Amazon Japan Vendor Central (1P) vs Seller Central (3P) for Foreign Brands

Almost everything written in English about selling on Amazon Japan — including everything else on this site until now — quietly assumes one model: you open a Seller Central account, you list your products, you are the seller of record, and Amazon takes a cut. That is 3P, and it is where the overwhelming majority of foreign brands operate.

There is a second model. Under 1P, run through Vendor Central, you don’t sell to Japanese shoppers at all. You sell wholesale to Amazon, Amazon becomes the retailer, and the listing says Amazon is the seller. Brands usually meet this model in one of two ways: an email arrives from Amazon’s retail team, or a competitor’s listing shows “sold by Amazon” and someone in the room asks why yours doesn’t.

This article is the arithmetic and the decision criteria: what each model actually pays you per unit, what you give up, the Japan-specific gates that sit in front of 1P for a company without a Japanese entity, and the honest limits of what can be verified about how the invitation process works.

The Two Models, Stated Precisely

The distinction that matters is who owns the inventory at the moment a Japanese consumer buys it.

• 3P (Seller Central). You own the inventory until the shopper buys. You set the retail price, you write the listing, you are the merchant of record for that transaction, and you pay Amazon a referral fee on each sale — plus fulfilment fees if you use FBA. The listing shows your store name as the seller.
• 1P (Vendor Central). You sell the goods to Amazon at a wholesale price against a purchase order. Amazon owns the inventory from that point, sets whatever retail price it wants, and carries the customer relationship. The listing shows Amazon as the seller and shipper.

Amazon operates both models in Japan — vendorcentral.amazon.co.jp is a live Japan-specific vendor portal, listed alongside the other marketplaces in Amazon’s own developer documentation for its selling APIs. So this is a real fork, not a US-only phenomenon.

For scale context: Amazon’s quarterly disclosures put third-party sellers at roughly 60–62% of paid units worldwide across recent quarters. Most units on Amazon are 3P. 1P is the smaller, invitation-shaped side of the business, and nothing about being on it is a graduation.

The Money: What You Actually Keep Per Unit

This is where most 1P-versus-3P conversations should start and usually don’t, because the two models don’t present their costs in comparable form. 3P costs are published on a public fee page. 1P costs live in a negotiated vendor agreement.

The 3P side is published

Amazon’s official Japan selling-fee page states a professional selling plan at ¥4,900 per month (excluding tax), or ¥100 per item sold on the individual plan, plus a category referral fee. Published referral rates range from roughly 5% to 15.4% depending on category, with several categories tiered by price band. If you use FBA, published per-unit fulfilment fees for standard-size items start in the low hundreds of yen and scale with size and weight, and monthly storage is charged by volume with a higher rate in the October–December peak. Rates and bands change; the fee schedule in your own Seller Central account is the version that governs your invoice.

The important property here is not the specific numbers — it is that you can build a per-unit model from a public page before you commit to anything.

The 1P side is negotiated, and the headline number is only the start

Under 1P you invoice Amazon a wholesale price. Japanese industry commentary on Vendor Central typically describes wholesale pricing landing somewhere in the range of 40–70% of the retail price, which is a wide band and, importantly, is agency and consultant commentary rather than anything Amazon publishes. Treat it as an order-of-magnitude sanity check, not a rate card.

Then there is the part that catches brands out. A vendor agreement typically carries allowances and deductions layered on top of the wholesale discount — co-op marketing allowances, damage and freight allowances, early-payment discounts, and chargebacks for operational failures like late or non-compliant shipments. Practitioner commentary circulates specific percentages for these. We are deliberately not quoting those figures: we could not verify any of them against an Amazon disclosure, they are drawn overwhelmingly from the US vendor experience, and a number you cannot source is worse than no number when you are modelling margin. What you should take from this is structural, and it is reliable: the wholesale percentage you negotiate is not the number you receive, and the gap between the two is set by terms you have to read in your own agreement.

The honest way to compare the two models is therefore asymmetric, and that asymmetry is itself a finding:

You can model 3P economics accurately before you start. You cannot model 1P economics accurately until you have the actual agreement in front of you.

The Japan-Specific Gate: Who Imports, and Who Issues the Invoice

This is the section that does not exist in the US version of this comparison, and it is the one most likely to decide the question for a foreign brand.

Under 1P, Amazon Japan buys goods and takes delivery. That means two things have to be true before a purchase order can be filled at all.

1. Somebody has to import the goods into Japan

Amazon buying from you does not make Amazon your importer. Goods have to clear Japanese customs under a named importer of record, and a company with no presence in Japan cannot simply appoint itself. This is the same structural problem we cover in do you need a Japan entity to sell online — except 1P removes the escape hatch that makes cross-border 3P workable. Under 3P you have real options: ship direct-to-consumer from overseas with each parcel clearing in the customer’s name, or use a partner arrangement to stock inventory in Japan. Under 1P you are making a domestic bulk delivery to Amazon’s warehouses, so the import has to happen upstream of the sale, under someone’s name, with duty and import consumption tax paid at that point. Our Japan 3PL vs cross-border fulfilment comparison covers what that stocking decision involves in practice.

