Benefits to Sellers and Customers Using FBA in the Festive Season

Consider increasing the number of faster selling items you convert to Fulfilled by Amazon during the busy run up to year end. This can result in the following benefits for your customers and incremental sales for yourself.

•   Amazon Prime and Free Super Saver Delivery: FBA items compete for the Buy Box showing £ 0 for shipping and most items qualify for FREE Super Saver Delivery and Prime shipping discounts.
•   Amazon Customer Service: Amazon handles customer service for FBA-fulfilled orders  including processing returns, which simplifies your festive season selling
•   Amazon's gift-wrap service: FBA-fulfilled orders are eligible for gift wrap services, adding a special finishing touch to any presents ordered.
•   Amazon's delivery promise for your products: Amazon lets customers know how late they can order your FBA-fulfilled products on Amazon in order to receive them in time for Christmas. This means more of your products can ship closer to the Christmas deadline with Amazon's delivery promise.
•   FBA orders can be combined with those from Amazon retail often leading to buyers adding FBA items to their Amazon order

If you have valuable products you're selling online, take advantage of Zero Fee Fulfilment  which means Zero Order Handling, Zero Pick & Pack, and Zero Weight Handling.  With Zero Fee Fulfilment, standard-size items selling for £ 300 or more will incur no  fees for orders sold on Amazon.co.uk.  Selling on Amazon fees, storage fees and other applicable fees still apply.  Please find an example of Zero Fee Fulfilment.

Best practices for Shipment Preparation

We also strongly urge you to comply with the best practices below for a smooth festive season:

•  Use EAN to match items when possible (see EAN and ASIN Matching Best Practices)
•  Do not send restricted items
•  Prep your shipment carefully—make sure all items and shipments are labeled appropriately (see FBA Help section 5.8 Packaging and Prep Requirements)
•  Make sure that quantity and items physically sent in a shipment are the same as those communicated while creating the shipment
•  LTL/FT shipments—make sure your carrier has secured a dock appointment
•  Be prepared to send items to different Fulfilment centres 

Testimonials from Sellers who are successfully selling their products internationally with Amazon

“Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) is the only way I know of allowing a one-man company to sell in multiple markets and turnover in excess of £1 million a year.  If I was to take this idea to ‘Dragons Den’ they would bite my hand off to invest”.
Julius Oliveti, Director of Gizmo-Deals

“Sales are up and we have access to an excellent customer base on Amazon in the UK and Germany”.
Sylvain Desprez, founder of French company Moeroshop admits that his business is years ahead of where it would otherwise have been thanks to Amazon.  He is now selling successfully across Europe too.

“Amazon has enabled us to easily expand our business into new international markets and grow our UK business through the economic crisis.  They offer an excellent low cost and low risk model allowing small businesses like ourselves to reach new customers all around the world.  Within 18 months from launching our products on Amazon’s international websites, 30% of our annual turnover is now from non UK sales.  Signing up as a seller has been one of the best decisions we have made as a company”
Ravi Karia from Universal Textiles based in Leicester who took the family business online

If you would like to know more about how to get started selling internationally, please visit our site about Unified Account and Amazon’s European Fulfilment Network or watch our video tutorials about How to configure your Amazon Europe Marketplaces account

Label units more efficiently with Scan & Ship

With our new Scan & Ship feature, you can build an inbound shipment by scanning Units using a barcode scanner, printing labels immediately, and adding the Units to a shipment with another quick scan. Scan & Ship is ideal for sellers who manage medium to large quantities of stickered inventory through the standard shipment creation workflow, rather than through Amazon MWS. 

Scan & Ship helps save time and reduce errors. Plus, it's configurable to your workflow. You can label all of your Units at once and add them to the shipment later, or you can label each unit and scan it into the shipment right away. Scan & Ship requires an Internet connection, single label printer, a bar code scanner, and thermal label stock. 

You can access Scan & Ship through your Seller Account under Manage FBA Shipments. Just click Scan & Ship to begin. For more information, check out the FBA Help 5.1.2 Scan & Ship.  

Important Update about the Long Term Storage Programme – Report enhancements to help you effectively manage your inventory

In May we announced the semi-annual Inventory Cleanup coming in August. This has generated a lot of discussion about how this change will affect sellers. To address those concerns we would like to focus specifically on two new features that will help you manage your inventory. First, we have enhanced the Inventory Health Report to help you better identify what inventory to take action on.  Second, we have launched a Recommended Removals Report, to make it easier for you to create a Removal order for your inventory.

Estimate Long-Term Storage Fee with the Inventory Health Report

After launching the Inventory Health Report in May, many sellers commented on how valuable this report is and provided suggestions for ways to improve it. Our recent update of the report incorporates two primary changes that sellers requested to improve its usefulness.

First, we have added new columns to provide more insight into how much ageing inventory will be assessed the Long-Term Storage Fee and what the cost will be for the Inventory Cleanup in August (assuming no  further sales of your inventory). This version of the report now shows you specifically how many Units of each product will be assessed the Long-Term Storage Fee (i.e., the number of Units that will have been in the fulfilment centres for 365 days  or longer on August 15, 2011) and the projected fee applied to each product if a  removal request has not been placed prior to the next Inventory Cleanup event.

Another requested addition was a field that would enable sellers to compare their prices to other sellers' matching listings. The fields "your-price" and  "sales-price" are now available, so you can see how your prices measure up to other FBA listings and non-FBA listing for both new and used products.

We also have added an online version of the report. By trimming down the 41 comprehensive fields available in the downloadable report to 18 fields, we have focused the online version on the information that is most frequently requested by sellers. We will be retiring the Inventory Age Report shortly; the Inventory Health Report is now the preferred source of inventory health data including age information. If you have been using the Inventory Age Report, you should move to the Inventory Health Report by August 15, 2011.

Learn more about the Inventory Health Report.