Understanding Amazon FBM Fulfillment and Its Key Benefits

If you are a seller on Amazon, you will have to choose between looking after fulfillment yourself or letting Amazon do it for you. Fulfillment by Merchant (FBM) can be a sensible option for sellers who want to maintain control over their stock. Amazon FBM fulfillment is very popular since it lets you sell on Amazon’s marketplace and reach its huge customer base, but you still control your own inventory, pack your own orders, and ship your packages directly to customers. This article explains how Fulfillment by Merchant works and its benefits.

Here are the advantages of Amazon FBM fulfillment for your brand:

Manage Packaging and Inventory Yourself

Amazon FBM fulfillment gives you the flexibility to hold your inventory in your own facility or someone else’s warehouse. FBA stores your stock in Amazon’s warehouses alongside other merchants’ stock. This means that you will always have real-time access to your inventory, which is important when it comes to the launch of a limited series of products that need additional quality control. In the process, custom packaging, personalized thank-you cards, and customized promotional materials are made available.

Leverage Amazon’s Tools to Reduce Shipping Costs

It is a commonly believed fallacy that self-fulfillment always means higher costs. However, Amazon Buy Shipping offers sellers using Amazon FBM fulfillment pre-negotiated rates that are often considerably lower than retail ground rates that are available to them. Amazon says shipping labels on the platform can save an average of 31% on shipments through UPS, FedEx, and USPS.  The lower rates and risk avoidance together make it so much cheaper to manage logistics than most merchants believe.

Ideal for Specific Types of Products

Not all products can be processed in Amazon fulfillment centers. Amazon FBM fulfillment can be a more cost-effective solution for large, heavy, and expensive items where storing products in an Amazon warehouse could reduce profits due to storage fees. Amazon’s warehouses are not always able to provide the precise storage conditions required by sellers of temperature-sensitive goods such as food and cosmetics. You can check out Packageman to get a reliable Amazon Prep Centre and FBM fulfillment partner for scaling brands.

Returns & Customer Service

This is a nice part of selling for those who love to talk to the people who buy their stuff. You answer questions from customers and personally process refunds and returns. You get to fix problems in a more personal way that you can’t do through automated systems, but it also means you’re doing a lot more hands-on work each day than you would if you worked with Amazon FBM fulfillment. If your return policies are at least as permissive as Amazon’s, you can tailor them to your particular niche of products. If done well, it gives you an opportunity to increase customer satisfaction.

Get Priority Shipping and get the Prime Badge.

Probably the biggest benefit of learning how to use Amazon FBM fulfillment is the opportunity to qualify for Seller Fulfilled Prime (SFP). Once you have perfected meeting all the high-performance requirements, such as actual tracking rates and on-time deliveries. The ability to tap into such a large number of high-intent customers is a reward for the SFP, which comes with high operational standards, such as weekend deliveries and same-day shipping for orders placed before the cut-off time set by SFP.

Conclusion

Amazon FBM fulfillment gives sellers a system that requires them to own their brands and have direct control over their costs and sales. This means online retailers can use tried-and-true tactics. With SFP, sellers can fully benefit from their hard work by getting their Prime badge, consistently buying the right amount of required stock, and taking advantage of Amazon’s rates. Overall, if the sellers follow the rules of the FBM approach for shipping their products, they can be successful on the biggest marketplace in the world.