2. You have to be able to issue a Japanese qualified invoice

Since the invoice system took effect, a Japanese business generally needs a qualified invoice from a registered issuer to claim an input consumption-tax credit on a purchase — subject to transitional relief that still allows a partial credit for a limited period. A wholesale sale to Amazon Japan is a business-to-business domestic transaction, so Amazon is the buyer that needs that credit, and you are the supplier who has to be registered to give it. In practice a buyer of Amazon’s size expects a qualified invoice rather than a transitional partial credit.

Japan’s National Tax Agency publishes a dedicated registration route for this: 適格請求書発行事業者の登録申請手続（国外事業者用）, the qualified-invoice-issuer registration procedure for foreign businesses. The NTA guidance flags an extra requirement for a foreign business with no office or place of business in Japan (特定国外事業者): a business required to appoint a tax agent (納税管理人) must have filed that appointment. In plain terms, a foreign company without a Japanese establishment generally needs a Japanese tax representative in place as part of becoming a qualified invoice issuer.

None of this is exotic — it is ordinary Japanese tax administration, and plenty of foreign companies complete it. The point is that it is work and time that sits in front of your first 1P purchase order, and it does not appear anywhere in the “Amazon wants to buy from you” email. Our Japan consumption tax guide for foreign sellers covers the registration and threshold mechanics in detail. This is general information rather than tax advice, and the specifics of your case belong with a Japanese tax professional.

Control: Price, Content, and Advertising

Retail price is the big one. Under 3P you set the shelf price. Under 1P you set the price you invoice Amazon, and Amazon sets the shelf price — moving it in response to competitors and other channels. If you are defending a price position in Japan, running selective distribution, or managing a global price architecture where the Japanese shelf price is visible to other markets, this is not a detail. It is the structural difference, and it propagates: a discounted Amazon Japan price becomes the reference price other Japanese channels and your own cross-border listings get compared against.

Price control is also the mechanism behind a problem we have written about separately. When you don’t control the shelf price and don’t control who else is listing, the Japanese marketplace gets messy fast — see someone else is selling your brand on Amazon Japan for the enforcement side of that.

Content ownership shifts. Under 1P, Amazon’s retail organisation has authority over the catalogue detail page in a way it does not when you are the brand-registered seller under 3P. Enhanced content tooling exists on both sides, but the version available and the approval path differ by model and change over time — verify what your specific agreement grants rather than assuming parity.

Advertising works differently. Both models can advertise on Amazon Japan, but the account structures, the available ad products and the reporting differ, and 1P advertising is more entangled with the co-op and marketing allowances written into the vendor agreement. If advertising is central to your Japan plan, get concrete about which ad products you will actually have access to before signing.

One thing genuinely improves under 1P: the customer-service and returns burden mostly leaves your desk, because Amazon is the retailer. That has real operational value — but the flip side is that Amazon then decides refund and return outcomes with your name on the product and no seat at the table. Our comparison of who actually handles disputes and refunds across Japanese platforms covers how that adjudication works.

“We Got Invited” — What That Actually Means

Here we have to be careful, because this is the part of the topic where confident English-language content most outruns its sources.

What we could verify: a Japan-specific Vendor Central portal exists at vendorcentral.amazon.co.jp, listed in Amazon’s own developer documentation for vendor APIs.

What we could not verify: an official Amazon statement, in English or Japanese, setting out the entry rules for the program. We checked the public Vendor Central landing page and it does not describe an invitation requirement; Amazon’s Japanese seller forums contain threads asking exactly this question, and in the ones we read the answers came from other sellers, not from Amazon staff.

What practitioner commentary consistently says — English-language agency writing and Japanese seller-forum posts from people describing themselves as registered vendors, which is secondary evidence and should be read as such:

• Entry is by invitation from Amazon’s retail organisation, usually arriving by email, sometimes originating from trade shows.
• Invitations tend to follow demonstrated sales performance on the 3P side, so the practical path to 1P generally runs through 3P.
• Amazon typically approaches manufacturers and authorised distributors rather than resellers.

Two planning conclusions follow, and both hold regardless of whether the commentary is exactly right:

1. You cannot schedule a Japan launch around a 1P invitation. There is no reliable application path to plan against. Build the 3P operation; treat an invitation as an option that may or may not appear.
2. An invitation is a purchase offer, not a promotion. Amazon’s retail team reaching out means Amazon’s buying algorithms think your product would sell profitably at wholesale. That is genuine validation of the product — and it is also a proposal to buy from you at a discount and take over your pricing. Those are separate facts, and it is worth keeping them separate when the email lands.

