Amazon handles all of the logistics, customer service & returns, which will in turn free up a ton of your time. They also will now be able to offer your customers two-day and overnight shipping on all of your orders. Also, all of your items are now eligible for Super-Saver Shipping benefits, which means that if a customer spends over $35 they receive free two-day shipping or a very discounted overnight shipping option. Amazon Prime members will be able to purchase your items and have them shipped in two-days, guaranteed, for free! This is an absolute game changer! World-class logistics will set you apart from your MF(Merchant Fulfilled) competition in a huge way!
Now, when you find yourself in competition with another Amazon seller but you’re FBA and they’re MF, you’ll have the advantage. Amazon customers, such as myself, have become accustomed to Amazon’s super fast shipping and world-class customer service and this encourages me to buy a Prime Eligible item over a Merchant Fulfilled item whenever I get the chance, even if the Prime Eligible item is priced much higher.
Often times Amazon shoppers, when looking to make a purchase, will sort all of the offers by selecting the Prime Eligible items only button near the top of the page, single-handedly eliminating all of the MF competition with one click. Although Amazon has not disclosed the number of Prime Members that they currently have collected, they have hinted that as many as 60% of their online customers have signed up for the Prime Membership.
Besides the main benefit, being able to utilize Amazon’s logistics and customer service there are many others worth considering:
FBA sellers have a greater probability of winning the Buy Box, even if they’re not the lowest price.
FBA sellers open up their market to the growing trend of Amazon Prime-only shoppers.
FBA allows you to spend less time packing and shipping and more time focusing on what you love.
The last benefit that I mentioned is key. Yesterday, according to our Seller Central page, we sold and shipped over 50 items, all FBA. These items were sold and shipped while I was going a variety of important things; sleeping, spending time with my family, enjoying a beautiful day, working on building my Amazon business in different ways, and writing this here post.
If I would have had to ship each of these items myself, it would have carved out a decent chunk of my day. Think of it this way, if each item needed a box, invoice and shipping label, and the estimated time that it would take me to get this done amounted to about 5 minutes per item, it would have taken me over 4 hours, just to fulfill the days orders (5 minutes x 50 items)! If we ship an average of 500 items per week, we’re talking about over 41 hours of time spent boxing and shipping. Do you see that by outsourcing your logistics to Amazon you are able to free up a ton of time?
Now, some of you more experienced sellers may be saying that it shouldn’t take me 5 minutes per box, but even it we developed a system that cut that estimate in half we would still be devoting way to much time, in my estimation, to packing and shipping. Why not let Amazon do it for you?
The burden of packing and shipping individual boxes yourself limits the scalability of your business, by outsourcing this task to Amazon, the experts, it frees up valuable time that can be invested in others areas.