How FBA (Fulfilment by Amazon) actually works

Welcome to the bring your product idea to Life podcast. This is the podcast for you if you're getting started selling products or if you'd like to create your own product to sell.

I'm Vicki Weinberg, a product creation coach and Amazon expert. Every week I share friendly, practical advice as well as inspirational stories from small businesses.

Let's get started.

Hi, and welcome to today's episode of.

Bring your product idea to life.

So in today's episode, I'm going to.

Talk to you about FBA or fulfillment by Amazon. Now, this is something I get asked about a lot, and I think a lot of us might think we know a lot about Amazon fba.

Certainly we know what it is, particularly from a customer perspective.

So you probably know that if you've got the prime badge on a listing, then that means it's FBA and you're going to receive that product maybe the next day, sometimes even the same day. But actually, there's a lot about how FBA works from a seller's business perspective that people aren't aware of.

So today I want to cover what FBA is and possibly you know, all about what it. What it is already. But let's have a little recap.

I'm going to talk a little bit about why it can be great and why you might consider using FBA if you're selling on Amazon. But I'm also going to counter that with some of the things that you might not know. Even if you're selling using FBA already.

There's a few things that can trip you up that maybe you haven't come across yet, maybe you, maybe you have, maybe you're not even aware of. And that I think it would be really good to know.

And I'm then going to talk through in really simple terms, how to send your stock in for FBA if this is something you've never done before.

And I'm also going to talk about how to decide whether FBA or FBM is the best option for you if you're thinking of selling on Amazon or indeed if you're on Amazon already. So this episode is definitely going to be a mix of the theory and the practical, and I hope, as always, it's going to be really, really useful.

And I'm going to try and cover off as many of the questions that I get asked frequently as I can. So in terms of what FBA is, so as I mentioned before, it stands for fulfillment by Amazon.

So this basically means send your products into Amazon and Amazon Store pick and pack. Store pick pack and ship your orders on your behalf. Now, you don't need to. You don't need to send all of your products into, into fba.

This is something that customers ask me quite a lot. So maybe you sell a range of products and you decide that some would be great for FBA and some wouldn't.

And we can talk a bit later about the reasons why some might work better than others. You can decide this on a product by product basis when you get set up on Amazon or when you're on there already.

You don't have to have the same fulfillment options for all of your products.

And that's something I think is worth knowing because whether you're using FBA or FBM is a big decision, but it's good to know that you can make this on a product by product basis, not just a blanket decision for all of the products that you sell. I personally, when I sold on Amazon, I started off using FBA and I continued to for the duration of the time I sold there. And I absolutely loved it.

I hated dispatching my own orders, I hated packing them, I hated going to the post office. And I don't even think I was very good at it. I don't think I knew how to pack a neat box. So for me, FBA worked really, really well.

However, I did make some, a few mistakes while using fba. There were a few things that tripped me up I wasn't aware of. I'm going to share those a bit later in this episode.

So some of the benefits of using FBA are that apparently, and I don't know how true this number is, but according to ChatGPT, there were 26 million prime members, we call them just in just in the uk. So these are people who will benefit from prime shipping on if when they're buying on Amazon.

So that's a big audience of people because I don't know if you're aware that if customers don't have a Prime membership, they actually pay Amazon standard shipping fee for prime products. But if you are a Prime member, then as you'll know, the shipping is included.

And you might have seen actually if you're shopping on Amazon, that they've just started. When you go to the checkout now, it's something new.

They've started showing you what the shipping price would be and then crossing through it if you're a Prime member. This is something I've noticed in my checkout anyway, which I think is quite interesting.

Customers also tend to trust products with the prime badge because a lot of Customers, if they're not aware of how Amazon works, I think some of them actually think that the product is somehow endorsed by Amazon, that Amazon has some kind of say in which products are sent in for prime, which we know is kind of not true, but also gets true in some ways.

There are some heaps to go through to sell your products on Amazon, but I think having prime does increase customer trust because they know for one thing, if something was wrong with the product or even if they don't like it, because, let's be honest, we're all quite fickle. If a product's prime, it's usually really easy to set, to send back, you know, it's coming from Amazon.