When 1P Actually Makes Sense

There is a real band where 1P wins, and it is not a consolation prize:

• Heavy, bulky or slow-turning products. When storage and fulfilment costs eat the 3P margin advantage, having Amazon absorb inventory carrying, storage and returns is worth a lot.
• You want out of retail operations entirely. No Japanese customer service, no returns processing, no inventory forecasting against Japanese demand. If your company genuinely does not want to run a Japanese retail operation, 1P converts it into a wholesale relationship you already know how to run.
• Volume predictability matters more than per-unit margin. Purchase orders are lumpy but they are orders, against which you can plan production.
• The “sold by Amazon” signal matters in your category. Japanese buyers read it as a trust marker, and it is widely reported to help conversion. It has a price — you are paying it in the wholesale discount — but in categories where counterfeit anxiety is high, it is a real asset.
• You already have a Japanese entity or importer. If the import and tax questions above are already solved for other reasons, the biggest structural barrier to 1P is already gone.

When 3P Wins for a Foreign Brand

• You need to control the shelf price — because of global price architecture, selective distribution, or a positioning you are defending.
• You have no Japanese entity and don’t want one yet. 3P has genuine cross-border paths that 1P does not.
• Your margin is thin enough that the wholesale discount kills it. Run the arithmetic per unit; for many consumer categories the answer is obvious once written down.
• You want the customer data and the brand relationship — reviews, Brand Registry tooling, advertising you control, and visibility into what is actually selling.
• You are still learning the Japanese market. 3P lets you change price, listing and assortment weekly. 1P puts a purchasing organisation between you and the market.

The Decision Table

Question	1P — Vendor Central	3P — Seller Central
Who is the seller of record?	Amazon	You
Who sets the retail price?	Amazon	You
How you get paid	Wholesale invoice against a purchase order, less negotiated allowances and chargebacks	Retail price less published referral and fulfilment fees
Can you model economics before committing?	Not fully — terms are in the agreement	Yes — fee schedule is public
Who imports into Japan?	You or your Japan-side partner, before delivery	Cross-border per parcel, or you stock Japan-side
Japanese qualified-invoice registration	Needed for your buyer’s input tax credit	Driven by your own taxable-sales position
Who handles Japanese customer service and returns?	Amazon	You, or FBA for fulfilment-side contact
How you get in	Reported to be invitation-only; not officially documented	Open registration
Speed of change	Through a purchasing relationship	Same day, by you

A note on running both

Hybrid 1P-plus-3P setups exist — typically core lines sold to Amazon at wholesale while newer, higher-margin or test SKUs stay on Seller Central. It is a legitimate structure. It is also two operating models, two sets of terms and two teams’ worth of coordination, which is why we would not recommend a foreign brand start there. Get one model working in Japan first.

Where LAUNOVA Fits

Our Amazon Japan seller support work is Seller Central work: Japanese listing production, catalogue and inventory operation, advertising, customer service, and account health. That is a deliberate scope. It is where nearly every foreign brand’s Japan account actually sits, and it is where operational execution changes the numbers.

We are not a 1P negotiation practice and won’t pretend to be one. If a Vendor Central invitation is on your desk, the useful things we can do are narrower and, we think, more honest: model the per-unit arithmetic against your current or projected 3P economics, and map the Japan-side importer and qualified-invoice questions that have to be answered before commercial terms mean anything. If the wider question is really “how should this brand be structured in Japan at all,” that is our cross-border ecommerce Japan territory, and it overlaps heavily with the distributor versus own store decision — 1P is, in structural terms, the same trade in a different wrapper: someone else takes the margin and the pricing power, and you get simplicity.

The Short Version

1. 3P means you sell to Japanese shoppers and pay published fees. 1P means you sell to Amazon at wholesale and Amazon becomes the retailer.
2. You can model 3P per-unit economics from a public fee page. You cannot fully model 1P until you have the vendor agreement, because allowances and chargebacks sit on top of the wholesale discount.
3. For a foreign brand, 1P has two Japan-specific gates in front of it: someone must be importer of record for a domestic bulk delivery, and you generally need to be a registered qualified invoice issuer — which for a company with no Japanese establishment usually means appointing a Japanese tax agent.
4. The biggest thing you trade away is retail pricing control, and in Japan that price is visible to every other channel you run.
5. Entry is widely reported to be invitation-only, but we could not verify that against an official Amazon source. Either way, you cannot plan around it — build 3P and treat an invitation as optionality.
6. 1P genuinely wins for heavy, slow-turning or low-margin goods, for brands that want out of retail operations, and where the “sold by Amazon” trust signal carries the category.
7. For most foreign brands entering Japan, 3P is the right first model — and the practical route to a 1P invitation runs through it anyway.