Shipping is a pretty big deal when it comes to Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). In fact, I wrote two posts on it in my Beginner’s Guide to FBA. You can check them out here:
- Beginner’s Guide to Fulfillment by Amazon: Shipping 101
- Beginner’s Guide to Fulfillment by Amazon: Shipping 201
And yet there is still more to write!
One of the biggest challenges for shipping is trying to get all of your packages into one FBA Center, preferably the closest one, at the lowest price, with the quickest delivery (so the products are available for sale, of course). I’m not sure I’ve found the silver bullet for it yet, however, I’m testing out some new things, and I thought I’d share them as I wait for the results.
Where it starts:
First off, you go into your Settings (see photo below), then select “Fulfillment by Amazon.”
Your next step is to tweak the Inbound Settings.
Inbound Settings allow you to enable the Inventory Placement Service, which is cool because it allows you to send all units of a single Merchant SKU to a single fulfillment center, but, it is not the answer to all woes! Once you see the details, you will see why:
As you can see, Inventory Placement Service is great for standard-size products. Depending on the product, it could also work for oversized units that are 5 pounds or less.
Anyway, once you select the Inbound Settings, you just want to select Inventory Placement Service:
Wrapping up
Like I said, I’m still testing this, however, it could be a nice solution if you’re selling a ton of standard size, less than 5 pound products.
H/T to Tom
IPS is kinda pointless – if you’re selling small-ish items, just pack as many as you can into a box <50lbs and ship it as case packed. No extra fee. You do have to have some bigger boxes around, but it's not too hard to save some from other shipments.
Small-ish items of the same MSKU, I meant. Which is all the IPS does for you anyway.
I looked at it as an option if case packed isn’t necessarily an option. That, and its fun to continue to peel the onion of FBA back. I’m perpetually in search of the secret sauce that would allow me to never have to ship anything to the West Coast again.
No, I totally understand that – eliminating all my shipments to OAK and ONT would be truly lovely!
But I guess my points is: when is case packed not an option, but IPS feasible? IPS is only useful for items that can be packed more-than-one-to-a-box, right? If I’m sending monitors, then IPS is probably pointless – yeah, some might end up going out west, but the IPS fee will overwhelm whatever savings there might have been for avoiding that. If I’m sending tablets, then absolutely I want to pack them all in together to one FC to save shipping cost – but all IPS does it let me pack those together, which is the same as case packed. Maybe I’m missing something!
I guess I’m thinking that the benefit of IPC is that all MSKU’s go to one Fulfillment Center… so if you’ve got multiple boxes of tablets for example, everything goes to EWR4 for example, on the East Coast. But, like I said, I have not yet tested this out thoroughly. I’m thinking probably the best use might be with something light, small, but bulkier than it needs to be, e.g. Keurig K-Cup packs. I know I’ve had scenarios where I’ve had so many I can’t fit into one box, and I have some going to Philly, some going to Richmond, and some going to somewhere in Tennessee!
I find that most of the single SKU shipments I do (as case-packed) are given a destination within my UPS zone (east) and are usually over 5lbs per item, so I don’t bother with IPS. The only thing that can be up in the air is kitchen appliances, which about half the time they want me to ship to freakin’ Phoenix for more than double the shipping cost of sending it to Virginia or Kentucky.
Yeah, that’s my challenge too; the appliances. I suppose there is a big market for appliances in Phoenix, for some reason, not quite sure why.
And I seem to always be sending my appliances from the PNW to the east coast FBA centers. Surely this could be more efficient.
Don’t forget that inventory placement service is not free, i think it’s around 50 cent per unit which can make a big difference when shipping say 200 of the same item, that’s an extra $100 you could pocket