Where are you seeing the FBA Fee Reduction value for your ASIN?
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It’s in the link on the announcement from Dec. For us, it’s 18 cents a unit.
Here’s the LINK
ETA from my last post. For the location that’s getting 2 pallets, they are allowing / suggesting that it’s combined into 1 pallet which makes this even better.
This used to take me about 5 mins to create a plan for a shipment this size. By the time I’m finished in the system and providing direction to our warehouse, it will be close to 3 hours.
This is lunacy.
It will be faster next time.
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It’s not lunacy, it’s AI.
Oh, wait…
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I’m just glad this worked out for LTL for this listing. It’s the only one that this will work for though but this worked out better than my best case SPD scenario I wrote about a few weeks ago.
4 pallets is a lot better than 76 shippers UPS. UPS never would pick up this much in 1 day. Would have been a nightmare.
Amazon is a nightmare.
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I am not high volume, I don’t ship pallets. I can usually avoid placement fees with shipments of 4 - 6 cases. However, with a recent 4 case shipment the cheapest option was to pay placement fees for fewer destinations. The total shipping cost to send each case to a different warehouse was higher than the total of shipping plus placement to fewer warehouses.
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It’s 5 and up. I doubt you’ll pay placement fees if you offer up 5 shippers. Those 5 shippers will likely go to just 4 locations.
I created 4 separate SPD plans last week for 4 different ASIN’s. 5 shippers each, no fees, 4 of the 5 went to 4 locations. 1 of them actually got split 5 ways.
I’ve got Walmart and Amazon all figured out now. Know how to avoid paying a penny for placement at either. Unless they make the system worse, we’re good, unless capacity limits get deeply cut. I don’t see that happening at Amazon and Walmart doesn’t have limits.
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I could avoid placement fees with 4 in this case. But the total shipping costs added up to more than paying the total of shipping costs with placement fees for fewer shipments. The difference in the shipping cost of shipping to the 4 destinations they offered and the shipping cost of the 3 destination option was more than the placement fees.
I think the sales velocity of the ASIN might have an effect on the fee avoidance options. 5 cases of this one would have been way overstocking.
Just pointing out that it pays to look at the total cost of each of the options instead of focusing solely on avoiding placement fees.
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100%. I spent hours fiddling around with lots of options till I landed on the path we went down.
Agree on the overstock for slower selling ASIN’s but you also need to weigh LTSF. In every scenario, it’s cheaper for us to pay LTSF then placement fees.
Every case is different.
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Just got the BOL’s for this 4-location shipment. Amazon Freight, likely the same truck.
It will be interesting to see how this goes and how long it takes.
NJ
2 different IN facilities
AZ
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Regional power unit owner/driver takes it to a regional Amazon hub all on same truck then distributed like every other LTL carrier across the country.
Pickup is done by a regional bidder who bids a route, and long haul from the hub is done by a relay bid winner to move inventory to the receive centers and then they bid a route for backhaul.
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I was thinking maybe the destination would be the nearest actual destination and from there it would be transferred everywhere else on those loads.
We will see what happens. We air-tagged these pallets as a test. LOL - Just kidding but might just do that one day for the fun of it.
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According to the Amazon Freight LTL rep I spoke with when one of our pallets came apart in the trailer, the receive centers are regional and do split to regional fulfillment centers, but the logistics is broken down to LTL for daily pickup, bundled to FTL for transfer to receive centers.
They maximize load/trailer capacity to keep logistics costs down. This is probably why they have not implemented tracking, because they don’t want you to see your inventory sitting at one location for several days, while they play tetris with the load and appointments.
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Good point, another factor to consider.
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There’s also a convenience factor to consider. How much is the time worth constantly micro-managing all of this vs. this fee or that fee.
It all boils down to this being another annoyance that Amazon stood up against their “Partners”.
Enough sellers figure out how to do things they way we are, I actually think this is going to cost Amazon $ rather than make them $.
Hope that happens. Karma.
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2 of 4 locations already checked in and counted, so that’s good. One of them was checked in within 24 hours of pickup.
Have a feeling that there is plenty of capacity to check in LTL / FTL at the moment with a lot of sellers going SPD splits to save on the placement fees.
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Seconded, because our own manipulations of the STA (“Send To Amazon”) workflow in recent weeks are increasingly leading me to the most-likely explanation for what we’re seeing being that.
I’m starting to think there will be some tweaking done one way or the other to make this make sense for Amazon.
They are either going to:
- Figure out a way to screw sellers that are avoiding the fees.
- Make this better for everyone (Sellers / Amazon), with an eye towards capacity / efficiency.
Most likely point 1, sadly
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It’s making you do the work of splitting up the shipments which saves them some amount of FC transfer work though, which is partly the point of this.
The big sellers will do the work and reduce the workload on the FCs, and the small sellers will have to pay placement fees to compensate Amazon for that work.
If they just wanted to hike fees they wouldn’t do it in some roundabout way with placement fees, they would just hike fees. It’s not like (a significant %) of sellers would stop using FBA in response to a hefty fee hike.
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I think it’s a game Amazon is playing to hike fees without hiking fees and giving sellers the opportunity to try and avoid them if they can. Many can’t, so it is a fee hike.
It’s just another piece of the Amazon puzzle with their multi-year plan to thin the herd or make the smaller members of the herd pay more to make it more worth Amazon’s trouble to keep them in the flock.
I’m sure you have noticed over the last few years how this change or that change comes out and it always seems to be against the smaller FBA seller. Not done by accident or without an agenda IMHO.
I could be wrong but I don’t think so.
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If they want to hike fees and improve service we would be happy to pay it.
We wish they would raise the monthly selling membership to $1000 monthly and in exchange offer propert seller support and stop the total errotion of seller support while nickel diming.
It would stop all the shucksters and drop shippers and attract serious sellers only. We have lost so much money (and Amazon too) by continuing to offer such poor seller help. I think this would solve both issues.
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