Podcast transcript
Introduction
Hi, and welcome to a live episode of Marketplace Masters, sponsored by MerchantSpring, your go-to marketplace analytics. We dive deep into the world of e-commerce, addressing challenges and opportunities that Amazon vendors face, improving their commercial performance.
Paul Sonneveld
I am Paul Sonneveld, and today we're exploring the world of contracts and negotiation on Amazon, specifically as an Amazon vendor. Now, allow me to introduce to you Alan Adams, the visionary behind Navazon Consulting. In 2010, Alan founded Navazon Consulting to assist companies in navigating the Amazon marketplace successfully. With a career spending roles as diverse as and pay attention here, an Air Force pilot, entrepreneur, BP Oil Spill Cleanup Manager, Google Operations Manager and Amazon Program Manager.
Now, as an Amazon Senior Category Manager, Alan managed multiple product categories, led negotiations with over 3, 000 companies, and handled more than 10, 000 contracts. Today, Alan is here to really shed light on that number one cost-saving business on Amazon as a first-party seller. Alan, thank you so much for being a guest on our show today.
Alan Adams
Absolutely, Paul. I love being here. It's fantastic to be able to connect with you. You're all the way there halfway around the world. If not more, I appreciate you making time to do it and getting this together. This is a big, big change for me from my Air Force days. So my Halloween costume and cheers to everybody from Halloween and on to Christmas. I can be Santa.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, that's it. Well, certainly, your background is super impressive. I think we could fill a whole podcast episode with the learnings you took away from being a pilot versus a BP Oil Spill Cleanup Manager some very diverse, but we'll have to we'll have to leave that for when I see you next in Seattle, we'll do that over a drink perhaps.
Alan Adams
We'll definitely bring some of that to bear today because we want to take the essence of contracts and negotiations and give that to everybody today so they can make the best use of it.
Alan and Paul:
Absolutely.
Paul Sonneveld
Nah, it's fantastic. I know we've got a jampacked show. Just a word of warning to the audience, we're going to try and do this in 30 minutes, but we're probably going to need a little bit more. Don't worry. This will be fully recorded and you can watch the end on demand afterwards as well. But of course, it's interactive too. So as per usual, please put your questions in the LinkedIn comment section and we will do our absolute best. And that's the only thing I can promise to get to them as well.
So let's get into the topic of contracts and negotiations. And the first question, Alan, I want to just want to ask you, you're in this world, day in, day out helping clients. I mean, talk to me, what are the most commonly asked topics and questions when it comes to kind of terms, conditions and the like that you come across?
Alan Adams
Excellent question. Yeah. Then this show is fantastic for everybody from the newbie, somebody who's first time on the Amazon business to somebody that I've got friends that have been 20 years and have joined the show because we share these types of ideas. The common question just in general terms and conditions is, Do I own my content? When I put it on Amazon, do I own that? Can I tell them to take it off? Very simple question. And it's the number one thing that typically gets asked in somebody that's most concerned about brand excellence.
The general terms and conditions specifically state that Amazon has a perpetual license to that content once it's listed on Amazon and going forward.
Something for that, that's a recent development that can impact everybody and does is that the contracts that we'll get a step into them a little bit later, but the contracts, if you have a dispute, you need to dispute as early as 30 to 90 days. And we'll touch on some of those very specifically later so that everybody can see literally where it is.
And these are things that can bite companies because you'll get down the road and go, wait a minute, Amazon charged me 45, 000 for this. What was that? And we literally have an example of that in the show today that just happened within the last two months. We want to help everybody on the show today, avoid those types of situations.
Paul Sonneveld
Fantastic. That's great. Well, you do have a number of it's a very meaty topic today. So I'm going to bring up a bit of a slide presentation as well that will just help us navigate through some of that. Here we go. And yeah, I think you're driving here, Alan.
So let me know where you want to start, but yeah, it'd be good to dive into it.
Alan Adams
Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks for putting this together. We want to help people. One of the ways to do that is some of these things are the most recent developments, literally on the Amazon 1P side, the first-party sales. There's tens of millions of dollars of profit of vendors that are unnecessarily lost every year, and it's throughout each one of these categories specifically against across contracts.
