"Should we grow sales or margins with #Amazon in 2026?" π Most vendors treat th
By Martin Heubel Β· June 11, 2026 Β· Curated by George's Blog
"Should we grow sales or margins with #Amazon in 2026?" π Most vendors treat this as a trade-off, making it one of the most expensive decisions in their business.
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To run a successful vendor operation, your efforts need to focus on growing sales above or in line with your category growth.
Setting a 10% growth target when your category is growing 15% means you'll lose market share. So if every other year you prioritise profitability over growth, chances are you're losing relevance in the market, which you'll then have to (expensively) recapture with higher marketing investments.
The opposite is just as damaging.
Prioritise margin over growth and you'll engineer your way into irrelevance. Cut investments, narrow your assortment, walk away from contested categories⦠and you'll see your Net PPM tick up for a quarter or two. Then your Vendor Manager will notice.
Slower growth than your category means less leverage in your next AVN. This leads to fewer concessions on cost increases, harder terms, and a longer list of demands you cannot afford to push back on. The margin you protected this year becomes the margin you bleed next year.
Leading vendors run their operations differently. They protect their sales and margin by being deliberate about the role of each product:
π Hero ASINs drive volume and category share
π Profit ASINs carry your Net PPM & Net Margins
π Tail ASINs get rationalised, delisted, or moved to 3P
Vendors that treat their assortment as a single block and apply the same growth or profitability target to every product will keep getting forced into the false trade-off year after year...
... and then wonder why their margins never recover.
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