Amazon Vendor Central and Centra
Integration Agency & Consultants
Commercial risk with Amazon Vendor Central increases the moment inventory levels in Centra fall out of sync. When Amazon issues Purchase Orders based on outdated stock data, the result is usually performance warnings or financial penalties for undersupply. We prioritise Centra as the source of truth for your product catalogue and inventory, ensuring that availability updates and order acknowledgements reflect actual stock levels across all your owned and marketplace channels.
Evaluating system audits and integration gaps
We connect your Amazon Vendor Central and Centra integrations quickly, supporting your Ecommerce and Marketplaces operations. Our consulting services are invaluable for businesses using Amazon Vendor Central, Centra, and other Ecommerce Marketplaces. Through our system audit services, we identify inefficiencies and integration gaps, enabling both our consultants and your team to take decisive action. This ensures your technology ecosystem runs efficiently, so you can deliver an excellent customer experience and keep your Marketplaces and Ecommerce platforms performing at their best.
Solution Design
We design Amazon Vendor Central and Centra integrations with Centra as the primary source of truth for product catalogues and inventory levels. A core decision involves the management of inventory updates to Amazon. We typically prioritise frequent stock pushes from Centra to Amazon to prevent overselling, acknowledging the trade-off that continuous updates require careful monitoring to handle potential API limits. Purchase orders from Amazon are mapped into Centra for fulfilment to ensure data consistency. This design ensures the operations team works from a single stock pool in Centra while finance can reconcile Amazon records against Centra data. The result is a controlled operating model where Amazon availability is managed through inventory levels maintained in Centra.
Mapping data flows and fulfilment cycles
The integration establishes Centra as the source of truth for product data and inventory, pushing updates to Amazon Vendor Central to maintain accurate availability. Purchase orders are retrieved from Amazon and synced into Centra for fulfilment. We implement data mapping rules to align Amazon identifiers with Centra SKUs, ensuring that when an order arrives, Centra recognises the correct items. Order status updates and shipping notifications flow back from Centra to Amazon to complete the fulfilment cycle. Monitoring is used at every stage to catch transmission failures or quantity mismatches before they lead to operational issues or Amazon performance strikes.
Orchestrating workflows via secure IPaaS middleware
Leveraging IPaaS with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 and above security accreditations enables secure, efficient integration between Amazon Vendor Central, Centra, and other Ecommerce and Marketplaces platforms. This approach simplifies connecting Amazon Vendor Central and Centra to various Ecommerce and Marketplaces systems, ensuring data security and compliance. IPaaS platforms offer centralised management, automation, and scalability, making integrations more reliable and future-proof for growing Ecommerce businesses.
Monitoring sync exceptions and mapping failures
Standard dashboards often ignore the fact that specific items within a sync may have failed to map correctly. Our approach prioritises exception visibility, surfacing discrepancies between Centra inventory and Amazon availability before they cause overselling. We monitor for purchase orders that fail to import into Centra and identify shipping notifications that were not correctly received by Amazon. By surfacing these mapping issues and stock gaps early, your team can resolve problems before they affect fulfilment or lead to performance penalties. Visibility means knowing exactly where the data flow has stalled and exactly what needs fixing.
Operational handover for finance and operations
Handover focuses on the finance and operations teams who manage the daily flow between Centra and Amazon Vendor Central. We transition ownership by training staff on how to monitor order flow, recognise mapping errors, and manage inventory exceptions. Teams learn to check purchase order statuses daily and reconcile fulfilment data regularly. Documentation is provided as a practical operational manual, detailing who owns specific failure types such as SKU mismatches or rejected shipping notifications. This ensures your team can interpret integration alerts and take direct action, maintaining a consistent sync between Centra and Amazon without relying on technical experts for routine issues.
Post launch governance and technical health
Support is an ongoing operational service focused on maintaining system health. After launch, we monitor the connection between Centra and Amazon Vendor Central for sync failures, inventory discrepancies, and rejected data transmissions. We manage the technical health of the integration, alerting your team only to specific business exceptions that require their attention, such as inventory shortages or unmapped items. This monitoring ensures that issues are identified and addressed before they affect your Amazon performance or fulfilment processes, providing the stability needed to manage sales volumes effectively.
