Not really though. This is about storing too little inventory, not too much.
Amazon has a way to hit their “partners” every which way now under the guise of better customer service.
I don’t see the placement fee increase as an issue.
There’s ALWAYS been a placement fee (15c for standard size items) that you had to opt into in order to not get your shipments split. At some point for whatever reason Amazon decided to stop splitting shipments, and you never got charged a placement fee.
I think it’s too early to cry foul on this unless they actually charge you a fee for when they decide to send your shipment to a single location.
Ya really though. If you only have limited quantities of items, that is exactly the problem. Amazon does not want your 3 items in Florida they want 100 of that item everywhere. They are trying to kill the case quantity for smaller sellers that have high ratios.
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You distributing it for them with multiple shipments to different destinations is the fee.
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Let’s say I am selling a popular personal care item from a national brand. A listing that has 10 sellers on it…
How does Amazon calculate what you have at FBA? Is it your sales for that item on a rolling 28 or some other magical # based on total sales for the ASIN?
There was a time when almost all FBA shipments went to a single location, with inventory placement service deactivated.
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Ya back when…
Flew
We now have to make pallets out of every SKU to get them on the same shipment.
Now it looks like this…
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I never used LTL, but earlier this year all of my SPD shipments were going to 1 FC, and they sometimes offered a rebate to split it, which I found very unusual.
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This is your friend if you keep getting split shipments…
Most of the time the destinations will merge to the same place if you create multiple “pallet” shipments at once meaning it all fits on one pallet.
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It SHOULD be based on your personal sales of the item.
If you’re a 1% buy box winner and the item sells 10K units a month, you wouldn’t restock 20K units, you’d restock like 200.
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Yea, I should be but what is it actually?
It’s that black box that sellers aren’t allowed to see.
Overall and to be honest, this doesn’t seem like a big deal to us.
I have a call with SAS on Thursday and I sent our manger a note “be prepared to discuss the fee changes in detail with real world examples based on our account”.
Gotta get something for the money we lay out.
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The current rate is 30 cents a unit…
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A long time ago they used to split my shipments into 2 or 3 different shipments but I could send them all to one fba warehouse if I chose inventory placement fee.
But I never did choose the fee and when they came out with the new workflow for sending to amazon I noticed then that every thing went to one fba with no fees or anything.
I guess they must have figured out no one was paying the fee anymore??
The low inventory fee also seems pretty messed up for us small handmade sellers. I typically only keep one or two of a sku in stock. Anything more and it sits for too long then I’m hit with long term storage fees.
But how will that fee even work? They want you to have 4 weeks of inventory but I already know their inventory recommendations is broken (it always wants me to send 5 or 10 of a sku, I never do. The two items I sent in 5 of a sku and finally after a year got rid of the last ones with discounts and long term storage fees, I wanted to test and they failed lol)
There is no way I can win with this. It will want to much qty but I know that amount of qty will never sell. Just double dipping on fees.
I’m taking a break from fba. Have not sent a shipment in since October. These changes are not beneficial to small time handmade sellers at all. I’d rather just have less sales instead of dealing with the stress and the fees. I hate that my fba fees are cheaper than usps postage.
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From what I read, you have the option to either opt in or opt out of “premium service” when you create each shipment. My guess is you have to do that BEFORE creating the shipment so they can get their fees even if they decided the entire shipment was going to one location.
I don’t see that being a huge issue as we use inventory placement now anyway. Seeing the new low inventory charges, we are probably going to be doing a lot more small package shipments just to keep up inventory levels. That’s going to cost more than bulk LCL shipments but comparing the premium service rates they published with our current inventory placement rates it looks like it might actually be less than we are currently paying. They didn’t break out the costs completely so it’s hard to say at this point though.
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Is this affected by a Buyer choosing “ships in Amazon packaging” at checkout? Because no matter how sturdy and ship-worthy the manufacturer’s or Seller’s packaging is, I don’t want to advertise my purchases.
I am FBA-ignorant, but doesn’t Amazon make you send in one large shipment that they then break up and disburse?
Edited title for format, added tags, pinned globally for a few days.
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Hm, looking a little more into it, it does seem like this is a new program. They’re also reducing fulfillment fees at the same time this new fee goes into effect (keep in mind that UPS hiked rates significantly, so the fact FBA isn’t hiking rates significantly as well is a huge deal in itself), so it looks like they’re now charging for receiving instead of building it all into the fulfillment fee. And it looks like you will have the option to avoid the fee by shipping to more locations.
I would still say it’s too early to cry foul on this. For most sellers it’ll probably end up being a wash when factoring in overall cost of fulfillment.
I agree with you but it is very dependent on algorithms with splits. There are ways to navigate it all but it’s not the seller’s choice or option. It’s what Amazon or their robots feel like doing on any given day.
That’s always been the problem with everything on Amazon.
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I think it’ll be a situation similar to missing inventory units. Sometimes you’ll get screwed on a split (or lack thereof), but if you average it out over the course of a year it’ll end up being a negligible amount that’s not worth stressing over.