So we'll start off with general terms and conditions, as we've already mentioned and work through each 1 on this list, typically in the slides going forward at the bottom is a takeaway. I know some people may want to review this later and have very specific examples and meaty information in the slide itself. And then at the bottom, the 07 takeaway so that they can remember and go back to that slide. So try to do that on this slide takeaway here is now to unlock the savings for you in each one of these categories and to get into how we do that.
The first you mentioned Paul we've already touched base on a little bit was terms and conditions and something that even somebody that hasn't been in Vendor Central for a while might ask the question. Well, what are you talking about? A lot of vendors don't even realize that they may come in and you've been on the account for three years and then you move to a different company, and somebody's already set up the Amazon account. So, you know, you don't know what general terms and conditions are or even where they are.
In Amazon's Vendor Central, this is the bullet there helps share where that's located. You go through VC, Vendor Central settings, the agreements page. And Amazon's now changed and this is on Vendor Central US. If international folks have a question around it, because the Amazon interface can be slightly different across. I'm more than happy to answer that and look at it.
There is something in the middle of the page. Now, generally, that says, click accept. You have to click on accepted or rejected because that's the type of contract that's there and only when you do that, will you get so I put it in the red box there called out the accepted and rejected you want to click on that and then you have to go down to select the account here. It's a US account. I've got the account marked out and for this very, you know, even for these number of steps to have to find this general terms and conditions is interesting, but this helps you to not only start, but you have to continue doing business. You have to accept this. So it's something that you want to know where it's at. Your management would may ask you for it at one time or another. And it has changed places of where it's located on Amazon over the last 10 years.
Paul Sonneveld
So, of course, the obvious question here is, what am I agreeing to here? What is it's easy to hit the button? But I'm sure the devil's in the details. We'll get onto that.
Alan Adams
Yeah. So you literally, when you're clicking on accepted or rejected, it is scary because you go, wait a minute, am I accepting or am I rejecting? And what it does is it opens those, it gives you access to those either pending contracts or accepted or rejected. And this steps into. That actual general terms and conditions, it varies from anything from a five to about 10-page contract, depending on location and what applies to your Vendor Central account.
So even when you change businesses, if we have people, I know we have people listening that may be the e-commerce specialist or vice president for their company. If you move to another part of the world, it may be different slightly. If you have a different portion of the business, if you're in a different category, this can be slightly different. The first five pages in general are absolutely the same. The takeaway kind of a thing to think about here is to audit what Amazon pays you on each purchase order. Each purchase order provides prices. And that seems really obvious, right, Paul? It's like, hey, Did we get the money that we were asking for?
Paul Sonneveld
The basic principles of the exchange of goods and funds, right?
Alan Adams
Yeah, we've got to get paid for what we've put in there and that is something that literally I put a Vendor Central case why that just happened within the last 2 months. I'll get into more specifics later if we have time, but the red box shows that this is the 1st, number 1 paragraph in the general terms and conditions contract. This is why it's so important is that literally at the bottom of this slide, it says Amazon is taking bulk buy and pallet quantity discounts.
On purchase orders that are later that are individual purchase orders that so they're getting a discount and and taking a deduction, even though they ordered it on a PO at a normal price and they spread it across 30 to 50 different purchase orders. This happened just in the last 2 months. We have a dispute for I think it's let's see, this one's 47, 000. It's open with the finance, the Amazon finance department. And they literally said, well, what's the problem? You said you would ship us two truckloads of stuff. You only sent us one truckload. Later, we sent you 40 more orders that are equivalent to a truckload. So we're going to take the quantity discount on that. All 40 of those orders. Well, the finance person conveniently didn't understand that processing 40 orders is a lot more difficult than one truckload. So, this is a great example, just in the very first paragraph of general terms and conditions. How can this conversation save some of our listener’s money?
Paul Sonneveld
Well, yeah, that's but they are, I mean, I don't want to sort of go too much into what to do, but the only way here is really just to open up a case and challenge it. Is that the main course of how to resolve this or
Alan Adams
Yes, well, number one, you have to identify it, which is pretty hard, which is great because your company and our company are the ones that are able to raise that information because you can't when you have thousands of purchase orders, you can't look at every one of those prices on everyone of those purchase orders. And here what happens is Amazon is actually taking a deduction in your payments, and you have to audit those payments. So, it's it emphasizes the importance of analytics and having something to highlight an unusual charge from Amazon to catch. You have to file a dispute for it.
