The biggest risk to your Amazon margin isn't Amazon.
By Ant Finch · July 21, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
The biggest risk to your Amazon margin isn't Amazon.
It's a team managing a significant Amazon business without the commercial skills to understand what's actually happening underneath it.
I'm not talking about platform knowledge.
Most Amazon teams know Vendor Central. They know how to manage POs, run ad campaigns, deal with chargebacks.
The operational capability is usually there.
What's missing is the commercial layer.
Understanding what Net PPM actually means and how every decision they make moves it.
Knowing how Amazon calculates profitability on their products and why that matters.
Being able to read a deduction report as a margin indicator, not just an admin task.
Understanding what ROAS/TACOS/ACOS means in a vendor context and why optimising to these is the wrong move.
Knowing their P&L before they walk into any commercial conversation with Amazon.
These aren't advanced skills, they're baseline commercial competencies for anyone managing an Amazon vendor account.
But most teams were never taught them. They were hired for operational capability, trained on the platform, and left to figure out the commercial model themselves.
That gap is where margin disappears.
The brands consistently protecting and improving margin on Amazon have teams who understand the commercial model as well as they understand the platform.
Not one or the other.
When did your Amazon team last have any formal commercial training not platform training?
If the answer is never it's worth fixing before the next AVN.
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🚀 I help Amazon vendors increase their margins by 5-20% in 90 days.