Amazon Vendor Services is often evaluated in surprisingly simple terms relative to its cost.
Do we need more support from Amazon? Is our AVS resource effective? Did they resolve enough issues? Should we renew?
Those are reasonable questions, but they’re not sufficient for evaluating an investment that can reach six or seven figures annually. In Vendorist’s experience, we have seen annual AVS investments begin around $100,000 and reach $1.5 million or more for large programs. That is operating experience, not an Amazon-published rate card or universal pricing standard, but it establishes the significance of the decision.
AVS should be evaluated as an investment in incremental capability.
Leadership should understand what it’s purchasing, what business problem the investment should solve, what should become different because AVS exists, and how the organization will determine whether it created enough value.
Vendors shouldn’t ask whether AVS is universally worth its cost. There is no universal answer.
Instead, vendors should ask whether AVS gives the organization a capability it genuinely needs, and whether the organization can convert it into economically meaningful outcomes.
Amazon Vendor Services is the current name for Amazon’s paid support program for 1P vendors, previously known as Strategic Vendor Services, or SVS. Specific services and role structures vary by marketplace, category, and program design, but Amazon broadly positions AVS as a way to accelerate vendor growth, strengthen the vendor relationship, and create more sustainable e-commerce partnerships.
In practical terms, AVS places an additional Amazon resource closer to the vendor’s business.
That person can spend more time in the operating details than a Vendor Manager ordinarily can. Depending upon the engagement, the AVS resource may analyze performance, investigate problems, coordinate initiatives, troubleshoot issues, navigate Amazon internally, support planning, help translate priorities into execution, and move issues or opportunities through Amazon’s organization.
This proximity is central to the proposition. Vendors are not simply purchasing more meetings or a higher level of support. They are purchasing Amazon-side capability and capacity they may not otherwise possess.
Purchasing AVS is not purchasing more Vendor Manager.
Structures vary, but the Vendor Manager generally has greater seniority and commercial authority. The role commonly includes responsibility for Amazon’s commercial relationship with the vendor, negotiations, vendor terms, category economics, and the performance of Amazon’s retail business.
The AVS resource is generally more junior, more execution-oriented, and closer to the daily work. The person is more of a doer: analyzing, coordinating, troubleshooting, escalating, navigating, and helping shared priorities move forward.
The two roles may collaborate closely, and responsibilities can overlap, but they’re not interchangeable. AVS adds capability and capacity inside Amazon. It does not duplicate the Vendor Manager’s commercial authority or transfer ownership of the Amazon business away from the vendor.
Consider two vendors making approximately the same AVS investment.
The first has an experienced Amazon team, strong internal analytics, mature operating processes, sufficient execution capacity, and established Amazon relationships. If AVS primarily duplicates what the organization already does well, its incremental value may be limited. But a sophisticated vendor may still receive substantial value where Amazon-side access, coordination, navigation, or escalation remain important constraints.
The second has a lean Amazon organization, recurring operational problems, limited Amazon-specific expertise, insufficient capacity, and difficulty navigating Amazon internally. For this vendor, AVS may close meaningful gaps and help the organization accomplish work that would otherwise remain unresolved.
The program may be similar. The investment may be similar. The incremental contribution is not.
Realized AVS value depends upon three connected conditions:
Program Capability × Resource Quality × Vendor Application
If any one of these conditions is weak, the investment becomes harder to justify.
Leadership should begin with the business constraint, not the AVS proposal.
What outcome is the organization trying to improve? What’s preventing improvement today? What would materially change that condition?
A vendor struggling with chronic operational defects may need better Amazon-side coordination and issue resolution. A new vendor may need stronger Amazon knowledge, planning support, or help navigating unfamiliar programs. Another may understand what needs to be done but lack the capacity to execute it.
AVS can create value when the business need aligns with what the program can credibly provide. Depending upon the engagement, that may include Amazon-specific expertise, analysis, execution capacity, internal coordination, issue resolution, escalation, planning support, and access to relevant programs or Amazon teams.
The presence of an important business problem does not automatically make AVS the right solution. AVS must be positioned to address the constraint that matters.
If the organization primarily needs independent strategic judgment, specialized advertising execution, durable internal capacity, or authority over decisions AVS does not control, the program may be adjacent to the problem without being able to solve it.
The first evaluation question is therefore not, “What does AVS include?”
It’s: “Can AVS provide what the business needs to improve the outcome that matters?”
AVS is a program, but much of its value is delivered through people.
In practice, the quality of AVS resources varies considerably. Some bring deep Amazon knowledge, strong analytical ability, sound judgment, initiative, category familiarity, effective communication, and valuable internal relationships. Others may be earlier in their development, unfamiliar with the vendor’s category, or require significant onboarding before they can contribute at the expected level.
