Podcast transcript
Introduction
Before we get started, a quick message from our team here at MerchantSpring. We've just launched something we're really proud of, our new AMC Insights module. It's designed to make Amazon Marketing Cloud simple, powerful and usable for agencies of all sizes. You'll get the five most popular AMC reports, pre-built, AI-enhanced and ready to go. You can schedule them, compare trends over time and never touch SQL.
We even spin up your own AMC instance so you can skip the infrastructure headaches. And the best part, it's all free on all agency plans. AMC Insights, zero friction. You can learn more or book a quick demo at merchantspring.io/amc. All right, everyone, and welcome to today's episode. Welcome to Marketplace Masters, the series where we dive into the trends, tools, and transitions shaping success on Amazon.
Paul Sonneveld
I'm your host, Paul Sonneveld, and today's session is a little different to what you're used to. We're not here for a roundtable or a discussion or Q&A discussion or debate. We're here because something important is happening. Amazon is rolling out its new solution provider program, a foundation change on how agencies and service partners connect with clients. And with that change has come a fair bit of noise, confusion and concern. That's why we've invited someone who's been at the heart of the rollout to really walk us through exactly what's happening.
Joining me live today from Amazon is Sumanth Janardhan, Key Account Manager for a Selling Partner and Services at Amazon. He's very kindly here to present a very detailed overview of the new SPP framework and explain what's changing, what it means for your agency and what you need to do next. This is a chance to really cut through all the noise on LinkedIn, the ambiguity, and really get a line and hear it directly from the source.
So while today's session is going to be presentation-led, we'll be watching the chat. So feel free to drop your questions in the LinkedIn comments as we go. We'll do our best to address them towards the end of the presentation. So get those comments and questions going. Sumanth, it's an absolute pleasure to have you here today. Thank you so much for agreeing to join us live. You've got a very busy week in Japan this week. So, thank you for making time. And yeah, the floor is yours.
Sumanth Janardhan
Thank you very much, Paul, for the introduction and for the opportunity. Hi, everyone. Good morning and good evening. It's a pleasure to be here with you all today to talk about Amazon Service Provider Network, introduce you to our new tool called Solution Provider Portal, and walk you through what the Solution Provider Portal experience for service providers is like.
Now, my name is Sumanth, and I'm a Key Account Manager with the Service Provider Network or SPN program. And the topic for today's discussion is to get you well acquainted with the new launch so that you are aware of what this could mean for you. And you are also well acquainted with the next steps that you can take. Now, before I get started with the topic of discussion, I just wanted to call out that if you are an agency or a partner, or if you currently support Amazon clients with your solutions, you're in the right place. Now, a lot of the agencies or partners have previously been accessing seller accounts by being added as a secondary user to the seller's primary seller central account.
Now, this feature was originally meant for the sellers to delegate permissions to employees within their own company. As such, a lot of the functionality mirrors that primary use case and specifically touches upon the seller account to their employee delegation. Through SPP, what we're trying to do is build a new permissions framework specifically designed to support partners and all the use cases that they encounter.
Now, for today's session, these are some of the points that we will be covering. We will cover SPN and what it is for those who may not know. We'll also go through what the solution provider portal is and what the experience for you would be like. And we'll also give you a step-by-step walkthrough of what the registration process on SPP is like. And if you are an existing service provider, then what the migration to SPP entails.
We will also go over the new mechanism to request for and gain access to seller account data and how you can delegate these permissions to individuals in your own company as well. Now, as you might be aware already, the secondary user permissions workflow on Seller Central is being deprecated for non-Seller employees, and partners will need to gain access to Seller account data by getting added as authorised partners through the global user permissions workflow on Seller Central and on SPP. Hence, SPP eventually will be the only way through which you will be able to request for and gain access to seller account data.
So I'll just start off by setting the context for what the service provider network is, and we can move forward from that. So, SPN is a services marketplace for Amazon sellers to discover and engage with service providers who can support them with various requirements. These requirements could be something as basic as imaging and listing their products, or it could even be an end-to-end full-service account management support for their selling account.
Now, Amazon provides account management support to the top tier of sellers. Any seller who may not qualify for this may still have these requirements. Last year, close to 120,000 sellers worldwide were account managed by an SPN-listed service provider and close to 180,000 sellers were serviced by an SPN-listed service provider. You could either choose to list with us as a full service service provider, or if you specialise in a particular field like accounting and taxes, you could choose to list under any of the 21 service categories that we currently support.
Now, what is SPP? So Amazon Solution Provider Portal is a one-stop shop for you to register your SP API developer account, as well as your service provider account with us. If you provide both apps and services, you would be able to manage both of these erstwhile separate accounts as a single parent account. This simplifies the registration process and the day-to-day management of all your various partner accounts with us.
