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How to Ship your Amazon FBA Shipment to One Fulfillment Center

Everyday this week I will be posting a quick Amazon FBA tip that will cover a topic that I feel is important that I haven’t covered yet. Most of these tips will be based off of the questions I had while i was going through the whole process as well as answering some common questions that I get all of the time.

I will be posting a new tip each day this week, so make sure to be on the lookout for more!

The first tip I will be covering is a HUGE money saver for those shipping large shipments to Amazon. What I will be showing you how to do is ship your products to one Amazon fulfillment center instead of multiple different ones.

Why This is Useful

You might be wondering why doing something like this would be useful?

Let me give you an example of the scenario that I went through:

I have mentioned in previous updates in my Amazon FBA case study that shipping cost me around $1,500. What I didn’t know when I first received that quote from my freight forwarder was that this quote was based off of sending my shipment to one fulfillment center.

When I created my shipment plan within Amazon’s Seller Central it had me shipping my 1008 unit shipment to three different Amazon warehouses. When I told my freight forwarder about having ti split up my shipment into three smaller shipment and send them to three different warehouses the quote was no longer $1,500.

Now, it was going to cost me over $3,000 to ship my products to these three Amazon warehouses. This killed my profit margins and wasn’t going to work for me.

Luckily, there was an alternative option for me that saved me a lot of money. This option was called Amazon’s Inventory Placement Service.

Amazon’s Inventory Placement Service

This is a service that allows you to ship to only ONE Amazon warehouse.

Yes, there is going to be a small fee to be able to do this but it will more than likely be cheaper than sending to multiple warehouses.

The fees for using Amazon’s Inventory Placement Service is shown below:

amz-pricing-tier

Depending on how much your product weighs, that will determine what type of fees you will have to pay per unit to have your shipment go to one warehouse.

In my example, my product fell under the “1 lb. or less” tier so I had to pay $.30 per unit. since I ordered 1,000 units it cost me an extra $300 to ship to only one warehouse.

Compare this extra $300 to the extra $1,500+ it would have cost me to ship to all three different fulfillment centers, you can see how using this inventory placement service could save you a lot of money!

It personally saved me over $1,200!

Now, this will be different for every person and every situation, but what you should do is compare how much using this inventory placement service will cost you to how much it will cost you to split your shipment to multiple Amazon warehouses. Pick the option that will cost you the least and go with it. I would think that sending your shipment to one center will usually be the cheapest option, unless you have a very large item that weighs a lot.

Alright;

Now that I have explained what the inventory placement service, I am now going to explain HOW to do this for your own shipments!

Step-by-Step Guide on How to Ship to One Fulfillment Center

This is actually really easy to do and doesn’t take a lot of steps. A few clicks and you could be savings thousands of dollars!

1. Go to Your Amazon Sellers Account

The first step is to go to the homepage of your Amazon sellers account.

amz-sellers-hp

2. Go to the Amazon Fulfillment Settings

From the homepage, click on the “Settings” in the top right corner and then go to the “Fulfillment by Amazon”. This will be at the very bottom, click on it. See below for further explanation:

settings

3. Edit the “Inbound Settings”

You should be at a page that looks like the one below, then click on the “Edit” button under the “Inbound Settings”.

edit-button

4. Change the Inventory Placement Option

This is where you change the setting so that you can send your whole shipment to one fulfillment center. Change the setting from “Distributed Inventory Placement” to “Inventory Placement Service”. See below:

final

Once you change the settings, make sure you click “Update” and then you should be good to go! You can confirm this worked by doing the following step below.

5. Confirm it Updated

The last thing you can do is confirm that it updated. You can do this by going into your shipment plan within your Amazon Sellers Account and see where Amazon is telling you to send your products. If it only shows one fulfillment center then it worked! You should see something like mine, which is shown below:

confirm

6. That’s It!

After you do all of the above steps you will now be able to send all of your shipment to one fulfillment center. Like I said, it is fairly straightforward to do this but it can be confusing to find proper instructions on how to do this.

