Amazon Vendor Central - Troubleshooting

While configuring your Amazon Vendor Central connection, you may encounter several issues. Understanding these common errors can help streamline the setup process and facilitate quick resolutions.

Authentication error "Client authentication failed"

This error may occur because Improvado cannot access your Amazon account. As of recently, Amazon requires regular rotation of application credentials every six months. Once rotated, your previous credentials remain active for 7 days, during which time you must reconnect your credentials or your accounts will stop updating and data will not be retrieved.

In the case of an upcoming rotation, Improvado will notify you of the impending expiration date and suggest the re-connection.

Solution

To fix this issue, re-connect your Amazon account with the current credentials. Learn more here.

Reconnecting a Connection via External Credential Request

If the connection was originally set up using Requesting Credentials from an External User, the reconnection process should follow the same steps.

To reconnect:

• From the reconnection page, request credentials by sending the non-Improvado user a unique link to a secure page where they can authenticate their account.
• The external user will need to re-authorize their credentials using that link.
• Once authorization is complete, you’ll receive an email confirming the successful reconnection.

Shipped COGS, Shipped Revenue and Shipped Units are roughly double

The signature reported most often is that Shipped COGS, Revenue and Units come out substantially higher than Amazon shows — in one investigated case roughly double — while Ordered Revenue and Units matched. That is not a currency problem and not a double extraction: it is one report requested several times.

Amazon serves the Vendor Sales report per combination of Distributor View (Manufacturing or Sourcing) and Selling Program (Retail, Business or Fresh). The Vendor Sales Report Options setting on the extraction order lets you pick more than one, and Improvado then runs one report job per selection and stores all of them in the same table. The same ASIN on the same day legitimately appears once per combination.

Every row carries the combination it came from, in the distributor_view and selling_program columns. Any aggregate that does not group or filter on those two columns adds the combinations together. How large the inflation looks depends on which combinations the order extracts and how much volume each one carries, so it is not a fixed multiplier and it will not affect every metric equally.

What to do:

• To reconcile against the Amazon Vendor Central UI, filter to the single combination the UI is showing you — the UI displays one Distributor View and one Selling Program at a time.
• In dashboards and downstream models, treat distributor_view and selling_program as part of the grain, alongside date and ASIN.
• If you only ever report on one combination, select just that one in the extraction order. The default is Manufacturing — Retail.