How To Ship Things To Amazon Fba

Printing Your Labels As A Seller

How To Send Your First Shipment To Amazon FBA | BEGINNER TUTORIAL

Because you chose a seller who labels units, you will be the one to print your own labels. To do this, you have to:

Make a second packing template for this queue by labeling your SKUs. To do this, just:

2.1 Access View Edit, whose button is found beneath the packing name templates drop-down menu.

2.2 Click the Save button.

Are you ready to use your label? Or do you want to go over the details one more time to ensure that nothing is amiss? If you have to edit your template, just follow the easy steps below:

Then, click on the button that says Edit Packing Template.

Start editing.

When you are done applying the needed changes, save your work. Just click on Save.

Get Ready For Your Shipment And Choose The Right Carrier

Smaller sellers can also use Small Parcel Delivery to send items in single boxes to Amazon FBA. Since were focussing on items and boxes secured on pallets, there are mainly two options available: Less Than Truckload means that your pallet is going on a truck shared with other sellers, while Full Truckload is for pallet shipments filling up a whole truck. Make sure that you calculate which category is right for your business.

While Amazon partners with carriers like UPS and FedEx, you can choose your own shipping company to carry out your shipment. A marketplace based provider like CitizenShipper can be a more affordable option for the same quality shipments. You can post the details of your freight shipment on the platform and available carriers will contact you with price offers.

Printing Labels To Send Your Inventory To Amazon Fba

You have a couple of options here, you can either print them yourself if you have a label printer or have Amazon do it for you.

Having Amazon do it for you will obviously accrue some fees which can be viewed here.

You can make Amazon label the products for you by clicking Apply to all under Who labels? and selecting Amazon.

Once you have your labels printed off, place them on the front of your product.

If you want to test out the products to make sure they can then use a barcode scanner this isnt required but I always like to do this just to make sure they can be scanned once they reach Amazons warehouse.

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Shipping To Amazon Fba

Once your freight shipment is prepared on Seller Central, you can get it ready for shipment.

No matter what your level of experience is with international freight, its really easy to make costly errors at this stage.

The three most important considerations when shipping your goods are:

Shipping Individual Pallets vs. Full Containers

Packaging and Labeling Your Products

Finding an Amazon-Friendly Freight Forwarder

Air Shipping: Manufacturer To Home

A popular way many Amazon FBA sellers start out importing their products.

You get the advantage of faster air shipping. And, add a layer of protection by giving you the opportunity to personally inspect the boxes/products.

Cost is, of course, higher due to air shipping. And you may still want an inspection on the overseas side of things.

Quality control is what this strategy is all about. You are personally seeing to it that everything is done properly so that your shipment is not rejected by FBA.

You have to store the products at your location, inspect them yourself and then label them and arrange pickup/dropoff.

How To Print Labels When Shipping Amazon Fba

Labeling packages and products correctly is essential, not to mention it also saves time and money. Incorrect labels might cause delays and even additional fees in the Amazon warehouse.The Amazon FBA system on your seller account will create labels for the shipment.Individual products must be labelled with their own barcodes. The same goes for boxes, and there should be no other barcodes aside from that one.

People often wonder how to print Amazon FBA shipping labels, and what they need to remember is that these labels shouldn’t fade, otherwise it may cause problems. To make sure that doesnt happen, simply print the barcode labels with laserjet printers.Note that 15-30 kg boxes should also be labeled as “heavy-weight” and this should be seen from any angle of the box.Polybags can also be used to protect products, but they have specific label requirements as well. Those with at least a 5-inch opening should warn for possible suffocation. It is a strict regulation that might risk the need for product repackaging if not done correctly. Babies and children might mistake the plastic bag as a toy, which can be dangerous.Labels also have a corresponding requirement for the point size:

For a bag less than 29 inches, the print size should be at least 10 point.
For 30-39 inches, the print size must be at least 14 point.
For 40-59-inch bags, at least 18 point is required.
For bags sized 60 inches or more, the print size should be at least 24 point.

Fbm Helps You Avoid Putting All Your Eggs In The Fba Basket

Other benefits to doing both FBM and FBA at the same time are ensuring your eggs arent all in one basket.

COVID has been a great example of this throughout the year as things progressed, Amazon restricted FBA sellers from sending inventory in unless it was classified as essential goods and has continued to set special limits on FBA inventory.

Amazons lead times for checking in inventory have also been incredibly delayed. Under normal conditions, depending on your location, the FBA centers location, and your inventory shipping method , it wouldnt take more than a couple weeks to get inventory checked in and actively for sale on Amazon.

Now with everyone turning to online shopping even more than before due to social distancing and quarantining, Amazon have been both understaffed and overworked.

This inventory check-in delay is also notoriously bad around Q4 due to holiday shopping, but thats still more predictable than COVID.

In any case, for those sellers who sell all or some of their inventory through FBM, in this situation they came out ahead.