So I think customers have that little bit more confidence. They also know that the product's going to arrive fairly quickly.

As I said earlier, prime delivery is usually next day, sometimes same day, never usually more than two days, depending on where you're located and where stock's held. And we'll talk about that a bit more later as well. And of course, there's the cost savings as well that you're not paying the shipping fee.

So for a customer, there are lots of things, benefits.

And obviously those are benefits for us if we're selling our products and we're hoping that someone is going to choose our products over somebody else's. I'll also mention that allegedly prime products feature higher in Amazon search results.

But as I've spoken about on this podcast before, Amazon are really secretive about their algorithm. So I have to say, allegedly. I don't know if that's true. I imagine it could be true, because remember that you are paying Amazon for fba.

So you're paying them to store your products, to pick your products, to ship your products, and you're paying them more money than if you were where to fulfill your own orders. And we'll talk about costs a bit later on.

So there are definitely reasons why Amazon might choose to put prime products higher in search results, but of course, I cannot confirm that either way. So let's talk a little bit about the other side of fba, because as I mentioned, there are lots of reasons why I think it can be really good.

You know, you're not doing your own fulfilment. Yes, you are paying Amazon to do it for you, but in some cases the costs can actually be equitable to doing it yourself.

And we'll talk a little bit more about FBA fees a bit later on.

But let's talk about some of the realities and the things that you might not know about using FBA that I think it's really good for you to have awareness of. So the first thing is that there are some sort of hidden costs, mainly storage fees. Storage fees go up over time.

So what you'll pay for the first 90 days is standard and then the longer Amazon holds your stock, the more expensive storage gets, long term storage. So if you have anything over I think it's 270 days counts as long term storage now gets really expensive and then you've got a couple of options.

You can well one, well say you've got a couple of options. Let's take a step back Amazon.

If your stock's been unsold for quite a long time and you've got this and you've set up in your shipping settings somewhere in your FBA settings that Amazon can dispose of your unsold stock after however many days they will dispose of it and they will charge you for it.

So a good thing to do is if you're using FBA right now, is to go and check your long term storage settings and just check that you don't have them set that they're going to dispose of unsold stock because you know you either want them to hold on to it or after when it gets to the point where they're not going to hold on to it anymore. I presume you'd rather have it sent back to you.

So you can either send it back in to fba, which okay, isn't ideal but it's an option, or you can sell it elsewhere. So make sure you've got your long term storage settings set up so Amazon will send the stock back to you.

However, as I said, they are going to charge you to send your stock back to you. And this actually did is something that happened to me. I sent in too much stock for my very first product.

I think I sent in 500 units and remember I hadn't sold a single one anywhere. So this is completely against what I tell people to do now, but you do learn from your own mistakes.

And they didn't sell as quickly as I'd like and then I had to pay Amazon to send them back to me and then I had to pay to ship them back into Amazon because Amazon at that time was my main sales channel. So they yeah, I paid Amazon to send them back and then I paid Amazon to send them back in and that wasn't ideal.

What I would recommend you do instead with your stock is if you are not sure how much to send to Amazon, I would Be a bit more cautious. I definitely wouldn't advise sending hundreds of units directly from your manufacturer into fba for a couple of reasons actually.

Unless this is your absolute only option or you've been selling for a while and you know that everything's good and you know that you know you're going to sell them and you know the product quality is going to be great. But the first thing is if there's anything wrong with the product, you're not going to know.

So again, in my experience, I had all of my products shipped directly from my manufacturer into Amazon and there was actually an issue with the box. So my product was a gifting product and the box quality was really poor.

I didn't know this because I didn't have sight of it because all the products went into Amazon. So the first I knew that this was an issue was when customers were leaving bad reviews and I was getting returns.

So that was really, really frustrating. If I was to have my time again, I would have got them sent to me and then sent them onto Amazon or to a third party distribution center.

I certainly wouldn't have sent them directly from the manufacturer in, especially not for a first order. I definitely, if you've been working with a manufacturer for a while and you know you can trust them, you can probably do this.

But if not, I wouldn't recommend it. And then the other thing is I wouldn't have sent in as many.

I think I would have ideally sent them to myself and then I would have drip fed stock into Amazon.