Now, once you register on SPP, you will be able to request for access to seller account data and then further delegate this access to your own team members or your employees. If you register with us as a service provider, there are also other benefits that this entails, such as you can increase the impressions on your company listing from sellers visiting our page on Seller Central. There were over a million such visits to the SPN page last year. You will also gain access to our proprietary service delivery tools to help you manage your seller accounts at scale. These tools include our lead management platform called Service Provider Central or SP Central. You can also use SP Central to manage relationships with the sellers that you work with by messaging them or sharing documents all through the tool and all instantly.
The second tool that you will get access to is a tool called Account Management Central. You can use this tool to view all of your seller KPIs in a single place, view ASIN level recommendations based on what has very likely worked for similar such selection in the past. The third tool is called the Learning Management System, or the LMS. You can use this tool to keep your team updated on all the Amazon programs, processes, policies. As you know, these are dynamic and subject to change, and training your new employees or retraining your existing employees through the LMS could help address any information gaps that could otherwise affect the quality of service that you provide to your sellers.
Now on SPP, apart from being able to manage your permissions and gaining access to our tools, you will also have the option to add new service listings, all in a self-serve manner. So once you sign into SPP, you will find an option to add more services. And in a few minutes, you should be able to register that with us as well. Now in terms of the registration process itself on SPP, it's a simple three-step process. The first is of course to follow the URL or the QR code to land on the SPP homepage or rather the login page. You can sign in using your existing SP central credentials if you are a registered service provider or an existing service provider. If you are not on the SPN program, you can create a new account on the same page that you see here. You can also choose to sign in with your Seller Central credentials, but you would need to log in once on SPP to begin the process.
Once you log in, there is a general guidance for different use cases or different customer cohorts who might be registering on SPP. So, please do go through the general guidance and acknowledge the guidance in order to proceed with the registration. Once you acknowledge the guidance, you will land on this page where you would begin with your registration. The second step is to verify your identity. There are two types of identities that we look to verify. One is for the individual proprietor and the second is for the company. This is a standard EKYC or Electronic Know Your Customer verification. Please do have your business registration information as well as your own individual identity documents ready. You do have the option of choosing to turn on your webcam and take a screenshot or to book a slot with our team.
Once you book this slot, you will connect with a person over a video call where these documents will be sought and verified. This should take a maximum of 20 minutes to complete. Now, when you get started with the identity verification, we will ask for certain basic details about the proprietor and about the company, such as the name, contact details, and the company registration certificate etc. Now, it is mandatory for the business owner or the legal representative or someone whose name is on the company registration certificate to register as the primary account owner. So the individual who will be registering or going through the KYC would be the proprietor or the authorised representative from the company. You can update contact information for other Amazon POCs later in the journey. But at this stage, it would be the primary account owner's details that would be sought.
Now, the documents that you can upload to complete the KYC for the company, it is the company registration certificate. For the individual, it would be any government-issued ID, could be a passport or anything else. And once these details are shared, you will have the option of updating contact information. And once done, you would be able to save your progress with this stage, where we will have all of your details as well as you would have completed the video verification or the instant verification through the screenshot as well.
Now, the third step is where you would need to select the primary service that you offer to sellers. Please note that you can start the registration or complete the registration by selecting one service, but that you can always add more services once your registration is completed. Now, if you are adding a service that requires access to restricted data or personally identifiable information, such as payment reports or customer order level reports, et cetera, then you would need to fill out a short questionnaire with responses on the use cases for requesting that data. For instance, if you offer account management as a service, which is a full account service, let's say, then in that case, you might need access to personally identifiable information.
So in that situation, the questionnaire will look to understand why you want to have access to this data. So please do respond on the use cases for it. It's four questions. And in case you do not need any seller account data, please select the option that says none. Once this is completed, once you've shared your responses, you can also select the seller central roles and permissions that you would need access to to manage your client's accounts. Please do select only those roles that you would actually need access to.
Now, our team will then evaluate the use cases and the roles that you've requested permission, the requested permissions for, and they will get in touch with you regarding the status of it. If they need more information to process or if it's an approval, they will reach out to you via email. Now, once your company is registered on SPP, you can do two other things as part of the same extended flow. One is add clients to your SPP account so that you are gaining access to seller account data through the compliant workflow, which is on SPP and on Seller Central for sellers.
And the second is you will also be able to add other individuals in your company to SPP so that you can delegate these permissions to them. Now, how do you go about doing that? In order for you to gain access to seller account data, your seller or your client needs to sign into Seller Central using their primary Seller Central credentials. Once they do, they need to visit the permissions tab. And in the permissions tab, they will be able to add an authorised partner.
