(Newswire.net — March 29, 2022) — Great news, you have made a sale on Amazon! However, you get your product to send to the customer and realize you have no idea how to package the item. This is a problem many sellers face at the beginning of their Amazon journey.
Amazon offers a solution to this problem via Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA). However, there are charges for storing and sending your products. If you are just starting off and only selling a few items at a time, it may not be worth the additional charge.
In case you are going down the DIY route of shipping (known as Fulfilment by Merchant (FBM) in Amazon talk), here are a few tips to help get you through.
How to Ship Amazon Products
Amazon will notify you via email when a sale has been made, and you will have 24 hours to confirm the order has gone out. Finding a reliable courier is one of the first areas you need to get sorted before selling on Amazon. In the UK, there are multiple options, including:
- DPD;
- Parcelforce;
- DHL;
- UPS;
- CitySprint.
The carrier will likely have a preferred way of packaging, which will help you determine the shipping supplies needed to post your products. The standard Amazon seller will need the following posting and packaging supplies:
- Boxes or envelopes;
- Pack material (such as airbags, brown paper, and bubble wrap);
- Parcel tape;
- Peel and stick address labels;
- Printer.
There are many places you can bulk buy shipping supplies, including the ever-handy Amazon.
When to Switch from FBM to FBA
Your long-term Amazon business goals will likely involve scaling up your business at some point. When you feel like the time has come to get serious about boosting sales, it is worth seeking out the professional guidance of an Amazon agency https://nuoptima.com. They will help get you organized and pushed up to the next level of revenue generation.
At the point of growth, it may be worth considering switching from FBM to FBA – giving you more time to fully focus on the business rather than sorting out shipping. However, some shipping and packaging still need to be done for this method as it is the seller’s responsibility to send their products directly to Amazon’s warehouses.
Amazon has some detailed packing and prep requirements for FMA. The general packaging requirement includes:
- All items much have a single scannable barcode placed on the outside of each unit;
- A single pallet much not exceed 180cm in height, 500kg in weight, or overhang 100cm by 120 pallets;
- The Amazon carton and pallet labels from your Seller Central shipment plan must be clearly visible;
- All individual SKU items must be in the same packaging. If you are selling a multi-set of a product (for example, books or DVD sets), each set must be packaged in one;
- If your products are sensitive to dust, dirt, or humidity, they will need to be protected by transparent poly bags;
- The total weight of each pallet must not exceed 500kg.
You must follow the FMA guidelines closely when sending to their warehouses. If Amazon decides that you have packaged breakable or dangerous goods insufficiently, they may reject your products or repackage them at your expense. In some circumstances, they may even charge you with non-compliance fees.
The Takeaway
At first, it may seem that FBM would be the most cost-effective way to ship out Amazon products, but once you start selling multiple products every day, FMA can actually work out cheaper if you are selling small, lightweight items. In addition, once using the FMA method, Amazon also looks after customer support and any returns, so you will have much more time to focus on marketing and selling products.