Amazon is shutting down Vendor Express, which launched three years ago as a shortcut for wholesalers to sell inventory, according to an email sent to merchants
Context & Ripple Effects
Vendor Express was Amazon's attempt to let wholesalers hand over inventory without negotiating full vendor terms — a lighter-weight on-ramp into first-party retail. Its shutdown after three years continues a pattern: Amazon already killed its Shopify competitor Amazon Webstore in 2015, and the company has since kept pruning services that sit outside its core marketplace engine.
First-order effects
- Wholesalers who used Vendor Express as their only Amazon channel must either migrate to standard vendor terms or open marketplace seller accounts, absorbing fulfillment, pricing, and customer-service work they previously outsourced.
Second-order effects
- Pushing suppliers onto the marketplace shifts inventory risk and logistics costs onto them — a dynamic that resurfaced a year later when Amazon abruptly stopped buying from thousands of wholesale vendors outright.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Amazon's first-party relationships keep thinning toward a marketplace-first structure where suppliers compete for visibility — including through ads Amazon can throttle, as vendors later reported with blocked ads on unprofitable products.
The trend: Amazon is steadily dismantling auxiliary first-party programs in favor of a third-party marketplace model where sellers carry the cost and risk.