Great article. Amazon could do some things to help itself like loosening up Seller Fulfilled Prime (SFP) requirements, so that more sellers can sell on Amazon but provide their own fulfillment. They do everything they can to try to get you into Amazon facilities/network, but this is backfiring and at a terrible time for sellers during peak e-com season.
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Amazon is changing quarterbacks in the fourth quarter. Amazon FBA is under tremendous pressure and sales will be lost. Amazon has changed their Inbound network forever. It is now a two tiered cross dock system (IXD). If you pay Amazon's new placement fee, you go to a national cross dock which feeds to a regional cross dock. AKA... it takes a lot longer to get your products received. BUT! If you avoid the placement fee and split your shipment (5 ways for now!) you can have your products received faster by going straight to a regional cross dock. Seems reasonable, but why the alarms? Amazon has been launching regional cross docks into October! That means a glut of inbound has been backing up. So much so that the west coast is raising the surrender flag. They announced to all sellers that west coast is experiencing major delays. Let's say that's less than ideal. Let's dig deeper... if you're still with me. LTL - Less than Truck Load FTL- Full Truck Loads LTL. I'm hearing that LTL is taking up to 30 days to get received. Smart shippers knowing the complexities of these placement fees are avoiding them. This is turning a lot of FTL (Full Trucks!) to LTL. LTL is gummed up per Amazon. Let's go deeper... AWD (Amazon Warehouse and Distribution) is also over capacity. AWD was presented as the future. Well, in the present it's not working. So what? You can't just solve this by sending in too much. Amazon will send inventory to suboptimal places and your inventory will sit there because their systems say so. You'll have poor proximity to customers (no same day!!). The way you ship to Amazon matters. Full Truck Load without paying placement fees is currently the most effective on a cost/speed basis. These are things you should be talking through with your distribution. There might be prohibitive minimums to get this ideal of FTLs + No placement fees. Amazon will solve the lead time as we come out of peak. But shipping to national cross docks will always be slower. Before you think I'm some shipping savant (I have sent millions of units into Amazon), I did some learning with Vanessa Hung and Rob Hahn (Pattern has a middle mile solution working on this). Anyways. Good luck with Black Friday! Isn't Amazon's second HQ cool? Will it get finished?