So I'd rather store them at home or maybe in a distribution center, which is why I worked for Distribution center once my business had been up and going a lot longer because I also used to fulfill orders in my website buy them as well. But what I used to do was drip feed my stock into Amazon.

So I would look every month at how things were selling and sort of try and predict how many I thought I'd sell in the next month. And then I would every month send a small shipment into fba, which is something that's relatively easy to do.

And we'll talk about how you do that a bit later.

But I think especially if you are new to Amazon or new to FBA or you've got a new product that you're adding, I wouldn't go crazy with the amount that you send in because you can always send in more saying that of course this is a bit of a tricky time of year because this episode is going out at the beginning of November, just actually in a few days time. I'm recording this one a bit later than I normally do.

And we are getting to the time of year where the fulfillment centers get really busy, which is something else that I wanted, that I wanted to mention. So I'm going a little bit out of order here. But. But never mind, you're.

It's good to know that when your products arrive at Amazon, then they don't go on sale immediately because there's a bit of a check in process.

So the lorry will arrive, it'll get unloaded and the boxes will there for a while and then the boxes will get scanned in and then eventually they go open and all of your products will get scanned in and added to the shelf. But that doesn't happen always overnight, particularly in quarter four when it gets really busy. Obviously we've got Black Friday later this month.

So that is a time of the year where if you were sending in a product for the first time now, maybe you would send in a little bit more than you usually would because there is going to be a cutoff sending stock into the warehouse there is every single year. So it might be good to send in a little bit more just so you don't go out of stock over the busy period.

Although of course there are things you can do to counter that as well, which I will talk about a little bit later. So what else do we need to know? So lost inventory. Sometimes inventory gets lost and if it does, obviously it will cost you.

It's really, really important to have insurance. Amazon does reimburse you for loss or damage stock because stock can also get damaged, but it doesn't always happen automatically.

Sometimes you have to raise a case. So that's something to keep an eye on when you're sending stock into fba. Check that it all arrives.

Check and tell you that, you know, say you send in 100 units and they say they've only got 98. Where's that too? Are they damaged? Have they been lost? Make sure you're keeping an eye on this.

Make sure you're raising cases for anything that does happen. And as I say, having insurance. And remember, I say remember.

You may not have listened, but a few weeks ago I had an interview with an insurance expert over on my main Friday episode. I'm going to link to that in the show Notes because he spoke about as a product business, the type of insurance that you should have in place.

And this would cover you against Amazon losing your stock in their warehouse. And by the way, when I talk about stock being lost, it Happens really rarely.

I do have a story a bit later on, but it wasn't an Amazon story, but it again empathize the importance of insurance. Sorry, I keep trailing this episode, don't I, with things that are coming up later. It's because I know I've got so much good stuff to talk about.

I'm really quite excited. This is going to be a good one. So where was I Losing my train of thought? Yes. So Amazon can lose stock. It doesn't happen very often.

I haven't heard of anyone losing lots of stock. Stock can get damaged. I have heard of this happening.

So just to bear all in mind, all this will happen and make sure you have adequate insurance, which you should do anyway. So when something else you should be aware of is returns, we've talked a little bit about damage stock.

Now, sometimes when Amazon, when a customer returns an item to Amazon and then Amazon returns the item to you, that item may not be in great condition. And this is something a lot of my clients have had issues with. So I have one client who sells quite an expensive electronic item.

But as soon as the box is open and the customer, you know, unpacks all the bits and sort of sets it up and they decide that they don't want to use it, obviously it's then in use condition when they send it. When they send it back, which is really frustrating.

So what this client does as an example is he then resells that as refurbished on a different platform. So he'll sell that as a refurbishment refurbished item for a little bit less and he would sell it for new.

Because to be honest, that is the only option. When I sold on Amazon, I got some returns sent back to me in really poor condition. So products that were obviously used.

So one of my products was a baby towel and I remember getting one sent back to me and it had stains on it and I was like, it wasn't sent out like that. So you obviously use it and then return. I don't know why people do that.

But anyway, and that again involved raising case of Amazon and sending them pictures. I mean, for one thing, I can't believe they sent it back to me in that condition. But there you go.

