Walmart Transfer Fees - An Insane Tale of Stupidity (heads up Amazon!)

Fulfillment by Amazon Shipping to Amazon
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Going to try and keep this short and sweet.

  • Needed to ship 3024 units of a single sku to Walmart.
  • Wanted to keep this easy for the warehouse so on a pallet it goes.
  • Create new inbound order for Walmart
  • $280 for the Pallet to go from NY to IL (only 40" tall), 600lbs. Kind of a waste of space but we needed to take some of the inventory intended for Walmart and make 2-packs of the same product for the AMZ variation.
  • Hit with a $756 “Transfer Fee Charge”, on top of the $280 for the freight - $1,036 total - 34 cents a unit freight (tiny bottles).
  • Went with the split and SPD FedEx. Split 3 ways (576 units to CA / 1440 units to GA / 1008 units IL)
  • 21 shippers of 6 cases - 144 units per shipper. Total FedEx charges - $210.

Saved $846. Went from 34 cents a unit to 7 cents for freight.

There’s going to be some additional carboard / labor costs on our end (TBD if we even get charged for them), but this is all just silly.

Wanted to put this here because it just happened and this is what’s coming to Amazon FBA in March…

Instead of 3 mins to create a pallet shipment, it just took me almost 2 hours to figure this all out and provide actionable, accurate, directions to the warehouse to execute it.

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The transfer cost is likely based on some kind of average weight/size for the size category that it applies to. Because your products are tiny and light, it’s cheaper for you to split it than to pay the transfer fee. If they were larger and heavier the cost between the 2 options would have a smaller gap.

Either way, Walmart (and soon Amazon) doesn’t want to foot any kind of cost for the seller’s convenience.

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Agree with you. What pisses me off is there was no notification of this change. No warning, no time gap of a change, it just happened…

There’s no explanation either anywhere.

At least Amazon laid it all out and gave a 4 month advanced warning that it’s coming.

Quite unprofessional of Walmart IMO…

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Understood. Made a category change, updated title, added tags. And thank you @ASV_Vites !

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Sounds totally consistent with the historical way Walmart treated its vendors.

You have to recognize that they had experience with such activity before there even was an Amazon.

And for all of those years, their vendors got to prosper in spite of being abused.

Perhaps, you need to recognize that having survives as long as you have on Amazon has made you capable of dealing with the masters of the art.

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OK, I’ll bite - what is a “shipper” that holds “6 cases”? Or did you mean simply “shipments” of loose cartons, 6 to each destination?

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Pretty simple actually. :wink:

Each case contains 24 units. 6 cases fit snuggly in one of our standard boxes (shippers) - 18X14X14 - 29lbs.

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Oh, they ARE tiny bottles… elixir!