A Billion-Dollar Amazon Seller Just Moved Most of Its Business From 3P to 1P
Ziel Home Furnishing Technology, a Chinese cross-border home goods company listed on the Shenzhen exchange, restructured its Amazon business almost entirely in six months. Revenue from Amazon's traditional third-party B2C channel fell 40.25% to RMB 1.447 billion in the first half of 2026, dropping from 60.44% of core business revenue to 30.17%. Over the same period, revenue through Amazon Vendor Central surged 406.31% to RMB 1.866 billion, climbing from 9.20% to 38.91%.
Vendor Central is now Ziel's largest Amazon channel. Total company revenue still grew 19.32% to RMB 4.826 billion, with net profit up 29.16%, so this wasn't a retreat. It was a deliberate channel swap that worked.
What Vendor Central Actually Is
The distinction matters for understanding what Ziel did. On Seller Central, the standard third-party setup, you sell directly to customers and control pricing, listings, and inventory decisions. On Vendor Central, you sell your inventory to Amazon at wholesale, and Amazon becomes the retailer. Amazon buys the products, warehouses them, sets the retail price, and handles customer service. Your listings carry the “Ships from and sold by Amazon.com” designation.
Vendor Central is invitation-only, which is the first reason most sellers can't simply copy this move. Amazon decides who gets in.
Why This Timing Is Genuinely Surprising
Here's what makes Ziel's shift counterintuitive: Amazon has spent the past two years shrinking Vendor Central, not expanding it. In November 2024, Amazon sent 60-day termination notices to thousands of vendor accounts, reportedly cutting brands doing less than roughly $5 million in annual vendor revenue. A similar purge hit in 2019. Industry analysis describes 2026 Vendor Central as harder to stay in, more expensive to participate in, and less profitable than it was even in 2023.
Ziel scaled into that channel at exactly the moment Amazon was culling it. At RMB 1.866 billion, roughly $260 million, Ziel is far above the revenue threshold where Amazon has been terminating vendors, which is likely why it had the option at all.
The Bigger Pattern This Fits Into
Ziel isn't the only large Chinese seller restructuring away from standard third-party selling. EcomCrew's own reporting from Shenzhen documented AUGROUP, another publicly listed seller, going from 84% of revenue on Amazon in 2021 to just 53% in 2024, with sellers there increasingly pointing to TikTok Shop and Temu as their growth channels rather than Amazon.
Ziel is diversifying too, just in a different direction. Beyond Amazon VC, revenue from German marketplace OTTO grew 27.25% to RMB 231 million, its own website grew 21.54%, other B2C platforms grew 25.81%, and its offline B2B business grew 21.75%. The company is spreading across channels rather than betting everything on any single one.
What This Means for Your Own Channel Strategy
The direct lesson is limited, since Vendor Central isn't open to most sellers and Amazon has been actively reducing the number of brands in it. If you're not already invited, this isn't a strategy you can execute.
The transferable lesson is what the numbers demonstrate. Ziel moved roughly 30 percentage points of its revenue mix between two Amazon channels in six months and grew total revenue 19% while doing it. That's a company treating its channel allocation as an active decision rather than a fixed structure, and it's the same instinct behind the AUGROUP shift and the broader move toward TikTok Shop and Temu among large Chinese sellers.
For most sellers, the practical version is auditing what percentage of your revenue depends on a single channel, and whether that concentration reflects a real strategic choice or just accumulated inertia. The sellers moving fastest right now are the ones treating that mix as something to actively manage, particularly heading into a Q4 where fee structures, insurance requirements, and compliance costs on Amazon are all rising at once.