Paul Sonneveld
Got it.
Alan Adams
There are other items that just in the general terms and conditions. This is another one in terms of monitoring Amazon business. I know, is Amazon business expanding as significantly there as it is for you, Paul as it is here?
Paul Sonneveld
I wouldn't say at the same rate or the same level of saturation, but certainly definitely a focus. So for sure.
Alan Adams
And there, there's a lot of companies that want to have nothing to do with it. And then there's other companies on the other side of the pendulum that say, look, I want to put all of my second-tier distribution through Amazon business because it can save me a tremendous amount of money. So depending on the clients that people have and the businesses that you're at, Amazon can be really important.
It's becoming even more important. And I wanted to call it out in this seminar or podcast, because I myself didn't realize how critically important it is. Initially, a lot of the clients say, I don't have anything with Amazon business. Well, in the general terms and conditions, Amazon business can automatically put your products out there on Amazon business and can add discounts that it funds itself to drive sales to businesses.
In addition, there are a lot of companies that are adding companies products, so distributors that have many brands that they represent, and they're posting the products exclusively on Amazon business only. So there are two separate platforms. What I call out on this slide is one, the general terms and conditions that allow Amazon's approval to post those slides or post your content in a specific spot. And I apologize for the small detail, but I tried to call it out.
In the red boxes and give context so people could see it as well as the red box on the right is Amazon actually boosting sales for its Amazon business subsidiary or independent business almost by providing free advertising for Amazon business. An advertising of discounts or lower price that businesses can get on Amazon business. That's interesting. I haven't really seen this too much in the retail world. It's like Amazon, it would be like or let's see Walmart posting that Walmart business has an even lower price for businesses. So Amazon is providing in this case, it's very significant a 63% discount on this product if you're a business. So, if a business is looking for 50 of these, that's a great incentive for them to go over to Amazon business and get that business pricing.
So there is an increasing amount of business over there I wanted to make everybody aware of this on the conversation today because either your company can benefit from it, or you want to be really aware of it because just like there are redundant pages and multiple detail pages created on amazon. com, those detail pages are now getting replicated out on Amazon business either if you do it or if others do it, and it's great to know your digital shelf has expanded in that way.
Paul Sonneveld
You know what I find really interesting about this? I think Amazon in a way is a little bit generous here because not on the discount, but in the ability to opt in or out at a product level, because certainly, Amazon is a retailer here. They've purchased the stock and really whether they sell it on a more of a wholesale basis or to individual consumers. In theory, that's up to them, right? Is the reason they do that, is it associated with the funding of the discount here? Is that where this goes into as well?
Alan Adams
Fantastic question. How is this discount possible? What's happened in this particular case is there is an individual that's willing to buy, say 10, 000 of these products, and they get a huge discount because they buy in that bulk quantity. The detail page in general sells one funnel on amazon.com and to pick, pack and ship that item. You have to charge 10, 15, 20 dollars. Well, when you go to Amazon business, if you ship 500 to a business, you can charge a much lower price. And so in many cases, Amazon's not even funding this out of their own pocket. They have people that have gotten a bulk buy discount themselves and use Amazon business as another channel.
Paul Sonneveld
I understand. Okay.
Alan Adams
Very smart for Amazon though, in terms of driving people to Amazon business to expand it because they have the consumer right there.
Paul Sonneveld
Absolutely. Absolutely. Great. All right.
Alan Adams
Well, one last item on I think this is the last one in general terms and conditions. I know. Wanted to call out this again is from the U.S. terms and conditions. So international is slightly different. The location go in there and check yours. Something that's common here is in Tennessee. It says that you have 90 days for a dispute. So just calling out. Why do I call this out? Because Amazon will sometime in this case, they assert that you have 90 days of payment. And it's from the date of payment versus just 90 days. Later I'll show you where there's even a further restriction on that.