Now, we will go through this workflow. As you can see here on the homepage, there is a user permissions option. And the client can add you as an authorised partner. This will generate a URL, which the client can then share with you. Once you click on this URL, you will land on the SPP homepage, where you can accept the invitation to be added as an authorised partner. And once you do that, the client can go to the user permissions page again. There's an ingress to the global user permissions workflow there. Once they select that, they can look at the authorised partners for that account, look at the open invitations tab, and start giving you the permissions that you would need access to.
Now, once they give you these permissions, it would need to map with the roles that you've requested access for in your SPP registration. So, please do ensure that you are selecting all the roles that you need access to during your registration. Now, once they have provided you with access, you can log into SPP and there's a tab or other dropdown for services and a feature for permissions management. And you'll be able to view the clients that have provided you with access by visiting the global account permissions tab. Or you can also export it in a CSV to see which client is mapped to which user within your own company as well. You can also update these assignments on your own with minimal friction.
Now, the second tab or the second function that you can perform as part of this extended workflow is to add individuals from your company onto SPP. Now, to do that, you can visit the user management tab under user permissions. Once you do that, you will find an option to add a user. Please select that. The user will receive an email along with the URL where they can create an account on SPP and complete their identity verification to be added onto SPP.
Now, the individual that you are adding will not need to complete the data access qualification. They will just need to complete the identity verification which is entering their name and uploading a government-issued ID, and either doing a video call or turning on their webcam and having a screenshot taken. Now, once that identity is verified, they have their own individual credentials. Now, subsequently, when you assign or delegate a client permission to that employee, they can sign into Seller Central using their SPP credentials, which they've just created. They can view all the seller accounts that are tagged to them through SPP, and they can select that account to begin working on that account.
Now we of course, support all agencies and service providers whether they are looking to get registered on SPP or whether they're already on SPN. Now you can reach out to us if you're stuck anywhere or if you have any questions for us. There's also a very detailed FAQ document, which you can also refer to. But yes, there's a lot of support that we can provide you. So please do reach out in case you have any queries or if you are stuck anywhere. And with that, I think that brings us to the end of the presentation. I'm happy to hand it over to Paul for any updates on or rather for the next topic on the agenda.
Paul Sonneveld
Thank you so much, Sumanth. That was really great. I'll keep the presentation in the background in case we want to refer back to it. It was really great for you to just walk us through that. I think it might be good if we have probably about eight minutes left and there are quite a few questions out there. I think some of them you covered sort of later in your presentation. Hence, I sort of wanted to leave them to the end, but it might just be worth quickly going through those and get your perspective on that. So let me start with Adrian. Interesting question here around SPP. Is it being rolled out everywhere at the same time? UK, AU, US, or is it sort of in stages?
Sumanth Janardhan
Thank you for the question, Adrian. It is a global launch. It is currently already available to the general audience. So yes, service providers or agencies registered with our business registered in any location around the world can access it.
Paul Sonneveld
Thank you. Let me have a look. I'm literally, there's a few here. Here we go. From Bogdan. Let me read the question. Thank you, Bogdan, for your question here and encourage others. If you do have questions, now is the time. Right. You can't sit back and then we're trying to get all of Sumanth after he's available now. Will we lose access to Seller Central accounts based on the old shared missions once this new mechanism rolls out?
Sumanth Janardhan
Thank you for the question, Bogdan. The answer is yes. So while you or any other agency who may have been added as a secondary user to the seller's primary account, and that has been the way in which you've been gaining access to the seller account, that will be deprecated for non-seller employees at some point. So what we have is SPP as an alternate for you to gain access to seller account data through the compliant way. So you can begin migrating your permissions through SPP and at some point it will be turned off. So it is best to get started with registering on SPP and migrating your permissions over to the global user permissions workflow on SPP.
Paul Sonneveld
Thank you for your question, Bogdan. Much appreciated. Okay, a few more. I'm just heading to Andrea here. Thank you, Andrea. We previously managed the access requests to a customer's Seller Central accounts via SPN. Now, if they grant us partner permissions, will everything transition automatically to SPP if we have that all set up?
Sumanth Janardhan
Thank you for the question, Andrea. So there are two ways in which you can gain access to seller account data. One is by being added as a secondary user. And the second is by using the global user permissions workflow. Now, the global user permissions workflow was previously available on AM Central. It's still available there. And it is a key part of how SPN advocates for partners to gain access to seller account data.