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Choose The Right Packaging

To choose these FBA pallet shipment options, the weight of your combined pallets must be a minimum of 150 lb, but a single pallet must not exceed 1500 lb for non-stackable pallets and 750 lb for stackable pallets. Ideally, they are 50 inches high. If they are not stackable, the pallets cannot be higher than 72 inches. Amazon prefers stackable pallets since they are more space-efficient.

All pallets must be made out of wood and follow the GMA standard Grade B or higher, measure 40 x 48 inches with 4-way access. The pallet boxes are not allowed to extend the pallets edges and must be secured to the pallet with plastic or stretch wrap. Single items weighing more than 100 lb or are longer than 80 inches or wider than 30 inches wide must be on their own pallet. If you are selling multiple boxes as a set and this set weighs together more than 100 lb, it must be on a separate pallet. The limit for LTL deliveries is 5000 boxes per shipment.

How Do I Create An Amazon Shipping Plan

How to Ship Products into Amazon FBA for Beginners [Full Tutorial from A to Z]

When you are shipping goods to Amazon, you must create a shipping plan in the Seller Central platform in order to get the correct addresses and information and ensure Amazon knows about your inventory and there are no setbacks in getting the inventory into Amazons warehouse.

Shipment plans do not expire so it helps to set them up well in advance. Lets walk through setting one up!

First, from your home screen, youll want to select Manage Inventory from the Inventory tab.

This brings us to all current product listings . From here well navigate to the Edit button.

Next, we select Send/Replenish inventory

In the following screen, we need to give Amazon some more information:

Select Create a new shipping plan

Enter the ship from address. Its important to note that the Ship from address is the location from which your shipment will be picked up for final delivery to an Amazon fulfillment center.

The location of the Ship From warehouse often determines the location of the Amazon fulfillment center youre assigned

Do not use the suppliers address. Use the final destination your product will land at before going to Amazon like the offloading warehouse at the port of entry.

Select Case-packed products. Be sure to put all SKUs into one shipment plan.

Shipment plans do not need to be broken down by SKU if you break them down by SKU, Amazon may split your shipment into more fulfillment centers than necessary

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How Do You Label Goods For Shipping To Amazon

Proper labeling is critical when shipping to Amazon FBA because it will enable your products to reach the right customer and sell quickly.

All the boxes used in the packaging must have a unique FBA label printed from the shipping queue.

Product labels must have a scannable barcode.

Note that Amazon has its specifications for barcode labels on products.

You can find them here: .

Scannable Barcode

As long as your product differs in any manner, for example, in color, they must all have a unique FNSKU printed on them.

How Do I Set The Final Delivery Method

UPS:

Select Small Parcel Delivery and UPS

Complete the Shipment Packing section by entering the units per box, the number of boxes, and the box weight

The estimated shipping cost will be in the Shipping Charges section. Then, you provide Amazon FBA carton labels to your freight forwarder.

Amazon LTL:

Select Less than truckload and Amazon-Partnered Carrier

Complete the Shipment Packing section by entering the units per box and the number of boxes

Input the following as estimate information:

Dimensions: Use 48 x 40 x 62 (maximum height per Amazon requirements
Weight: Divide the cargo weight by number of pallets
Approximate pallet count: Divide the shipments volume by 1.5

Complete the Shipping Charges section and click Calculate

Shipment Size
Within 7 business days from when goods are available for pick-up	See Setting up Flexport FCL	All products must be assigned the same fulfillment center

Your freight forwarder may be able to provide trucking services that are faster, although more expensive.

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How To Track Your Shipping From China To Amazon Fba

Tracking your Shipping

Depending on what means of transportation used to ship your product, you can either visit the website of the sea or airline company.

Tracking your shipping by Air

Then, input details like the tracking number of your air waybill on the airlines website while in the case of sea shipping companies,

Tracking your shipping by Sea

you input such information like your Shipping Company Name, Container Number, B/L Number or Vessel Booking Number according to your shipping company request.

How To Set Your Price And Deal With Amazon Price Wars

Before setting your price its important to get a good idea of the market for your product. Once you see how much people are willing to spend on a similar product, you can calculate the landed cost of your goods to see if you can match or beat them.

You should also include a lot of wiggle room since price wars are very common on Amazon.

A price war occurs when your competitor undercuts you sometimes even by pennies in an effort to drive you away from selling your product. As a seller, you have several options for fighting in a price war:

Actively fight. Change your price as required if you can do so while still remaining profitable. This tactic is not recommended.

Play the waiting game. Your competitor doesnt have unlimited stock and price wars often become simple waiting games especially if competing products are priced so unreasonably low that your competitors profits are slim or nonexistent.

Go high. As counterintuitive as it sounds, pricing your item 20% higher than the lowest priced seller is another tactic that people use. Although you wont see many sales, you will still see some thanks to the rotation of the Buy Box.