Take away for this is make sure to dispute your amounts within 90 days or less if you can to challenge these amounts and and get them. And that includes everything from price claims, shortages, chargebacks, audits, COOP recoveries, and payment terms. Because companies like yours and ours can do that if people are overwhelmed with it. If they want to learn how to do it, we can share and help people learn how to do it too. You got a limited amount of time to do it though.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, 90 days. Can I just say, when I said at the start that we're going to go right into the detail, we meant it, right? I think this is the first episode I've ever done where we are going deep into the specific clauses and paragraphs of the Amazon agreement, right? So, because it matters it's a big deal.
Alan Adams
So, but we're talking about thousands of dollars here, in some cases over a quarter million dollars.
Paul Sonneveld
Absolutely.
Alan Adams
This next slide, COOP agreements and marketing accruals, the standards differ across categories and across countries. In general, you have a marketing accrual, which is called a COOP, an MDF, or marketing accrual development fund, that's typically anywhere from 5 to 15 percent on the 1P side, there's a damage allowance, a freight allowance. Don't want to get into too much details with everybody with, but with Amazon, this is an opportunity for companies to think about adjusting their freight allowance.
A lot of people are prepaid because they can manage their shipping or want better shipping and want to control and coordinate their shipping more. Right now is a fantastic time to ask Amazon what its lowest cost would be to handle shipping. Why is it the fantastic time? Because Amazon has overexpanded. It's networked by billions of dollars, so it has extra space in some areas, and it has thousands of ships and hundreds of planes ships, not ships, sorry I misspoke there, thousands of trucks, and hundreds of aircraft that literally ship items around the world. They need to take use and optimize that, and one way to do that is to take it in as collect freight. So in general, right now you can get a fantastic rate from anywhere from 2 to 4 percent in some cases, which is much less than 6 or 8 percent that companies may be paying.
Paul Sonneveld
Take advantage of that spare capacity that they have in their system right now. That's a great tip. Can I just ask Alan, quick, the marketing COOP and marketing development, are you saying, is that a percentage or is that usually a lump sum? I've come across both in the past, not necessarily the Amazon context. From Amazon's point of view, is that always a percentage?
Alan Adams
It is generally a percentage. There's literally about five different selections that you can have on the actual, the it's about a four or five page system internally in Amazon. Generally a percentage. It can be a fixed amount and it can also have variable payment over many, many periods of time. A whole separate show. We can talk about each one.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, I know. The other thing I was just going to ask was, which of these items are included in the net PPM calculations and which ones are outside of it?
Alan Adams
Great question. Net PPM is usually, I believe the revenue that they get minus the cost. So that's kind of at the top of the funnel. It's not necessarily inclusive of all these things. So it's a very good thing to do on one of the next slides is literally ask Amazon that question.
What are you including in the net PPM calculation? And get them to list it out because different people, you would think it's defined the same, but it's not. With each 1 of these contracts, including the payment terms, Amazon over-deducts frequently. You know, it's an auditing every accountant and auditing company potentially makes mistakes.
We've been able to recover over 5M dollars and you need to file it within 30 to 60 days on European contracts. Some only allow 60 days. So I mentioned, do it, make sure to dispute within 90 days. But check the contract and try to be there within 60 days, if you can. Negotiations. Have you handled a negotiation or seen one, an email like this? Can we have an audience raise their hand at all? Have you seen them?
*(Both laugh)*
Paul Sonneveld
Red, green. Yeah. You're, you're off track. We need more right on these dimensions.
Alan Adams
Absolutely. You hit it on the head. And this is negotiations and roughly in around 2010, this system was automated. So they just pulled all these numbers in. What I mean by automated is that literally we had to do negotiations with 4, 5, 000 companies. You can't do that on the phone with everybody. So internally at Amazon, while I worked there, we put together an email, pulled in these numbers and asked for increases. Interestingly, probably over 50% of people gave every single increase that was asked.
Quick takeaway on this is that you make sure that the products you're, that Amazon's referencing are actually your products. So, very simple. The number 1 tip there at the bottom of the slide, ask for data to support the proposed increases. Why? Because you got to make sure that they are including the right things and that you understand that data because in the case of a damage allowance, it can be really important to understand where are the damages happening so that we could fix those. Or if the freight cost is much less by doing it, the company's self, they stay prepaid if they can get 2 or 3 percent right now for freight allowance might be a great time to change. This negotiation, then that's an annual negotiation. Part of that then is this MDF COOP agreement here, the red box as people are able to get the slide.
