There are three Amazon fulfilment options to choose from when deciding to sell on Amazon (FBA, FBM and SFP) and this blog post will go into detail on the benefits and challenges of SFP (seller fulfilled prime). Deciding which fulfilment option is best to suit your business is key to being successful on Amazon, and each are tailored in specific ways to help your business.
What is Seller Fulfilled Prime?
Seller fulfilled prime (SFP) is the prime program that allows you to deliver your products directly to domestic Prime customers in 2 days, from your own warehouse. Amazon has seen that businesses who use SFP have experienced an average sales uplift of more than 50%.
Your company must meet strict performance metrics and shipping standards to qualify for SFP, but if you do qualify it can be very useful to reach more customers. To qualify for Amazon Seller Fulfilled Prime, your business must register and complete the trial period. Being eligible requires a business to have its own warehouse and have an Amazon Professional Seller account.
Benefits of SFP
It allows you to have full Prime eligibility as well as the flexibility of fulfilling orders from your own facility or a 3PL provider. This means it will allow you to offer Prime shipping without relying on Amazon's fulfilment centres, providing greater control over inventory and costs, whilst benefitting from having Prime customers.
SFP still gives you access to Amazon’s 24/7 customer service team, which consists of highly trained representatives that will help you with your customer service on your behalf. This saves you time and resources as well as customers being able to track orders and returns.
SFP is cheaper than FBA too, meaning you could save on shipping, handling, and storage fees.
So FBM may be might for you if:
- You still want full control over your shipping and storage.
- You want to take advantage of all Prime benefits.
- You want to benefit from both the benefits of FBA and FBM.
- You have your own warehouse to hold your stock or use a 3PL for your fulfilment.
Challenges of SFP
It is important to understand that qualifying for SFP can be a difficult and tedious process as your business has to reach all of the Prime performance requirements.
In order to qualify you must:
- Offer premium shipping options.
- Ship 99% of orders on time.
- Have an order cancellation rate of less than 0.5%.
- Agree to Amazon’s returns policy.
- Deliver orders with Amazon’s supported couriers.
- Allow all customer service to be dealt with Amazon.
Maintaining all of these rules can be extremely difficult for any business and therefore can be quite stressful.
When using SFP, it is likely your order rate will increase drastically and this can be extremely hard to deal with from your own warehouse, and problems can begin to happen.
Also, SFP requires very high shipping rates, which can add up as quite costly for your business which may eventually affect your profits.
What we do
GNOC are a 3PL provider, meaning we can store your products at our UK based warehouse, then pick, pack, and ship them out to your customers. Partnering with a 3PL can save your business both time and money, as all of the logistics are left to us. Find out more now.
We have a lot of experience in all Amazon fulfilment options, and here at GNOC we can help you with your SFP process. We will receive your products and then conduct a quality check to ensure they meet Amazon's SFP guidelines. We then move them to general storage, where they will be prepped and wait to be shipped.
Once your prime orders roll in, we will ship it to your chosen Amazon fulfilment centre as quickly as possible via our trusted couriers. It really is as simple as that!
