Harpy Glossary

JBP (Joint Business Plan)

Amazon & D2C glossary · Harpy Media

A JBP (Joint Business Plan) is the annual — sometimes half-yearly — growth agreement between a brand and Amazon’s retail team: the structured document a 1P vendor and Amazon build together to align commercial targets, promotional calendars, operational standards, and investment commitments for the period ahead.

What is JBP?

It exists because vendor relationships otherwise drift into reactive trading. Purchase orders arrive, chargebacks bite, assortment decisions get made without you — and nobody has agreed what the year is supposed to add up to. A JBP replaces that drift with a shared scoreboard: assortment, availability, and marketing goals that both sides have signed up to, with owners and dates attached.

What actually goes into a JBP

The working parts are consistent across categories. Revenue and unit targets. Assortment expansion — new SKUs, variants, bundles, and the launch calendar behind them. A marketing and promotional calendar for the year. Operational commitments such as fill rate, in-stock percentage, and chargeback reduction. And investment lines on both sides: AVS support, co-op spend, traffic-driving programmes, sometimes supply-chain terms.

The best versions are boringly specific. A target with no metric, no owner, and no review cadence is a wish, not a plan — and Amazon’s retail teams read the difference immediately. Write each commitment as a number, a date, and a person, or leave it out of the document.

How to make a JBP that actually gets used

Treat the plan as an operating rhythm rather than an annual ritual. The commitments should map onto metrics Amazon already reports — the Vendor Scorecard, fill rate, chargeback trends, search-term growth — so progress is visible without anyone compiling a special report. Monthly check-ins on the operational lines, quarterly business reviews on the commercial lines, and one mid-year reset when the numbers say a line needs re-planning.

When both sides are looking at the same dashboards, the meeting stops being a negotiation and becomes a diagnosis. That shift is the entire point of the exercise: a JBP is less about the document you sign and more about the twelve months of decisions it quietly governs.

In practice

Picture a beauty brand entering its second planning cycle. The plan commits ten new SKUs, a seasonal promotional calendar, and a 95% in-stock standard, balanced against marketing support and shared trade planning from Amazon’s side. Twelve months later the review isn’t a debate about goodwill — it’s a readout: each commitment against its number, each miss explained, each next-year ask priced against what was delivered.

⚠️ Watch out. The classic failure is the JBP as a filing-cabinet document: signed with fanfare, filed, and never opened again. Fill-rate misses go unchallenged, chargebacks accumulate, and the promotional calendar gets executed in isolation. When the next planning cycle arrives, the brand negotiates from a position of unexplained misses — and wonders why the asks that landed last year are suddenly expensive.

💡 Harpy tip. Bring data, not adjectives. Come to planning with last year’s scorecard mapped line by line against next year’s asks, and quantify what each commitment is worth to Amazon — search growth, category gaps, premium placement that converts. Vendors who arrive with the maths tend to leave with the calendar.

How Harpy Media helps

Vendor-side planning is core Harpy Media work: JBP preparation, AVN negotiation support, and the operational routines — fill rate, chargeback hygiene, scorecard reviews — that keep the numbers honest between planning cycles. We help brands walk in with evidence and walk out with commitments that hold.

JBP FAQ

Is a JBP only for 1P vendors?

The co-signed JBP is a vendor construct — Amazon’s retail teams build them with 1P suppliers. But the underlying discipline works for any serious seller: annual targets, a promotional calendar, availability standards, and an investment plan are worth running whether or not Amazon co-signs the document.

How is a JBP different from an AVN?

The AVN is the annual negotiation of commercial terms — costs, margins, funding, and support. The JBP is how both sides will grow the business during the year that follows. The AVN sets the deal; the JBP sets the plan.

What happens if you miss JBP targets?

In most cases it is not a contractual breach — but it costs leverage. Marketing support, category advocacy, and the next negotiation all reflect whether you delivered. Track variance quarterly and re-plan in the room, rather than trying to explain it at year end.

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