Andrew Hamada explains why Amazon Vendor Central brands stuck on manual reporting can't scale. Downloading reports by hand works until you add more countries or report types, then you're hiring people just to download spreadsheets. Programmatic APIs let you automate it instead.
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When we first meet a lot of brands that are looking for help with their Amazon data, many of them are currently manually downloading all the reports that they need because it's just so difficult to build a programmatic scalable solution that leverages all of Amazon's APIs. As long as your team is manually downloading reports from vendor central, you're going to be limited. If you imagine somebody is downloading five different reports for your Amazon business and you want to add a another five reports, there's no efficiencies gained. That person needs to spend twice as much time. Now, if you wanted to add that same level of data for not just your Amazon US business, but also your business in Canada, Mexico, France, Italy, Spain, UK etc. Then you're multiplying that amount of time and that amount of effort. So this limits your desire to grow and it also limits the ability of your data practice to scale. Because the only way that you can do this is by adding additional humans, all of whom require you need to be data oriented, detail oriented and need to understand and your ecommerce business.