Because the process is that a customer will send the return to Amazon and then Amazon, if they believe it's unsellable, will send it back to you. Unless you want them to dispose of unsellable items, which is another option.

However, I don't recommend this, mainly because I wouldn't want to be the judge of whether an item can be resold or not. And I'm not sure that I would always trust Amazon's judgment on this. And this is another setting.

So when you decide to use fba, there are all kinds of FBA settings. And one is what you want them to do with unsellable items. And they might be unsellable because they've been damaged in the warehouse.

It might be because they're a customer return. But as I say, I would always recommend if it's feasible for you, getting these returned to you.

So you can decide, you know, is this in perfect condition? Can it be resold as new, sent back into FBA stock sold on your website, does it need to be sold as resellable or is it really, you know, in.

In such a poor condition that it can't be sold anywhere else?

Other things to know is that if you, when you send your stock into Amazon, you need to make sure that your packaging and your labeling is all done correct. If you don't label your products and cartons correctly, this will cause delays, which will obviously prevent your products from going live on Amazon.

So this is definitely something to be careful with.

Something else to know, because I'm just running through my list of things that I definitely want you to know about, is that Amazon can split your stock across multiple warehouses and you don't choose where it goes. The reason I mention this is when I'm working with a new client, I'm getting them set up on Amazon.

One of the first things I'm usually asked is, well, which warehouse would it be? And the answer is, we don't know.

Until you tell Amazon what you're sending in, you know, more details about your product, the size, dimensions, we'll go into that in a moment, and how many you're sending in and how many SKUs, and all of that, they won't tell you where your stock's going and you have absolutely no say because they're going to send it where they feel makes most sense. So you have no say in that at all. However, I don't think that should be any kind of issue. It's just something I want you to be aware of.

And I guess the final thing I want you to know and consider if you're deciding to use FBA is you still need to manage your inventory.

So Amazon won't automatically tell you when you're running low, although you can set up alerts in your inventory so you can say to Amazon, please alert me when I reach, I don't know, 100 units, 50 units, 10 units, whatever it is for you, whenever you want to be alerted. So you can do that.

But you do need to make sure that you or someone else is keeping an eye on your Amazon inventory and is replenishing stock when needed.

Because if you do decide to use fba, particularly if you're only using FBA and you work really, really hard to get some sales and ranking goes up, things are going great. The moment you go out of stock and customers can't buy your product anymore, your ranking starts to drop.

So you don't want to do all that work into getting sales going. And then things go downhill because you don't have anything to sell. So that's something else to be aware of.

Okay, now let's talk about how to decide whether fba, FBM or a mix of both makes sense for your business. So there's a couple of things to consider. So the first thing is the type of product that you're selling.

So if you are selling something that's really big, so let's say you're selling garden furniture as an example, or I have a client who sells fence panels, they're not selling fence panels via FBA because they're oversized, it's going to be really expensive. It's just there's no real reason for using FBA for those products. Equally. If you have products that are personalized, of course you can't use that.

You can't send those in for fba.

So if you're selling handmade or custom products, some handmade items you might be able to send in, but if they're items, items that you're going to be customizing so you're going to add the customer's name, for example, that wouldn't work for fba. If you sell something that's particularly fragile, you might not want to use fba.

So I have a client who sells really, really beautiful candles and they will find, and they're beautiful, beautiful candles in a beautiful gift box. But what they were finding is that when these beautiful gift boxes for the candles in arrived at customers, they weren't always in great condition.

There were some, some breakages. And this wasn't happening on any other platform. It was just Amazon. So they made the decision that maybe Amazon wasn't maybe fba. Sorry.

So Amazon still a great platform, but maybe FBA wasn't the best because obviously how the product is packaged, how much care is taken into, you know, putting it in that box and send it to the customer is completely out of your hands. And while you would hope that Whoever is packing your products would treat them with as much care as you would. Obviously, that can't be guaranteed.

Also, if you have a product that gets returned a lot. So I mentioned before, a client who sells an electronic product, that product has a high number of returns.

And that client, actually, for that particular model, the model that was getting a high number of returns, decided to sell that, not via fba, just for the fact that it was easier to manage returns when they were coming back to their own warehouse.

