Pros and Cons of Amazon FBA Shipping

When you become an online seller, one of the greatest challenges you come across as a growing merchant is warehousing inventory. After a certain point, you will require a larger space than your garage or basement to keep your inventory. This adds on to your cost which includes real estate rent, picking of items, packing them, and shipping them to your customers. All this planning quickly become everyday challenges.Fortunately, there is a service by Amazon FBA Shipping as most us know it. Before we talk about the pros and cons of shipping to Amazon FBA service, let us briefly understand what it is all about.

What is Amazon FBA Shipping?

Amazon has created one of the most advanced fulfillment networks in the world, to help business flourish easily. Amazon charges a small amount to shipping cost amazon fba and take care of your inventory.

Pros of ship directly to Amazon FBA

Like everything else, this also has its share of roses and thorns. Let us first look at the pros first before we move on to the bad news:

No hassle for shipping

Becoming a seller online is not an easy job. When you receive an order When you get an order, packing it and sending it out is a lot of work. You must print a packing slip, Amazon FBA shipping labels, arrange a box to pack the item, stick on the shipping labels, and then give it to the shipping guys to pick it up. This is only for one order. Now if you got 20 orders a day, this would be a good chunk work and a lot of time will be lost in shipping alone.

This is where Amazon FBA Shipping comes to your rescue. With FBA, you send your stuff to Amazon, they do everything else for you.

Returns are easy

With Amazon FBA, managing returns have never been so easy. They take care of communication, inspection, returning the item to the seller, getting a refund or replacement of the item, and shipping it to the customer on behalf of the seller.

What else can you ask for?

Amazon FBA shipping fees

Amazon FBA Shipping is cheaper than shipping through other means. Amazon fba shipping rates very nominal for packaging and shipping the products to the customer. You can check the prices and compare before finalizing to use Amazon FBA shipping services.

Automatic Prime

When you fulfill with Amazon FBA Shipping, your items automatically qualify for Amazon FBA Prime shipping, this gives your prime customers free shipping in two days for all the products they shop for.

This reward is a huge motivator for consumers to buy more products and get them delivered in two days’ time.

As a seller, you don’t have to pay extra, and you’ll be charged the same rate, whether your customer is a Prime or regular consumer.

Buy box priority

Getting on top of the Buy Box could mean more orders and that too by hundreds. Sellers using FBA Shipping are higher up in the buy box. Have you noticed a little emblem saying, “Fulfilled by Amazon?” This means, in listings where 20 or more people are selling the same product, your product will be listed higher.

Multi-channel fulfillment

With FBA, sellers not restricted to sell on Amazon alone. They can sell their products on other marketplaces and fulfill their multi-channel orders with FBA.

Cons of Amazon FBA Shipping

There are a few cons to the Amazon FBA Shipping program that you should know –

Stale inventory/losing track

This may occur if you have many products to sell on Amazon. You’ll probably end up with quite a bit of stale inventory for which you are paying rent and not selling.

It becomes difficult to keep track of large inventory as well. A hundred to a couple of hundred products are easy to keep track of, but anything more than that will not be covered by the Seller Central Dashboard in one go.

Pooled inventory

Due to the plenty of products, and sellers, it is not possible for every merchant to get their own bin location. Quite often your inventory is pooled with the same products, from other sellers.

This means that the product your customer receives may not be the same one you provided to Amazon. It may be one from another seller.

The quality of that product may differ even if it’s the same product. If the customer complaints of poor quality and defects, your account may get suspended as well.

Difficulty in shipping product to Amazon

The difficulty of getting products over to Amazon’s warehouses may become challenging. Amazon has a very strict ASIN/UPC system, and each amazon shipping requirements fba product is required to be labeled individually, pack them up into multiple shipments and send them off.

So, one shipment to FBA will be 3 or 4 shipments, which adds up to the cost to ship to amazon fba.

Although you can consider a service by Amazon where they will label the products for you at $0.20 per product.