Tenure and continuity matter as well. An effective resource develops knowledge of the vendor’s products, organization, priorities, and recurring problems over time. Turnover can interrupt initiatives, weaken relationships, and require both organizations to rebuild context that already existed.
This variability is not unique to AVS. Agencies, consultants, employees, and other people-delivered services also vary in quality. The value of any people-delivered service depends materially on the quality of the person delivering it.
Leadership should therefore understand who will deliver the service, what that person is expected to own, what relevant experience the person brings, how much onboarding will be required, and how continuity will be handled if the assignment changes.
The objective is not to prejudge the individual. It’s to evaluate the investment as it will actually be delivered, not only as the program is described.
Effective vendor application requires two things: a sufficiently important business problem for AVS to solve and an organization capable of using AVS effectively against that problem.
An excellent AVS resource can still be a poor investment when the vendor lacks the first.
Some organizations join because greater Amazon access feels inherently useful. They begin the relationship without clear objectives, defined priorities, or agreement about what should become different. AVS activity follows, but the organization cannot determine whether that activity is improving the business.
Other vendors have legitimate capability gaps but lack the organizational conditions required to address them. Priorities change frequently. Internal ownership is unclear. Relevant information arrives late. Recommendations don’t reach decision-makers. The vendor requests support but lacks the responsiveness, authority, or capacity to implement what follows.
Effective application requires more than assigning a contact. The vendor needs:
AVS can add capability. It can’t substitute for proper vendor leadership.
The vendor remains responsible for deciding what matters, organizing the relationship, making commercial decisions, and converting support into results.
AVS relationships naturally produce more activity: meetings, reports, analyses, escalations, project plans, resolved tickets, and completed initiatives.
Those outputs demonstrate that work occurred. They don’t establish that the investment created enough value.
Leadership should define what is expected to improve before the investment begins or renews. Depending upon the business need, value may appear through incremental revenue or profit, protected or recovered sales, fewer out-of-stocks, improved operational performance, faster launches, avoided costs, faster issue resolution, better decisions, access to valuable opportunities, or internal capacity redirected toward higher-value work.
Some value can be measured directly. Some can’t.
A resolved availability issue may have an estimable sales effect. Reduced management time may be translated into capacity. Better decisions may create value over several periods rather than appearing immediately in a financial report. Internal access may matter because it changes the probability or speed of an outcome, not because it produces a separately attributable revenue line.
That leads to a more useful standard: Not all AVS value can be directly attributed, but all AVS value should be economically explainable.
Management judgment belongs in the evaluation. Vague references to strategic value do not.
Leadership should be able to explain what became possible because AVS existed, why that difference mattered, and whether the resulting value was sufficient relative to the investment.
The wrong comparison is: AVS versus no AVS.
The right comparison is: AVS versus the next-best way of acquiring the capability the business needs.
That alternative might be internal headcount, an agency, a specialist consultant, technology, additional advertising or operational investment, another internal resource, or simply retaining the economics.
These alternatives aren’t interchangeable.
AVS may possess advantages external resources cannot reproduce, particularly Amazon access, internal coordination, internal navigation, program knowledge, and escalation. An external advisor may provide greater independence or specialized expertise. An internal employee may create more durable organizational capacity. Technology may solve a narrow problem more efficiently than another person.
The decision should not default to the lowest-cost option. Nor should Amazon access be treated as valuable regardless of its application.
The relevant question is which investment can most effectively close the capability gap and create sufficient economic value.
The three determinants of AVS value also reveal the three ways the investment can fail.
Each failure requires a different response. Asking the resource to work harder will not correct a program-capability mismatch. Changing the resource will not help an organization that has never defined what it needs. Improving vendor utilization will not create authority the program does not possess.
Leaders should identify which condition is limiting value before deciding whether to renew, restructure, expand, or exit the investment.
The same questions can guide an initial enrollment decision and a later renewal, but the evidence available is different.
Enrollment is necessarily prospective: What do we expect AVS to make possible?
Renewal should be evidence-based: What actually became possible because AVS existed? At renewal, leadership should consider AVS’s realized contribution, any remaining gaps, the performance of the assigned resource, and whether AVS remains the best alternative.
These questions don’t eliminate uncertainty, but they make the decision more disciplined.
Leadership’s responsibility is to understand what the business needs, determine whether AVS and the assigned resource can provide it, and evaluate whether the organization can convert that contribution into enough economic value relative to the alternatives.
The best measure of AVS isn’t how much work the resource performs. It’s what becomes possible because the capability exists.
