Amazon Warehousing & Distribution Supply Chain Solution
Amazon has a new service coming in 2023 to help sellers solve supply chain struggles - Amazon Warehousing & Distribution.
Gopal Pillai, Vice President of Amazon Distribution and Fulfillment Solutions
For many businesses, managing logistics and operations—such as inventory storage, distribution and order fulfillment—is a source of complexity and cost. These challenges have only been amplified in recent years as constrained supply chains caused global inventory backups and fulfillment challenges.
In fact, a recent survey of U.S. Amazon sellers showed the three biggest pain points for sellers in upstream warehousing and distribution operations are high prices for storage, complicated fee structures, and insufficient storage capacity.
With this simple pay-as-you-go service, sellers are free from the time-consuming, cumbersome process of moving inventory from upstream facilities to Amazon fulfillment centers. AWD makes the promise of supply chain as a service a reality and is specifically designed to solve inventory management challenges and deliver operational efficiencies.
Amazon promises a simple, one click integration and simplified pricing to help reduce storage costs, allowing sellers to send their inventory to Amazon Distribution Centers and integrate upstream inventory storage operations with the Amazon Fulfillment Network.
Sellers using AWD can simply operations by consolidating their global inventory into one pool, which can be viewed and managed on Seller Central. And in 2023, sellers will be able to use AWD to send their inventory to any location, including to wholesale customers or brick-and-mortar stores.
Amazon is expected to release more details about Amazon Warehousing & Distribution at its annual seller conference, Amazon Accelerate, being held in Seattle on September 14-15 2022.
much too complicated now for a few pounds a year in sales
They just "killed the golden goose". I imported my 1500+ eBay items to there since it was free. Turned out just to be a lot of work for (maybe) 3 sales a month.
The total fees were higher there before this new $20 a month cost structure, even though they claimed otherwise. When one factors in the 3.49% + 49 cent PayPal processing fees so one can get paid, there went a good chunk of profit.
Now they have boosted their commission to 11%, and still claim that the cost to sell there is less than eBay's. And remember that this does not include payment processing. WHY?? Makes no sense at all.
On eBay, for $27.95 a month, I sell over 100 items there every 30-31 days. Makes ZERO SENSE to pay a site $20 to make just a couple of sales. Since they now allow 50 "free listings", I have trimmed my offerings back to just below that amount. Also had to raise all my prices accordingly to absorb the extra selling costs.
The people who run the show here obviously didn't realize that eBay sellers who imported their listings gave the site a great depth of product, which would attract more buyers. Now that will be gone, because NO ONE will pay them $20 monthly for little to no sales.
The site also has technical issues that they refuse to fix. It was a decent resource to enable the occasional sale, but they will soon be stacked onto the eCommerce trash heap of companies that THOUGHT they could compete with Amazon and eBay. Etsy may also suffer the same fate soon, as many sellers are also leaving their site due to high fees, website issues, and poor management.
Basic eComm rule here: When you do not carry any inventory, and sellers are solely responsible for supplying your site with the goods offered, DON'T BITE THE HAND WHICH FEEDS YOU!!!