You can’t easily raise prices, but your costs (logistics, returns, ads) keep rising quietly. Margin compression isn't a phase. It's structural. 3️⃣ No Consumer Ownership  Even after selling 10,000+ units, you don’t own the customer data.  You can’t remarket. You can’t build loyalty.  You are permanently renting traffic—on someone else’s terms. 4️⃣ Working Capital Traps  Longer payment cycles + return risks = working capital nightmares.  Every rupee stuck in the system delays scale. 5️⃣ Exit Valuation Hit  Brands with over 60% marketplace dependence often get lower valuations.  Investors penalize the "platform risk" by adjusting down the revenue multiple. This is the advice I've seen the smart founders share: - Balance marketplace sales with your own website D2C channel. - Invest in brand-building early—even when marketplace sales look tempting. - Build retention engines (email, WhatsApp) off-platform. - Negotiate smarter platform deals once you have leverage. 📌 What's one thing a founder should do to de-risk their channel dependence? Picture - Inc42 FAB MAVEN

Prime Day is 20 days away. Most CPG brands are running the 2024 playbook: submit deals, boost ad spend, wait for the traffic surge. That playbook just expired. Prime Day 2026 (June 23-26) is the first major retail event where AI agents are the primary discovery layer, not a side feature. Here's what changed: Rufus now influences 25-35% of all Amazon searches. It drove $12 billion in incremental sales last year and compresses product discovery from ~50 results to 5. On March 25, Amazon made Rufus ad placements billable. Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands now cost real money inside the AI assistant. CPCs are up 18-32% YoY. CPMs have surged 47%. Translation: you're paying more to be visible to fewer people in a narrower recommendation window. And it's not just Amazon. Target is running Circle Deal Days on the exact same dates. Walmart is running a competing event. 20% of shoppers plan to use Alexa for Shopping during Prime Day. 38% plan to use ChatGPT. 33% plan to use Google Gemini. Four AI agents. Three retailers. One week. Your product data has to work for all of them simultaneously. Last year, Prime Day generated $24.1 billion in sales. CPG accounted for ~$6.75 billion of that. 84% of baskets were under $100. This is an essentials event now, not an electronics event. Three things that matter more than deal depth this Prime Day: 1. Rufus readability. If your product attributes are incomplete, Rufus won't recommend you. It doesn't rank you lower. It skips you. Most CPG brands audited have 30-40% attribute fill rates. Rufus needs 90%+. 2. Cross-retailer content parity. The same shopper is comparing deals on Amazon, Target, and Walmart simultaneously. If your content is optimized for one and broken on the others, you lose the comparison before price enters the equation. 3. Hour by hour execution, not daily look backs. Ecommerce is a game of inches, not yards. Prime Day is won with real time actions: adjusting bids, swapping content, fixing inventory gaps hour by hour while your competitors review yesterday's reports. The brands looking at Day 1 dashboards on Day 2 morning have already lost. Here's what to do this week: Open your Amazon Listing Quality Dashboard (Seller Central: Inventory > Improve Listing Quality, or Vendor Central: Catalog > Listing Quality). It shows every missing attribute on every ASIN, sorted by your highest-traffic products. If your top 100 SKUs aren't at 90%+ attribute completion, fix that before you finalize a single deal. If you're a CommerceIQ customer, ask your account lead to set up a Prime Day readiness session. Get your Rufus Scorecard and Hourly Performance Dashboard. Twenty days is enough time to close the gap. Ten days is not. How does your Listing Quality Dashboard look right now? #PrimeDay2026 #RetailMedia #CPG #AICommerce #Ecommerce #DigitalShelf

Most vendor failures don’t happen at onboarding. They happen in the quiet months when no one is looking. A supplier who passed every check in January could be insolvent by March. A “secure” IT partner today could suffer a breach tomorrow. And if your process only checks once a year, you will not know until it is too late. That is why continuous compliance is becoming the new standard. It means tracking a vendor’s financial, cyber, and reputational health in real time — all year, every year. Here is a 5 step framework you can apply now: 1️⃣ Define your critical vendor health indicators → financial stability, cyber posture, compliance status 2️⃣ Embed these checks into onboarding workflows 3️⃣ Automate ongoing screening for: → OFAC lists and regulatory watchlists → Company registry changes → Adverse media alerts 4️⃣ Monitor spend for unusual patterns or spikes 5️⃣ Review performance and risk status quarterly with stakeholders I have built this two pager so you can drop this straight into your own process or improve your current processes. Save this post and comment COMPLY if you want it.

In 2022, Toyota had to shut down its entire manufacturing operations because of a cyberattack. It was a nightmare that resulted in $375 million loss. But here's an interesting catch – it wasn't an attack on Toyota!   Instead, it was against one of their plastic suppliers' company, Kojima. Because Kojima had third-party access to Toyota manufacturing plants, shutting down was necessary to protect their data. So, a cyber incident with one of its suppliers brought the giant car company to its heels.   Attackers are masters of finding creative ways. By compromising your vendors/suppliers, they can effectively compromise your organization, infiltrating it from within.   So how do attackers exploit vendors to compromise your company?   𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝟰 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗼𝗻 𝘃𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗼𝗿 𝘀𝗰𝗲𝗻𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗿𝘆:   1) Attacker compromises your vendor staff identities > Uses them directly to access your data.   2) Attacker compromises a vendor device connected to your network > Gain an initial foothold inside your company.   3) Attacker finds a vulnerability in a 3rd party or vendor software > Compromises all systems in your corporate network running that software.   4) Attacker compromises a vendor SaaS app > Steals your company's data from 3rd party servers.   𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘀𝘁𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺?   - Firstly, identify how do your vendors authenticate to your systems? Use a centralized identity system that handles the full life cycle of provisioning, tracking and de-provisioning. These accounts can typically live under your primary tenant and should be monitored just like your full-time employee accounts. Apply MFA & RBAC.   - Ensure that every vendor laptops/devices that are connecting to your network meet your company's device compliance standards. Treat vendor employee devices with the same level of security controls as your own company devices. These devices should have the same AV, EDR and other software that you mandate on your company devices.     - Maintain a detailed inventory of vendor apps running in your network along with their versions, systems where they are deployed etc. Having this information enables you to respond swiftly to zero-day vulnerabilities in those 3rd party apps.   - In the event of a security incident, establish right capabilities for your SOC teams to initiate containment actions. Ex: ability to disconnect a vendor's device from your network, reset a vendor account in your tenant, or block a vendor application.   - Conduct a thorough vendor security assessment in scenarios where you need to store sensitive data in vendor's servers. Evaluate their cybersecurity practices, protocols, and incident response capabilities. If you enjoyed this or learned something, follow me at Rohit Tamma for more in future! #vendormanagement #supplychainsecurity #cybersecurity #incidentresponse #identity #applicationsecurity #cyberattack