- Quick delivery while handling the logistics and customers
Known for its lightning-speed delivery service, Amazon offers this premium service to all businesses using FBA. All you have to do is monitor your listings and make sure that your products are stocked. Amazon handles the rest. This opportunity is huge for SMBs because they can save money on warehouse space and pay others to pick, pack, and ship their products (not to mention a whole customer service team to give your customers the best experience). You can also rest assured knowing that they perform at a high quality and professional level, which can be hard for businesses to attain on their own without great monetary resources.
- Prime and Buy Box privileges
Choosing to use Amazon’s FBA program also comes with some marketing perks. With FBA, you’ll automatically get Amazon Prime delivery as an option, which customers love because they’ll be getting your products delivered for free in up to two days. Prime delivery is also trusted by customers, so they’ll be more likely to buy from you compared to a seller who doesn’t provide this as an option. If you aren’t sold on FBA, you can get Prime delivery marketed on your product through Seller Fulfilled Prime (but you’ll have to jump through some hoops to get your warehouse and delivery process approved—if you haven’t been waitlisted).
Now, this isn’t an automatic feature like Prime, and you’ll have to prove your products’ selling metrics along with their sales volume. If you do pass these requirements, you’ll get high visibility and more sales. This happens because the Buy Box is placed by the “Add to Cart” section of the product details page, making it more likely that customers will choose your product over others.
- Selling in global markets
With Amazon’s global marketplace, you won’t be limited to your own geographical location. You’ll be able to sell in markets you wouldn’t normally be able to.
As long as you can get your products to the right fulfillment center, you’ll be able to sell to millions of customers worldwide—not something that most SMBs would be able to achieve on their own.
- Merch by amazon
Specifically, who wants to start amazon FBA with minimum budget, continue how to succeed in merch by amazon to get an understanding & the benefits of amazon merch.
The cons:
- The costs of FBA services
As previously mentioned, FBA services do come at a cost. You’ll be paying for your selling plan, a referral fee between 8-15%, and a fulfillment fee, along with any other extra services you’ve tacked on to your FBA plan. This is when Amazon’s profitability calculator comes in handy because some items don’t make sense to sell using the FBA program (like low-cost goods). Another option would be that you mix and match items from your range. You don’t have to commit to selling all of your products through the FBA program. Find the products which are the most profitable for FBA selling, and then manage the storage and shipment of the rest.
- No questions asked return policy
Customers love Amazon for many reasons, one of those being their no-questions-asked return policy. While this policy is appealing and overall can create great customer relationships, it often creates an increase in returns for vendors. Luckily, Amazon FBA is specifically designed to manage those returns and get them back into the warehouse (not like how they previously would send them directly back to the vendor—how annoying would that be?). Just make sure you do everything to not turn off your Amazon customers to help minimize these returns.
- Product prepping and packaging
For customer experience and logistics reasons, Amazon has strict and specific prep and packaging requirements. You have to make sure that everything is FBA ready before getting to the fulfillment center, so there is a lot of pressure to make sure that you have your products properly labelled and in the correct package.