So, in case you have used the global user permissions to gain access to seller accounts, then your permissions will be migrated over once you register on SPP using your existing SP Central credentials. The secondary user permissions will not be migrated over and you will need to request your clients to add you as an authorised partner in that case. But if they've already added you as an authorised partner, then those will migrate over as well.
Paul Sonneveld
Thank you very much, Andrea. Moving on, there was a related question here from Jamie. Thank you, Jamie. What do we do if a current client's seller account does not have the Add Authorised Partner button. Thank you.
Sumanth Janardhan
Ideally, this should not happen. They should have this option to add you as an authorised partner. But in case they don't, please do reach out to me and I can understand more about this use case and help address it as well.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, that probably links to the next question here. It's really around support. Actually, I know there's lots of support because certainly even from our point of view, Amazon has given us lots of support and has been very responsive. But there was a question here actually from Jamie actually, is there SPP support that can be reached out to if there are issues or what is the best way? If you really get stuck, I mean, most of the attendees here are working in the agency world, so they're in Seller Central every day, they're pretty familiar, but occasionally you get stuck, you've got the edge cases. What's the best way to reach out and get support?
Sumanth Janardhan
That's a very good question. Now we understand that with SPP, there might be lots of questions that agencies have. There might be faster response times that may be needed. So what we have is a dedicated workflow just for SPP-related support. Now in the deck that we will be sharing with you post this, you will find links to two places where you can reach out to us for support.
One is for anything related to SPP registration or migration and the other is for anything related to SPN. So please do reach out to us through these means and you also have the option of chatting with us through our support resources. So, in case there is anything that you would like for us to look at in priority, please do mention that as well. And we'd be happy to help answer any questions or any issues that you might be facing.
Paul Sonneveld
Fantastic. I think you've already mentioned the answer to my next and last question, but there are a few of them, a few of the ones we're asking, you know, Adrian and a few others, can we get access to the presentation with some of those links in there? We are certainly happy to put a link up on our website or on some of the show notes to link back to that presentation. Yeah, so happy to support with that. And we'll also make sure we, probably in the next 24 hours, everyone who registered for this episode will get a link to the recording here as well. We'll make sure that a link to that presentation is included here also. Great. I did, no real questions, but a couple of people were highlighting that they have some issues with that QR code. Sumanth, I'm not sure whether you saw that. So I'm sure the answer there is we'll need to have a look into it and see what's happening there. But yeah, I just wanted to draw that to your attention as well.
Sumanth Janardhan
No, thanks for that. Let me check on that, and I'll be sure to send the updated link with resources that are working fine.
Paul Sonneveld
Awesome. All right. Well, that really brings us to the end of today's session. So I'm having trouble with my camera here. It doesn't seem to like to zoom in on me today. Sumanth, thank you so much for, you know, agreeing to come on the show and really just explain things and actually be able to engage with Amazon themselves.
Actually, it's been a, you know, I've certainly really appreciated not just how you helped us, MerchantSpring, but also just your openness and willingness. And I think it's been absolutely great. So thank you so much. And I'm sure the audience is very appreciative. And yeah, we will obviously make sure we send out this recording. and all the supporting materials as well. Thank you so much today, Sumanth, for being on the show and good luck. I know you're spending the whole week in Japan. Good luck with all the events that you've got lined up there.
Sumanth Janardhan
Thank you so much, Paul. And the pleasure is all mine. This is a great opportunity for us to connect with our customers and to bring them up to speed on some of the things that we're working on and what this means for their business. And I couldn't think of a better way to connect with our customers than through this.
So, thank you once again for setting this up. And thank you to everyone who joined us for the session. And if at any point in time you need any support from us in terms of migrating your account or in terms of understanding what SPN is, please feel free to reach out. We'll be glad to connect with you and help you get set up.
Paul Sonneveld
Fantastic. Thank you so much, Sumanth.
Sumanth Janardhan
Thank you, Paul. Thank you, everyone.
Paul Sonneveld
All right, everyone, that is the end of today's episode. Thank you for all of you who join us live. I know how busy your schedules are. I really hope that this session gave you some insights and direction in terms of what you're looking for. If you'd like to dive deeper, revisit today's content, access that document or share it with your team, the recording will be made available in the next 24 hours via email and via our on-demand library at merchantspring.io.
And of course, if your agency is looking to upgrade its analytics across advertising, retail, reporting, or as you just heard at the start of this episode, AMC, please reach out. I'm very happy to walk you through how MerchantSpring can support your goals that it's remodelled. And as always, we're building the show for you. So if there's a topic you want me to cover or a specific challenge that you're wrestling with, or you just know a great topic expert, I would love to hear about him or her. So just drop me a note. Thank you again for tuning in and until next time, stay informed, stay connected and stay ahead. Thank you so much.
