FBA Getting Started Guide Updated in Amazon Seller Central: Nov 2021

Amazon announced an update to the FBA Getting Started Guide on November 8, 2021.

On November 8, Amazon announced they added recent updates to the FBA Getting Started Guide. The guide is meant to help new sellers navigate through each step of selling FBA. It covers everything – from registering your account for the FBA program, to shipping your products into Amazon Fulfillment Centers.

Pros & Cons of FBA

Benefits of selling FBA include:

• PDPs will have the Amazon Prime Badge (when you are the featured offer), gaining instant customer trust, and a higher chance of converting clicks to sales, and better overall visibility on your products.
• You do not need your own warehousing space to be able to fulfill hundreds or thousands of orders per week, Amazon will store the products for you, and you can choose to work out a process with your supplier to have items shipped directly to an Amazon Fulfillment Center – eliminating any need for you to rent or own a warehousing space for purposes of selling FBA.
• FBA Sellers get to take advantage of Amazon’s already existing, large customer base and potentially see your brand-new products or brand have remarkable success. This is because Prime customers are likely to automatically trust products with a Prime badge because they can view this as an “Amazon approval” badge in a way.

Cons of selling FBA:

• Higher fees for FBA compared to selling FBM (Fulfillment by Merchant) or selling through your own website. This is because the fees include the cost of Amazon receiving your FBA shipments, unboxing them, shelving/storing the products, picking the units as orders get placed, and shipping the orders out.
• There is some uncertainty when selling FBA -- as depending on the current amount of staff and inventory space available, there can be unexpected delays, leading to a gap in sales for your products. Depending on your business model, it is a good practice to supplement sales by also selling FBM (if you can – you need to have a warehouse/space to store your products and fulfill/ship orders).

The FBA Getting Started Guide is a good place to start for new or existing sellers who are wanting to start selling via Fulfillment by Amazon. As an agency, we reviewed the entire document, and sorted out each section by department, based on which team the information is relevant to. We found that this document is helpful for our organization across the board, and we recommend other FBA sellers to do the same.

With the constant updates in online marketplaces, it’s important to stay up-to-date with the latest changes. If you are a client looking for additional information, contact your strategist or if you are interested in learning more about how Retail Bloom can assist your brand efforts in online marketplaces, schedule a consultation with our team. 

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