They could check the product when it was returned, they could make sure that it was in good condition and everything themselves, and they preferred to do it that way. So that's a few reasons, reasons why you might decide not to use fba.

And also there are products that are harder to send in, so products where you might need to provide some safety information, for example. Obviously, I hope you have all of that to hand, but it might be that you are not wanting to jump through so many hoops.

Maybe there's a reason you want to get your product online a bit quicker at the moment.

And you're just thinking, actually, I could just use FBM for now because then I don't have to provide all this extra information, which is going to slow me down. And of course, that's absolutely. That's absolutely valid. And the other thing that might stop you from using FBA is the fees.

So FBA storage fees are based on the total square footage that your goods are going to take up. And then there's the shipping fees to consider as well.

I can't tell you what your FBA fees are going to be because it's going to vary depending on what you're selling, what category it's in, and the size and the weight of your product. But there is a free FBA calculator that I've mentioned a lot of times on this podcast, because a really, really good tool.

It's an Amazon tool, but it's free. It's really good.

I'm going to link to that in the show Notes, because you can then plug in all the details of your product and it will give you an estimation of the FBA fees.

And I think that will be really useful for you in determining whether FBA is going to be viable for you, because let's be honest, cost is something you do have to consider in terms of what products to send in for fba, because I mentioned earlier that you don't need to send in your entire inventory. So you say you sell 10 SKUs. You could have some of them on FBM and some of them on fba. But you might be thinking, well, how do I, how do I decide?

So I guess if I were a new seller on Amazon or if I was advising you seller on Amazon or someone who was sending selling currently via FBM and was considering fba, I think the thing that I would say is first of all think about which ones are likely to sell. Perhaps you might want to think about which ones might sell best.

So you might want to send, sell your best sellers on, on fba because you might have more confidence then that the stocks you send in will move fairly quickly. Because as we spoke about earlier, stock that doesn't move quickly starts to get expensive.

And if you have SKUs that you know are not such good sellers, you know, you do sell a couple, but actually maybe not enough to justify sending them for fba, then you might not want to. So I definitely think if I was looking at someone's inventory and saying which ones to send, it would be the ones that baby sell quickly.

Also consider everything else I spoke about. So the size of the product, the fees, how well you think your products will, how well you think your product will arrive. What am I trying to say?

The condition you think your product will arrive at the customer. So if you're selling something extremely fragile, then you might think, okay, I'd rather dispatch that myself.

But you might have other products in your inventory that would be better. It might come down to size.

So you might have some products that are smaller and you think they'll be great for fba, but actually you've got bigger products that you'd rather dispatch yourself. And there were also some things that you can't do on FBA at the moment. So for example, bundles.

So in the US at the moment, and this is something that will come over here because if it's in the us, it always comes over here. You can bundle together products in fba. So let's say you're a hair care brand.

You can send your conditioner and your shampoo and your curl cream over to Amazon and you can sell a bundle on Amazon where Amazon will bundle all of these products together and send them to send them to the customer as one order. We can't do this in the UK at the moment. Customers can buy all these products separately, but you can't offer virtual bundles.

So if you wanted to sell a bundle on Amazon, you would either have to send your products into Amazon packaged as a bundle, which is something that obviously you can do, but you might be considering how many of those you're going to sell, although it's a good thing to offer, particularly at like this time of year, or you would want to do something on the product pages to make people clear.

So whether that's using a comparison table in your A or highlight sending people to your store, making it really clear which products go together and maybe offering some kind of discount for buying them together. However, if you are selling via fbm, you can obviously list these products as a bundle, much easier because then you can ship them as a bundle.

So you could list a bundle of hair care products as an FBM product, dispatch it yourself. So there's a lot to consider when deciding whether FBA is the right thing for you or not. And that is just, just a few of them.

So let's have a little talk about how to set up your first FBA shipment.

If this is something you've never done before, I'm obviously going to have to go through this at a fairly high level, try and give you as much as I can. Although it's a very hard thing to get across in the medium of audio.

And if you are very proficient at using fba, then of course you might want to skip the next few minutes, unless you really want to hear me talking about it. But perhaps you do, and perhaps there'd be something that you hadn't considered.