Common failures
Mismatched product and case pack identifiers
Operational impact: Amazon Purchase Orders (POs) for case packs are incorrectly processed as single units ('eaches') in Centra. This leads to incorrect stock allocation, short-shipments, and significant chargeback penalties from Amazon. The finance and operations teams must then manually reconcile discrepancies between POs, Item Fulfillments, and Amazon's payment advice.
Prevention / Action: The integration logic must include a specific lookup and conversion layer for units of measure. During implementation, establish Centra as the source-of-truth for product data, mapping each Centra SKU to its corresponding Amazon ASIN and defining the case pack quantity. All inbound POs must pass through this logic to convert Amazon's order quantity into the correct base unit quantity before a Sales Order is created in Centra.
Delayed or failed Advance Shipping Notice (ASN) transmission
Operational impact: When the ASN (EDI 856) message fails to transmit or is rejected by Amazon's gateway, inbound deliveries at Amazon fulfilment centres can be refused. This creates expensive return-to-sender freight costs, chargebacks for non-compliance, and delays the order-to-cash cycle. Operations teams must halt dispatches and manually investigate data errors, causing a backlog.
Prevention / Action: Structure the process so that an ASN is generated and successfully transmitted before the physical goods are released to the carrier. The integration must validate that all required data, including SSCC carton labels and carrier details, is present in Centra before triggering the ASN. Implement robust monitoring to immediately alert the operations team of any transmission failures, allowing for correction before the vehicle leaves.
Inventory latency and overselling
Operational impact: Delays in synchronising Centra's stock levels with Amazon Vendor Central lead to inaccurate availability. This can result in Amazon issuing POs for stock that has already been sold via other channels, forcing a rejection of the PO. Consistently rejecting POs damages the vendor's operational scorecard with Amazon and can lead to suppressed listings or delisting of SKUs.
Prevention / Action: Configure Centra as the definitive source-of-truth for inventory. Inventory updates should be pushed to Amazon on a frequent, scheduled basis, especially after large stock movements from other sales channels. The integration should be designed to handle high-volume updates and include queueing and retry logic to manage API rate limits from either system without losing data.
Frequently asked questions
How does the integration prevent overselling on Amazon if Centra is our master source for stock?
The integration establishes Centra as the single source of truth for inventory levels. Any stock movement in Centra, such as a sale from your direct-to-consumer site, triggers an immediate inventory update to Amazon Vendor Central. This ensures the availability figure on Amazon accurately reflects your true stock position, preventing you from selling the same item twice.
Our SKUs in Centra don't match Amazon's ASINs. How is this handled?
This is a common issue that is solved by creating a mapping table between Centra SKUs and Amazon ASINs as part of the integration. When Amazon sends a Purchase Order referencing an ASIN, the integration uses this table to identify the corresponding SKU in Centra for fulfilment. Without this, order processing and stock synchronisation would consistently fail.
How are Purchase Orders from Amazon Vendor Central processed into Centra?
Amazon sends Purchase Orders via an EDI 850 message, which the integration automatically translates into a standard Sales Order in Centra. A crucial part of this process is sending an EDI 855 Purchase Order Acknowledgement back to Amazon. This confirms you have received the order and prevents Amazon from flagging it as late or unacknowledged, which can impact your vendor rating.
Amazon orders in case packs, but Centra tracks individual units. How do you prevent errors?
The integration must correctly translate Amazon's 'Unit of Measure' into Centra's base unit for each SKU. For example, if Amazon orders one case containing 12 units, the integration ensures the Centra Sales Order is created for 12 individual items. Getting this logic wrong is a frequent cause of major fulfilment and inventory errors, as the business could ship 12 cases instead of 12 eaches.
How does Amazon get shipment details once we fulfil an order in Centra?
When a shipment is created for an Amazon order in Centra, the integration generates an EDI 856 message, known as an Advance Ship Notice (ASN). This ASN, containing the tracking number and carrier details from the Centra shipment record, is transmitted to Amazon Vendor Central. This is a mandatory step to confirm despatch and is essential for Amazon's goods-in process at their fulfilment centres.