Amazon Seller Central Business Value
Amazon Seller Central Fulfillment by Merchant
Section 1: Fulfillment by Merchant
Cheat Sheet
Amazon Fulfillment Options
• As a Seller with Amazon, you are in the fortunate position where you have a few options available to you on how you would like to fulfil orders for consumers that purchase your products from the Amazon Marketplace.
• You can choose to use Amazon to fulfil these orders for you or you can fulfil them yourself.
• You even have the option to have Amazon fulfil part of your catalog for you from their Fulfillment Centers, while you fulfil the rest of your catalog from your own warehouse or warehouses.
Fulfilled by Amazon
• The first option available to you is to have Amazon fulfil your orders from consumers who purchase your products from the Amazon websites.
• In this instance, you will do your own forecasting with the assistance of some reports from Amazon on product demand, create a shipping plan and ship your products to a single or multiple Amazon Fulfillment Centers.
• Then, when a customer purchases your product off of Amazon, Amazon will pick, pack and ship that product to the customer.
• Amazon will then deduct a referral fee or commission fee from the sale from the total sale price and pay you the balance of the sale price after their commission has been taken.
• For example, if your product sells for $20 on the Amazon marketplace, Amazon may have a referral fee of $2 for this particular product.
• Amazon will then pay you the $18 balance and keep the $2 referral or commission fee for themselves.
• The advantage to this option is that you don’t have to deal with all the little itty-bitty orders and the paperwork and labelling that goes into shipping a product to a consumer.
• The disadvantage is that, if Amazon does not have stock of your product, they will ship a product from another Seller who does have stock and you end up losing the sale.
• Further to this, using Fulfilled by Amazon means that you will also be charged a pick and pack fee for each order as Amazon has to pick and pack your orders for you.
Fulfilled by Merchant
• The second option available to you is to fulfil your orders from consumers who purchase your products from the Amazon websites yourself.
• In this instance, when a customer buys one of your products from Amazon, you will then pick, pack and ship the product yourself directly to the customer.
• Amazon will still deduct their referral fee or commission fee from the sale as described in the previous video and you will receive the balance in your account from Amazon.
• The advantage to fulfilling orders yourself is that you can be sure they are packaged securely and can even customize your parcel by including a personal message or a little thank you gift for purchasing your product.
• The disadvantage is obviously that you will need to keep on hand packaging materials, labels, et cetera, and would need to deal with the courier or mail yourself.