But do feel free to skip the next two minutes if you're thinking, yep, Vicky, I've absolutely got that. I know how to send in FBA shipments.

So the things that you need to have is, first of all you need to know the address that you're shipping your products from.

And it doesn't matter what that address is, whether that's your home address, whether it's distribution centre, whether it's a friend's address, whatever it is, it needs to be where your products are and where they're going to be shipped from. You also need to have for each product the product size in centimeters and the weight in grams. That's really important.

And this is the final packaged product as a customer would receive it. And then from there you then need to tell Amazon what you're sending in. So we set up something that's called a shipping plan.

Now it's quite good if you can to do set these up as templates. Obviously this isn't something I can show you on a podcast, but if you ever need a hand with this, let me know. We can always have a call together.

I offer one hour power hour calls and something that's very popular that I do with people is help them with their first shipping plan. Because what we can do is we can get all set up and we can do it all using templates. So the next time you come to do it, it's really quick and easy.

And when I work for a new client, I always try and set up templates where I can.

So a template might be, for example, you know, you're going to send in six of a certain product and they're all going to fit in that one box and you're going to give the dimensions and the weight of that box and you're going to set that up as a template. Next time you'll send in the same six. You know, you send in your product in multiples of six in the same weight, size box.

And next time it's really easy. You just need to tell Amazon how many boxes you are sending.

If you're sending products that are expiry dated, you need to put the expiry date on the product.

Now, you should know that particularly for food products, you need to have a minimum of 90 days expiry on the product, preferably longer, because customers like long expiry dates. And that actually could be another reason for not using fba.

So if you sell a food product that's unprocessed, you don't have anything in there to keep it fresh for a very long time because you know it's a really lovely fresh product, then you might find that FBA doesn't work for you because, because of that. Because, you know, you sell a product that people you know designed to eat fairly quickly and that's absolutely fine.

That might be another reason not to use fba. But if you are going to use fba, then you need to tell Amazon what the expiry date is.

And do know that 90 days out of that they're going to start sending products that are about to expire back to you. So be aware of that too. And that's something else else to consider when you're thinking about how many to send in.

So once you've told Amazon what you're sending, where you're sending it from, all the weights and the dimensions, you then need to agree your shipping method.

Now, you can use for this, you can use your own shipping, you can arrange a courier, you might have a courier locally to you and you think, right, I'm going to use them and you absolutely can do that. However, the thing that I would always recommend is using either UPS or dpd. I usually go for ups, which are Amazon's preferred shipping providers.

And the reason I suggest this, there's a couple of reasons actually. One is that it's all tracked then via Amazon.

So you're going to sell Essential once you've set up the shipment and you'll be able to track the entire shipment there and Amazon will be doing that for you. Whereas if you are doing it via a third party, of course they should have some sort of tracking method, but it won't be within Amazon.

The other reason is that UPS and DPD make multiple drops at all the different Amazon warehouses or distribution centers, which probably call them multiple times a day through the day and the night. You know they're always getting in there.

So if someone were to pick up products from you today, chances are they'll get into Amazon tomorrow or maybe the next day because they're constantly just delivering stock in. Now some of the other distribution companies, they might not have such regular slots into Amazon.

So they might have an agreement with Amazon where they can deliver products every other Friday morning at 10 o' clock for example. That might be their slot.

And it might just so happen that they collect your product products on the Saturday and then you've got to wait two weeks before your products actually get delivered into Amazon. So it's definitely a lot slower. And then also you can run into issues as well. Now I'm not this is something that's probably quite rare.

Hopefully this isn't something that's happened to many people. But I worked with a brand earlier this year where their entire shipment went missing.

So they used a different shipping company to get the products into Amazon.

The entire shipment went missing and then that company went into administration and they lost all of their products and it obviously never arrived at Amazon. They've never seen it again. And because the company went into administration, that's all gone, which is another actually good insurance reminder.

Please, please, please make sure you have adequate insurance if you don't already. And again, I will link to that episode in the show Notes.

So once you've decided who you're going to use for shipping, if you're using one of Amazon providers, which is what I suggest, Amazon then tells you what the price will be. I always think the price is really reasonable, actually.