I'll reference the number 2 tip here is many contracts have auto-renew clauses in them. What does that mean? Well, unless Amazon has notified you of a required deadline in the agreement, the same terms will be automatically renewed next year. So why would you have very little incentive to go, yes, I'll accept a 15% COOP instead of 10%. No. If you get past that deadline, if they haven't notified you within 60 days of the contract, number one, they don't have a right to ask you for a change because it's going to auto-renew.
Now we have some nuances and how we suggest that you say that to Amazon because it's not taken very well if you say that that directly, but that's what these contracts are there for and can really protect clients if we want to point that out for us so people can see that. A lot of people say, well, what happens, you know, if I don't accept that, what happens? We've only seen out of tens of thousands of companies now. I've only seen one account ever been terminated by Amazon. And that was because it was minus 20% for Amazon, literally not making a profit. Several accounts had purchase orders stopped for two to eight weeks, but if it's profitable, it's in Amazon's best interest. To have that business.
So this is a really great area for people just to have these takeaways. If you're able to sustain 2 to 8 weeks of not having purchase orders that puts pressure on both sides to kind of figure out, hey, let's look at the data, figure out why something's unprofitable or not profitable, limit the selection. If it's highly unprofitable, fix the problems that we have and get the business moving because it's in both parties interest to make sure that they're profitable. So if
Paul Sonneveld
A lot of this is about it seems to me about like calling each other's broth blood, but who's blinking first?
Alan Adams
You're right. And this is recall. I have got a bullet on there. I've recalled negotiations. Tip number 1, ask for data supporting the proposed increases. Why? Because that data is frequently wrong. And if it's not wrong, it's correct. You want to fix it as a company. And this stuff, when there's a dispute, sometimes information tends to dispute disappear.
So tip number three for today is to print out all of your annual contracts and save them to a PDF into a folder by year, because these contracts can be hidden by people internally at the company and they're hard to reference if they're hidden. So great to have if you have to figure out how to adjust those with Amazon.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, make sure you don't get into information in a symmetry where you're only seeing a bit of the picture and you put yourself at a big disadvantage. So record keeping on your own systems.
Alan Adams
And that number 1 place that people can lose money. So we're helping them out with hidden contracts. In particular, you can see auto price protection agreements come across guaranteed minimum margin agreements. Amazon vendor services agreements. Takeaway on this slide, you're not required to accept these. Reject them. Unless you have a very good reason and you've consulted with somebody likely to reject these and there are specific ways to reject them so that they don't pop up. Why? Because we've had clients and businesses come to us with hundreds of thousands of dollars of outstanding audits from Amazon. So you want to reject these in the right way. Don't feel the pressure to accept them. Have you ever run into any of these?
Paul Sonneveld
Certainly the last two, I was going to ask you about the order of protection agreements and what they entail. So, I mean, what does Amazon offering in return for accepting one of those?
Alan Adams
So an auto price protection agreement can make sense. Fantastic question. Now what it's meant to do, or its intention is, if you have changed the cost of Amazon's current inventory, so if they have a thousand units on hand and you've said, look, this is now out of stock, I'm going to lower the price by 5 dollars and you lower the cost to Amazon and Vendor Central, then they'll send you in many cases, an auto protection agreement to say I have 5, 000 units in stock. Currently, you lower the cost by 5 dollars. I need 5, 000 dollars. So 1, 000 times the 5 dollars times the thousand units that we have on hand. And that way they're automatically protected or price protected. And that is protection for Amazon. However, that's not in any agreement anywhere. So they have to ask for your agreement on that. And in many cases, it's not in your best interest. In some cases, it can because you want the inventory to move faster.
Paul Sonneveld
Makes sense. Thanks for clarifying that.
Alan Adams
I know we're at time. I, there's a lot on subscribe and save. I'll just jump to the takeaway at the bottom is if, you know, people can reach out to me if they have a question on this particular, but Amazon sometimes pays the last bullet here. Amazon sometimes pays for subscribe and save. So you'll show it, see it show up on your detail page. But this frequently makes top-selling products into what's called CRAP, and I don't mean to be crass there. So put it in parentheses. Crap means cannot realize a profit, and those products then frequently are suppressed in some cases.
