Trying to decide which Amazon fulfilment option is best for your business? We want to help you here at GNOC as each method of selling on Amazon can help your business in a variety of ways (Read more on FBM and SFP here). This blogpost will look into the key benefits and challenges of Fulfilled by Amazon.
What is Fulfilled by Amazon?
Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) is the process of storing your products in Amazon's fulfilment centres. This is a service offered by Amazon and it allows Amazon to take care of your inventory storage, order fulfilment, returns, and even customer service. It takes care of order fulfilment, including picking, packing, and shipping. The seller is only responsible for the associated fees, including storage and fulfilment fees.
Benefits of FBA
Using FBA means you will have access to Prime customers, help with customer service issues, inventory storage, handling returns, and efficient scaling during peak seasons. FBA gives you the option to offer free shipping, or one or two-day shipping to Prime Members. This is hugely popular in increasing sales as customers look for next-day delivery options when online shopping, it also gives you a better chance of winning Amazons buy box.
FBA also allows you to gain full trust from your customers too as Amazon do intense quality checks to ensure your items are getting sent out correctly and quickly, meaning more of your customers are happy. You also don’t have to worry about managing your own warehouse and fulfilling your own orders, allowing you to focus on running other facets of their business, and helping with growth.
So FBM may be might for you if:
- You have large sales volume (specifically in peak demand periods).
- You want to expand to more international markets and offer international shipping and handling of orders.
- You don’t have warehouse space.
- You are fighting for the buy box or want to benefit from Prime customers.
Challenges of FBA
The main challenges of FBA are flexibility as well as costs. You will no longer have full control over your stock, and this can be fairly daunting as you are leaving a large amount of responsibility with Amazon. It is extremely hard to keep up with demand and industry trends when it comes to eCommerce businesses, and once a product is shipped to Amazon to be stored and fulfilled, you can’t be very flexible.
Using FBA can also be a challenge if you are planning on selling on other platforms as your products are tied up at Amazon centres, therefore it is hard to change packaging, add customs or inserts to your orders.
It is also extremely costly, as you are getting all of the perks of Amazon (such as prime customers), and these costs may eat into your profits quite heavily.
What we do
Here at GNOC, we can help support you with your FBA services. To save yourself on warehouse space and staff, partner up with us to keep your stock at our UK based warehouse and we can handle your FBA fulfilment from there.
We will conduct a quality control check of your products, then send them to general storage in our Durham warehouse, where they will wait to be prepped and shipped to Amazon. When your customer orders, we will ensure they are packaged and labelled correctly, and then ship them to your nominated Amazon warehouse, where Amazon will then sort out the rest.
Find out how to partner up with GNOC here, then you can relax, and watch your orders come flying in.
