Yeah, that’s not right to have a forced placement fee on a shipment that large especially for a standard size which has many warehouses.
It might take a few months for the effects of this to ripple through, but prices will have to be hiked for this. For the lower margin products, how well the logistics game is played is going to be a big impact on who wins and who loses.
It’s funny because we have only split pallets 3 times so far - all done recently as a test for the future.
Pallets were going to different DC’s. Amazon Freight was the carrier. 1 truck picked up all 3 destinations.
Might be specifically where Amazon Freight is the carrier. We sent in a request to not have Amazon Freight as the carrier since they don’t have pallet jacks are usually have other peoples’ loads at the very edge of the truck (meaning the load before us just parked their load at the edge of the truck and blocked us from putting ours) - and we don’t want to have the rebalancing load discussion with the driver/amazon everytime - it was cheaper but we don’t have a dock - we just load with forklift (which is what I’m assuming the load before us did) - only one time did we push the other load back further with our pallets but who wants to take on that sort of risk and risk damaging our own goods in the process? Never had Amazon Freight assigned to us ever again after. So its always Central or Maersk and sometimes Estes (Yellow). So it’s usually 2 trucking companies for us. Maersk subcontracts like Amazon does but they come in tiny box trucks (not full sized) so usually the max capacity for Maersk is 6-8 or the largest I’ve seen is 12-14. Maersk also doesn’t have PO stickers and writes down their PO number on your copy of the BOL - some wild shenanigans I tell ya.
T_T
I would use an empty pallet to do the pushing. That way if it damages something it’s not your product. Though the next guy might be pushing your stuff back w/ their stuff. Seems like a crappy trucking “company” either way.
Precisely this which is why we don’t use Amazon Freight even though they are super cheap. None of their driver rebalance their loads and it can get complicated when you’re operating with a storage facility with JIT labor - which is why AWD might be the only option left and this year would have to significantly test the isht out of it
That’s great but they won’t take anything with a shelf life so we are SOL once again.
And BTW - I wouldn’t put Amazon in charge of anything I didn’t have to, including when to replenish the FC’s / DC’s. This just plugs another piece into the algorithm in terms of who they play favorites with, AKA, who spends the most on PPC.
I’m not losing any badge I might have bc inventory drops too low for same day next day Prime (in areas where that’s actually possible).
Let me be clear here, I think AWD is a trash service.
I’m just stating that it looks like they’re making some extra push for it. Giving Amazon more control than the huge amount of control they already have sounds terrible. Probably why nobody uses it right now so they need to put some pressure on. AWD probably lets you ship everything to 1 local warehouse with no splits, and then they take it from there, and of course no placement fees between AWD and FBA.
They’re also penalizing people big time who don’t use their partnered carrier for AWD, they want control of it ALL
Badgest don’t mean what they used to. I am organically ranked 1 for my branded kw for my main sku and yet I don’t have the choice badge for it. Someone is outspending me for sales for it but they don’t outrank me for it.
Well, as with everything logistics, economies of scale is key. The only reason we can ship a pair of Nike shoes from a sweat shop in China is because economies of scale let that voyage only cost $0.50 a pair across the Pacific Ocean.
I can see their need to push everything that way, as it decreases their operations cost. Airplanes on the ground, empty warehouse space, and idle trucks are expensive assets to let sit or go underutilized.
They have to do it for the direct to consumer side for Chinese sellers anyway, and the receive centers can’t operate if they are dealing with waves of containers input into FBA.
Makes sense, they have to run the program for chinese sellers, and they don’t want to hike rates on their precious china sellers, so they need to bring down costs and the way to do that is get more scale by forcing US sellers into the program.
