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There are some fairly big changes being implemented on February 22 that will seriously affect everyone, but primarily FBA It is coming on top of the recent fee structure changes and storage fees increases. Keep in mind that if you are using scanning apps to source they will reflect the old structure so something you source now, ship, and hits the fulfillment center will have a fee change in a month or two.
They are also going to be splitting our big shipments to go to mutliple fulfillment centers which means shipping costs will go up as well.
Time to reevaluate whether Amazon is worth it as they continue to push third party merchants out.
Be your own judge:
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/homepage.html/ref=ag_home_logo_xx
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Retro,
For awhile they had me shipping everything to Nevada, 50lbs boxes of books really rack up charges. That lasted about three months then they had me ship everything to North Carolina for a year. Now I ship to New Jersey and Kentucky. So hopefully ride it out and it may change.
Are they splitting up identical items or different items in the shipment being separated out to different warehouses?
If they are splitting identical items to different warehouses you can adjust an option to change that.
Settings —> Fulfillment By Amazon—> Inventory Placement Option On/Off
This will force identical ASIN/SKU’ed items to one location regardless of quantity. They will charge you for this service based off of the weight of the item, but it may save money versus separate shipments to different parts of the US.
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The shipping is changing I think. We were having the same experience you were– we get the same distribution center for large lots and have for over 8 months. The issue is that once our stuff was received, it would take a while to be redistributed, which we planned for and accepted given the reduced shipping costs. The new policy intimates that will no longer be the case. It sounds like we will be sending directly to the ultimate FBA center or some version of that.
Given the slim margins on books and media, I personally would never send books in unless they are high dollar and quick turn over. I do all my books FBM if they are of any value. But I also never figured out the penny sellers nor that market.
Best of luck and I would love to learn how to do books properly.
whiskey
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So looking at my numbers the new fees will break down like this.
Average book will be between 1-2 pounds.
Self Fulfilled
Media shipping $3.16
Bubble mailer .22
Total shipping $3.38Amazon Fulfilled Feb 2017
Single Pick/Pack Fee $4.18
Cost to mail book in $.33
Total cost $4.51Not including the storage fee, its rather minor for >2LB books. I would have to both look for a new warehouse and build a lot of storage shelves if I had all 8,000 items sent back. So for now going to consider it a wash, even though it is probably cheaper to have them store it. I also didnt include the referral fee/variable fee because it is the same for FBA and merchant fulfilled.
So unless I am missing something in the fees I will be spending $1.13 per book to have Amazon handle most of my orders. So far this month I have sold 3,609 units, so thats $4,079 difference if I would have handled them myself. In the past it was a .42cent savings to have them handle it. Lot to think about.
I think Amazon is trying to get rid of the penny book crowd like Jensenbooks and Murfbooks, these large penny book sellers send in thousands of books a day to FBA and I am sure take up huge loads of warehouse space and resources shipping out $4 books. Heck maybe they are trying to get out of the used book business all together.
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Really there isn’t a lot to think about there. You sold 3609 units at an extra cost of $4079. Assume you spent 5 minutes per item locating it, packaging it, making the label, etc. That’s $13.60 per hour to do it yourself. This is not even considering the time and energy it takes to manage the storage facility for that many items. I mean just acquiring and stocking that many bubble mailers is a task in and of itself!
You are definitely getting great value for that expense in my opinion.
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Starting on 1Jan17 I will list everything locally for two months. This should give me time to see how the new fees affect FBA sales and what the other sellers are doing to react to them. If enough of them are simply raising their prices to compensate for the fee hike then it would make sense to send them back in.
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Experiment update in case anyone is thinking of switching from FBA back to merchant fulfilled. I didn’t list anything until the 5th, so results are from 5-10th.
Listed 770 previously FBA bound items. Sold 220 on Amazon (15 on other sites not counted) for a 28.5% sell-through rate. Lower than my typical 35% via FBA. I did enjoy that almost instantaneous sales versus waiting the normal 5-7 day shipment/processing time. Comparing to February rate hikes, self-shipping will save $396 in fees.
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