Yes, I arranged for someone to send in three big boxes of shoes into Amazon and the total cost was 7 pound 49. That seems cheap to me. Like we're talking 22 pairs of winter boots. I think that's a really good price. Anyway, not that I'm trying to.

I'm not trying I promise I'm not trying to sell it, but I will always give you the advice of what I think works best. And if I'm setting up a shipping plan, I always, always recommend, I always use ups. I always think, think it's they're good. Yeah.

Not I'm not on commission from ups, by the way. I'm just like to share with you what I do myself for my clients and what works.

So once you decide that you know who you're going to go with and then you agree the shipping fees, you then get labels and then you need to make sure your, as I mentioned earlier, your products and your cartons are labeled correctly. So your products are hopefully already labeled. So you should have a barcode on all of your products anyway.

You would have needed a barcode to get your products listed on Amazon.

If for some reason you have a barcode but it's not printed on your package in any way, you'll need to make sure it is because Amazon will use that to scan your products in when they arrive at the distribution center. And the labels that Amazon will be sending you will be labels for your cartons.

The cartons is what they call the bigger boxes you're sending into Amazon. And you just need to make sure you're labelling them correctly. Because say you're sending in three different SKUs and three different boxes.

You just need to make sure you label each box with what's actually inside it and this information will be on the labels to help you.

I should say that if you have some sort of exemption, barcode exemption, and you are using Amazon's labels, because there are examples of when people use Amazon SKU labels rather than their own, then you will be able to print and download these from Amazon and put them on your packaging if that's something that you need to do. So once you've done that, you will then call ups, assuming you're using ups, you'll give them the reference number for one of your labels.

They'll come and collect the parcels from you, they'll take them into Amazon and you'll get email updates all the way through telling you what's happening with the shipment. And that is in a nutshell, how that works. Just a reminder that you can always start with a small test shipment.

So as I said earlier, you definitely don't need to send in hundreds at once. I always recommend against it if possible. You don't need to send in lots of stock. You can also have an FBA and FBM option set up.

So by that I don't mean that some of your products FBA and some are fbm, although of course as I mentioned that is an option. But you might not know that you could for a single sku, have that single SKU on Amazon set up with an FBA and an FBM option.

Reason you might do this is it gives your customers another option. So if there are customers who don't have prime to have a Prime membership, then they've got another way to buy from you.

If you go out of stock, and this is what I was going to touch on earlier, if you do lots of work on building up your rankings, then your FBA goes out of stock, people can't buy your product and then your ranking starts to drop. However, if you had an FBM option, customers could still buy your product and then therefore that doesn't affect your ranking.

So that's something to think about as well. If you are going to go ahead and do this, of course you could have your FBM option.

You know the stock set to zero and just turn it on when you have no FBA stock. If you don't want to be running both offers parallel to each other, something else to consider on this is pricing.

I think if you are offering FBM and FBA, you might want to consider offering free shipping for FBM if that's feasible for you if it works with your margins.

Reason being is if a customer is used to buying your products on on prime or they've seen it and they've seen it offers free prime shipping but then you go out of stock and they have to buy the FBM version and it's free.99 for shipping. That could be enough to put some people off or certainly make them think about waiting until you have prime stock.

But then of course while they're waiting waiting, they might find something else they prefer to buy or they might forget about you entirely. So just a few things to consider. If you need any help with this, you can book a Power Hour with me. You can book some one to one training.

If you want support in setting up your shipments.

If you want advice on whether FBA or FBM is worth it for you, whether you want to understand the cost involved, your actual products, we can do all of this together. So I'm going to put bit a little link to how you book that in the show notes for this episode. I really hope you found this useful.

If you have any follow up questions at all, please let me know.

I'm really looking forward to speaking to you again on Friday when I have another amazing guest joining me and then I'll be back as usual next Tuesday. So have a lovely week whenever you're listening to this and I will speak to you very soon.

Thank you so much for listening right to the end of this video episode.

Do remember that you can get the Fullback catalogue and lots of free resources on my website, vickyweinberg.com Please do remember to rate and review this episode if you've enjoyed it, and also share it with a friend who you think might find it useful. Thank you again and see you next week.