Fulfilling Amazon orders: FBA and Seller Fulfilled Prime

Why sell on amazon?

Why not? Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer, generating revenues in excess of $230 billion in 2018. In the UK alone, Amazon.co.uk gets an average of 480m visits per month.

Did you know that in 2018, 44% of online searches began on Amazon (not Google)? So if you don’t have a presence on Amazon, or moreover, if your products are not optimised for Amazon’s search engine, you’re definitely missing out on lots of potential revenue.

Their ecommerce platform and logistics are second to none. If you want to launch a brand and reach millions of customers, then you cannot ignore Amazon.

It’s great for brand building. It’s a great platform to sell your products. It just works.

Why is it so good? Because Amazon ensure that third party sellers (non-Amazon sellers, which, incidentally, make up over 50% of Amazon’s global products and sales) adhere to strict performance levels. It’s widely known that if your performance levels drop below excellent, there’s a very strong chance that Amazon will revoke your selling privileges.

That’s why it’s so important that not only do you get your fulfilment right (by ensuring orders are delivered to your customers on time) but also that you update the order information in Amazon’s Seller Central.

Virtual Logistics’ 3PL Platform integrates seamlessly with all Amazon’s global channels, as well as Amazon Buy Shipping and Amazon Business. As and when Amazon introduce new features, we will include them in the services we provide.

Additionally, our Amazon Experts can help you launch your brand and optimise your listings on any regional Amazon marketplace. We will also work with you on Amazon sponsored ad campaigns and lightning deals.

integrating with amazon

We are able to integrate with all Amazon regional marketplaces, as well as FBA, Amazon Business and Seller Fulfilled Prime.

We need to ascertain which Amazon accounts you’d like us to integrate with. To create a synchronised link between your Amazon stores and our platform, we’ll need to know your Seller ID and MWS Authorisation Token. You’ll also need to authorise our platform to access your Amazon Seller Account.

If you’re unfamiliar with this, we can walk you through Amazon’s Seller Central portal.

Product Synchronisation

Once we have integrated the Amazon store, we’ll then need to match your Amazon listings with products on our platform.

We’ll decide the most efficient way of doing this. This will be done either by creating the products on our platform first (via an upload), or more simply, by asking our platform to grab the listing information from your Amazon store(s). They will then be mapped or created on our platform.

We may have to do this for every Amazon store you have. If so, we’ll create separate channels on our platform for each of your Amazon stores.

Inventory Levels

We can decide, at a product level, the percentage of your available stock you want to be displayed across each channel. You may only want to show 10% of your available inventory on your Amazon France store for example, or all your stock on your Amazon UK store. It’s entirely up to you.

Pricing / Repricing

It may be that you already have a pricing and/or repricing mechanism in place. If not, we can take that headache away from you and ensure that your pricing is performing optimally, based on your pricing strategy set rules within our platform.

Shipping Methods

We have to synchronise your Amazon channel shipping methods with our platform to ensure your customers’ delivery timescales are satisfied. We’ll ask you about these and ensure the mappings are in place before we start shipping your orders.

FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon)

If you have items at one of Amazon’s fulfilment centres and are utilising Amazon FBA, we can prepare the shipping of FBA products to Amazon on your behalf.

Amazon can differentiate between your FBA and FBM (fulfilled by merchant) orders, therefore only FBM orders will be processed by our platform.

SFP (Seller Fulfilled Prime) / Amazon Buy Shipping Services

If you already have an account that is Seller Fulfilled Prime eligible, we will integrate Amazon Buy Shipping Services to ensure compliance with Amazon.

If your account is not SFP ready, we can discuss utilising Virtual Logistics’ own Amazon retail brand – ShopAtHome – for your listings. This gives your products the Prime badge on your listings (albeit via our ShopAtHome store).

Additionally, as we have a proven track record of Seller Fufilled Prime eligibility, we can work with you through Amazon’s SFP trial program, that invariably takes 30 days, giving you all the benefits being an SFP seller brings.

Order Fulfilment

Once we are satisfied that your Amazon listings are mapped and synchronised correctly (and you’ve delivered your products to us), we are in a position to fulfil your orders.

Our system listens for orders on all channels continuously. No more than 10 minutes should elapse between a customer ordering on one of your channels, and the order appearing on our platform.

Once an order appears, our fulfilment team will get to work on picking, packing and shipping as per the conditions we have collectively set out.

On completion of the order (picked, packed and with a shipping label and consignment number) our platform sends order notifications to your Amazon channels, ensuring you are conforming to Amazon’s strict seller measurement policies.