And then Amazon's natural response is, hey, I can't sell this profitably. Give me a cost reduction. And then it's really important to understand if Amazon's doing that subscribe and save because the number one thing to do is remove that unauthorized subscribe and save. Because Amazon's basically having to fund that they don't realize it in a lot of cases because it's not something within the vendor manager's purview. In many cases, they have to go search for it, and that'll help reduce the discount that's being given so that you can still capture those sales and the product can get reinstated. Common pitfalls. We've probably all hit 1 of these pitfalls at any time. Have you ever hit any problems?
Paul Sonneveld
Everyday.
*(both laugh)*
Paul Sonneveld
I stopped making mistakes at the end of 2022, I just decided no more pitfalls and mistakes. That's the end of it. But unfortunately hard to live by that motto.
Alan Adams
Oh, yeah, that's great. You know, we've been looking at not filing for recoveries within 30 days of payment. I've talked about 60 and 90, but in some cases, Amazon's demanding 30. In other cases, we've had clients come to us that went with the 1st Amazon negotiation ask. Hey, you want an increase in terms? Yes. You want cost reductions on our top products? Yes. And then they back themselves into our corner unknowingly or unintentionally because they're thinking that Amazon is thinking in their best interest to and Amazon's really thinking in its best interest at all times.
So I want you to look at all of the information that they're sending it, consider it from your specific turn, your perspective, the client's perspective as well, and their bottom line profit, and the red box on this page calls out, this is where Amazon says the vendor will have 1 month from the date of payment. So, technically, they can go back to this and say 1 month, but you have the general terms and conditions that you can go back to and say, well, here, it says 90 days. And this contract says it takes priority unless other contracts are deemed necessary. Great little takeaways for your accounting team if they're out there disputing those.
If you can share that with your accounting team or an agency that you're working with, you don't want to lose that right to dispute, keep that money in your pocket and go back and get it. I know we're always looking for ways to, how can you recapture some leaking profit? Have you run into any provisional COOPs yet?
Paul Sonneveld
I personally have not, but I'm sure many of our listeners have. I'm scrolling through the list in terms of the people who are currently watching. And I know many of have so, let’s hear it.
Alan Adams
Well, it started in about 2021, Amazon realized that the way that it started its business, they were not collecting COOP or the freight allowance and damage allowance or payment terms across the company's entire catalogue. And the reason for that, 1 of the reasons I should say is that many of the products are established on Amazon before the contract came along.
And those products were added by somebody outside the category. So depending on the contract and how it filters to capture products, many products have been excluded and people have not had to pay COOP. So what Amazon came up with is that if you're selling products, and there is no COOP agreement in your account that covers them, here are the terms that will apply and those are typically the standard terms for the category, which can be in several cases, more than double what your typical or your account terms would be.
So you don't want a provisional rope COOP recovery. You'd like to get those on your standard terms. So you want to identify those COOP deductions as soon as possible. Those come through in payments. And COOPs, you want to ask Amazon to correct those agreements and add ASINs to your existing ones so you don't have to pay the higher amount.
And the second bullet here, it's literally in the last two or three weeks, I think it was let's see, I'm looking, four ASINs dropped off the existing contracts. So, you know, it seems very convenient that wait, these four ASINs were on these contracts for the last five years. Now they dropped off the contract and onto a provisional contract that's collecting more than double what the normal COOP is. So that, that's why I go through around
Paul Sonneveld
Why go through a round of negotiation when you can just do that, right? You can move from one set of commercial terms to a much more favourable set of commercial terms. Seems a little bit unfair to me, but you know, do you have a sense that that's happening deliberately or that's just being caught up in some of the administrative errors that we're seeing on that side of Amazon?
Alan Adams
Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. Amazon is so complex and there's so many tens of thousands of workers right now, is that people adjust something in the system, and they don't realize the impact of that adjustment. And I think that's what it is here. It's not somebody intentionally trying to take money away from people, which is what's happening. It's that, hey, this agreement was not set up properly 10 years ago. And these new ASINs came across. In this case, it was a little bit odd just in the last couple of weeks because these were on existing contracts. So it's somebody may have changed internally the database for how those products were linked with the contract. So a great opportunity to get that. That was that itself was 13, 000 dollars.
