Why the 3P side of Amazon has been a blind spot for CPG, and what closing that gap unlocks 

Amazon’s eCommerce business runs on a hybrid model. In the 1P model, Amazon buys inventory directly from a brand at wholesale and resells it as the merchant of record—setting the price, owning the customer relationship, and controlling fulfillment. In the 3P model, brands (or resellers and distributors) sell directly on Amazon’s marketplace through Seller Central, retaining control of pricing and brand presentation but taking on the operational load themselves. Increasingly, the same ASIN (Amazon’s term for SKU), and the same brand, can be sold through both models simultaneously, sometimes by different sellers with little oversight from the brand or Amazon. 

The Challenge: Most Measurement Stops at 1P 

While many manufacturers have strong visibility into their own Vendor Central performance, visibility into broader marketplace activity is often much more limited. Vendor Central gives manufacturers detailed visibility into what Amazon bought and sold as merchant of record for the products they supply directly to Amazon. 3P is a different story. Sales run through numerous individual sellers, each with its own listings, pricing, and reporting, and a meaningful share of that volume comes from resellers and distributors the manufacturer never directly authorized. 

The result is an incomplete category view: 

• Total demand is undercounted. A brand tracking only its 1P sales is, in many categories, seeing a fraction of the sales of its product on Amazon. 

• Competitive share is distorted. If a competitor sells predominantly 3P and a brand’s own measurement doesn’t capture that volume, head-to-head share comparisons are built on mismatched data. 

• Pricing and brand risk go undetected. Unauthorized 3P listings can undercut MAP pricing or misrepresent packaging, and without a data pipeline into 3P, the manufacturer often finds out from a retailer or a customer complaint, not from its own reporting. 

• Media and assortment decisions are made on partial signal. Advertising spend, new-item launches, and portfolio prioritization all get calibrated against incomplete demand data if 3P volume is invisible. 

• Emerging innovation signals are missed. Ingredient trends, new product concepts, and challenger brands often gain traction in Amazon 3P before appearing in broader retail measurement. 

None of this shows up in a measurement approach designed around traditional retail POS or even total eCommerce dollars. Amazon’s marketplace structure requires a fundamentally different kind of data access, one that can see inside 3P selling at the same level of detail brands may already have for 1P. 

As Amazon’s influence continues to grow, manufacturers need more than visibility, they need actionable insight. Measuring both Amazon 1P and 3P enables brands to understand the full competitive landscape, identify emerging trends, optimize pricing and assortment decisions, and respond more quickly to changes in consumer demand. The result is a more complete view of the market and a stronger foundation for strategic decision-making across Amazon and beyond.

Closing that gap requires solving a specific technical problem: Amazon organizes the marketplace around ASINs, while manufacturers run their business on UPCs. Without a reliable bridge between the two, 3P data stays fragmented and unusable at scale.

NIQ maps Amazon ASINs directly to UPCs, giving CPG brands granular, product-level visibility into 3P sales that were previously a black box. That mapping means a manufacturer can see 3P performance, by product, side by side with 1P, and build a single, accurate picture of total demand on Amazon rather than two disconnected ones.

As Amazon’s share of total CPG spend keeps climbing, the brands with the clearest view of the full marketplace, 1P and 3P together, will be the ones setting strategy instead of reacting to it.