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Sea Shipping: Manufacture To Distribution Warehouse

This is a personal hack of mine:

Enter the Distribution center.

Unlike FBA inspection centers, distribution centers dont squeeze every dime from unwitting yet hopeful Amazon sellers.

They make their money warehousing and distributing products, often times for very large companies.

Now:

Any labor will still be pricey. So use these staging warehouses to have Amazon partnered carriers come and pick up the products.

Pro Tip: No need to pay Amazon that extra fee to have everything delivered to a single FBA center.

Distribution centers handle:

Duty and Customs
Palletize inventory when shipping less than a container load

You reduce your shipment travel time when your distribution center is located closer to your factory.

Using Import Records To Find And Vet Chinese Suppliers

One of the best things an importer can do is to use import records to help them find products to import and vet suppliers.

As mentioned, in America, import and export records are public information, however, the government does not catalog or give easy access to this information. However, there are tools that do allow you to easily search this information, the most popular and cheapest being .

These tools allow you to:

Find out what Chinese supplier a competitor is using
See how much a supplier exports
Find out what suppliers export specific products

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Amazon Abbreviations You Should Know

For those sending inventory to Amazon for the first time, some helpful abbreviations to know include:

ASIN The Amazon Standard Identification Number are unique identifiers for any product sold on Amazon. An ASIN is a mix of ten letters and numbers listed in the product information section. If you are shipping from an existing product listing, it should already have an ASIN. When creating a new list, the platform generates a unique ASIN. You can also find the ASIN on the URL bar of any Amazon product. The ASIN not to be confused with UPC codes.

SKU The Amazon stock-keeping unit is your unique and personal alphanumeric code that you can use to identify and track all your shipments. It is useful for sales and inventory purposes. A typical SKU will also have information on product details such as color, size, etc.

FNSKU The Amazon Fulfillment Network Stock Keeping Unit is a combination of your SKU and ASIN numbers. Together, they make up your Amazon barcode. The FNSKU helps to identify, track the number of units available, and send inventory. This code is similar to the Universal Product Code used to label your inventory at the Amazon fulfillment centers. The FNSKU label is what Amazon uses to determine payment whenever shipping products to a customer.

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Choose Package Prep Options

How To Prepare Items to Ship To Amazon FBA

In most cases youll likely choose the Merchant as who preps? since your products should be packed and ready to sell.

Its costly to ask Amazon to do this for you, but if you do want to just send them a box full of random unpacked items, youll choose an option from the prep guidance dropdown menu such as glass or fragile.

Otherwise, just choose no prep needed.

How Do I Ship My Goods From China To An Amazon Warehouse

A good place to begin is with the weight of the shipment. These are some of the rules I always stick to:

For ocean shipments, always use a freight forwarder
For air shipments, use a freight forwarder if your cargo weighs more than 200 kg
If your cargo is less than 200 kg, then you can go through your supplier, who will leverage DHL Air Express
Freight forwarders are too expensive for shipments of less than 200 kg

What Is The Difference Between Fcl And Lcl

The most typical ocean shipment is an LCL shipment. Youre going to be in an LCL shipment if your shipment is less than 18 cbm . Think about it as the space your product takes up as opposed to the weight.

If youre in this category, it means your product will be in a container with other shippers products. That container will be shipped to the United States and then offloaded at a container freight station before the cargo is prepped and sent to Amazon fulfillment centers.

This is where a freight forwarder comes in handy!

If your shipment is over 18 cbm, thats when Id be working with your freight forwarder to see if FCL makes sense. Typically FCL ships direct to an Amazon warehouse without unloading the container.

What are shipping container sizes?

If you were wondering how much you would need for FCL, heres a list of the container sizes available:

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Not Adhering To Amazon Guidelines

Amazon has a list of restrictions regarding the products that you are allowed to sell. There are also requirements regarding inventory, including packaging and labeling. If you fail to adhere to these requirements, Amazon may cancel your listing, terminate your selling privileges, and end your FBA relationship at its discretion. Always ensure that whatever goods you ship and whichever supplier you sell through, Amazon complies with the companys guidelines and all applicable laws.

How To Create An Amazon Fba Shipping Plan

Back in Business: Amazon Sellers Can Ship Nonessential ...

If you selected Convert & Send Inventory or if you have just added your second item, you will be prompted to create a shipping plan. For this youll need your Ship from address and your packing type.

There are two packing types: Individual products and Case-packed products. Most likely youll be selecting Individual products. Only select Case-packed products if youre sending a box with all the same exact type of item in it. For example, a box of 20 Anchorman DVDs.

Once you set up a shipping plan, you will be prompted to add your items. Assuming this is the second item youve added, you should see two items. Select both.

Once youve created a shipping plan, you can add all the items you wish to sell. Simply go through the same process you went through for the first two items, however, when you get to the end select Add to an existing shipping plan rather than Create a new shipping plan.

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