In the last slide here, one of the latest developments is $47, 000 was what I had mentioned earlier on the Amazon applying lower costs on bulk or pallet orders to actually many other orders that were spread across small orders. It's a lot of opportunities for people even most recently to capture recapture money by making sure that you dispute those items.
Paul Sonneveld
That's really fantastic. Alan, and we've covered a lot and I'm looking at the clock, we're way over. I think you and I should sit down and think about what's the follow-up session look like because I think there's a lot more topics we can get into. I do love the fact that you've brought lots of practical tips to the table here, like really fantastic. So thank you so much for that.
We are running out of time. So usually I cut off the questions, but I do have one question here that I thought I'd just throw in just before we wrap up just to demonstrate to people that this is actually a live recording. And just to get your perspectives on it. So it comes from Clint. He's actually based near where you are in Seattle there. And he's asking about, yes, of course, very familiar with cannot realize a profit items, but is there a way really to identify these kinds of easily within Vendor Central?
Alan Adams
Yes. If you go into Vendor Central one way Clint, feel free to reach out to me directly to through our website. My email address is Alan, A-L-A-N@navazonconsulting. com. One way is going through the net PPM and see what year-over-year net PPM is. And if it's less than 40 or 50%, there's probably a similar issue there. And you can also look over year over year. There are a couple of other things to look at, too, but that's one way to quickly grab them.
Paul Sonneveld
Fantastic. Thanks, Alan. And thanks for the question, Clint. Great one. We've got the last one just popped in. I think that's a great one to close, because that's usually a question that I ask at the end of the show. But Zach beat me to it. Zachary here. Obviously, great, great session. Thank you. Do you offer services to support brands in negotiations? And I usually rephrase that as how can you help our audience and how they don't get in touch with you?
Alan Adams
Oh, absolutely. Like my email address. We've got a website in Amazon. It stands for navigate Amazon. We help. We actually provide a webinar that has usually in the past it's been a 1 or 2-day seminar where people can come to Seattle to interact with others as well as learn how to do not only negotiations but the latest and greatest things on Amazon. So if you have interest in that, you could go to our website at Navazon Consulting and just drop us a contact us and we'll reach out to you and let us know what your need is and we'll deliver that for you.
Paul Sonneveld
Fantastic. Actually, we had a last question here from Colleen. I won't bring it up, but she's asking exactly about your point around training and all of that which you just answered there on the spot. So thank you for your question there as well, Colleen. Well, on that note, Alan it's time to part ways. But it's been absolutely fantastic. I love the practical aspect that you brought it. You know, we've gone right into the details. We haven't sort of stayed at the superficial generic side. So, really thank you for joining us today. And I think your experience is truly enriched our discussion. I think you may just want to mention that email email address again, or how to get in touch just in case people didn't catch that. You want to just restate that. And I think we've got a little slide here.
Alan Adams
This is a slide without my beard moustache.
*(both laugh)*
Alan Adams
Thanks for sharing.
Paul Sonneveld
This is your future. You, this is the future you.
Alan Adams
Past and future you. Yes. I appreciate you making this opportunity available. It's great to be able to share these ideas because as we share them across the industry, we're able to stay in touch with the most recent developments, as well as things that can help people that maybe haven't seen it before. So great. I appreciate getting together with you on this.
Paul Sonneveld
Well, fantastic, Alan. Thanks for your time. And we'll talk about lining up the next one.
Alan Adams
Sounds great. Thank you, Paul.
Paul Sonneveld
All right. Well, thank you for tuning in to today's enlightening episode on Amazon Retail Vendor Contracts and Negotiations. If you are hungry for more of these episodes, don't forget to visit our video-on-demand library on our website. It's really a treasure trove of insights like the one we had today.
And if you're aiming to streamline your analytics to gain sharper insights learning about what is my net PPM by product? How's it moved year on year? What's it overall and which ones are dilutive? Amongst many other things, feel free to reach out. We can discover how MerchantSpring can help you in that journey.
Lastly, I am all ears for what you would like to hear next. So if you have a burning topic or a big question in mind, drop me a note and I'd love to find an expert to tackle that topic. So until next time, make sure you keep thriving, keep innovating, and thank you so much for listening.