Video Instructions

For those of you that prefer watching a video, I have put together a quick video below:

Conclusion

That ends the first tip for the week!

I hope this was helpful for some of you and that this was able to save you some money, because I know it saved me a lot of money. I will be back tomorrow with another tip so make sure you stay on the lookout. Not only will there be a new tip tomorrow, but also all week long so stay tuuned. Thanks for reading!

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Comments

28 Comments

Benji

Hello Josh,
On your facebook group you mentioned your shipping weight was 1280Kg. So how come you ordered 1008 units and each weighted less than 1 lbs? I am trying to figure out what will be best for me as I also have 1000 units for a total weight of 280kg. I got a quote close to you of about 5usd per 1kg, for only one warehouse. And you say you had 1280kg! What Am I doing wrong? where can I get a price low as yours? Forest shipping quoted me.

Josh
Josh

Hi Benji,

Good question about my products weight, I am assuming it is based off of the products weight and not the total weight. I may be wrong but that is the only way that my product would have fallen under the 1 lb.

Are you shipping by air or sea? This could be the reason for the high quote.

Josh

yossi

Can we select to which sole fulfillment FBA center products will be send ?
or change it ?

Josh
Josh

Hi,

Unfortunately no. Amazon will choose what fulfillment center you will ship to. Good question and I forgot to mention this within the article

Josh

ken

it seems that your shippment cost too much since it took about 2 month to arrive, I like your blog ,would you like to talk more about it with me?

Josh
Josh

Hi Ken,

Feel free to email me at [email protected]

Thanks,

Josh

Ziv

Hi Josh,
What about Amazon inspection service? Is the shipment still splitted?

Thanks
Ziv

Josh
Josh

Hi Ziv,

What are you asking about the inspection service? Sorry I don’t fully understand your question.

Josh

Joe

That’s a great money saving tip!

Not sure if you’ve covered this already, but do you know if your freight forwarding service would work with non-US residents and ship straight to Amazon in the US?

I’m in the UK and am thinking of selling on Amazon.com but would need to ship from China straight to Amazon.com – just looking into what info I need to set this up.

Cheers,
Joe

Josh
Josh

Thanks Joe!

Yes, the freight forwarding service will work for anyone no matter where you are located. I never saw my actual shipment and they handled it all for me. I could have been living in Mexico and I would have bee able to do the exact same thing I did. Forest Shipping handled all of the logistics for me and I just gave them the info they needed

Josh

Elena

Hi Josh, same story here as i’m from UK and currently trying to create my first shipment to Amazon in US. I’m using the same freight forwarding agent you have used – Forest Shipping, not sure if you are still working with them. When it comes to creating a shipping plan, Amazon prompts me to list a valid “shipping from address”, not sure which one i should use, may be the one of my Chinese factory, or Chinese office of my freight forwarding agent?

Josh
Josh

Hi Elena,

Good question – for your ship from address you can either use your suppliers address or Forest Shipping’s address. Both will work just fine

Josh

Taz

Hi Josh. You don’t use fba inspection for goods from China?
Taz

Josh
Josh

Hi Taz,

I don’t use a FBA inspection service, I probably should have but I made sure that everything looked good before my supplier sent it to my freight forwarder.

Josh

Diego

Does using one Fulfillment Center still allow you to prime ship your product??

Great article,
Diego Murray

Josh
Josh

Hi,

I was still able to utilize prime shipping!

Josh

Gary

Great article. How long did it take for Amazon to move the products to the other warehouses? And did it delay the start date of your sales? For example let’s say your single shipment of 1000pcs arrived at the “FBA warehouse 001” on Jan 1. After amazon receives them and makes them available for sale let’s say Jan 3. Then as Amazon moved for example 300 products the products to FBA warehouse 002 and 300 products to FBA 003, was your product available for sale on Jan 3? Or did they postpone it until they arrived at all 3 FBA warehouses? Would be useful to know as I’m trying to plan ahead. Thanks.

Josh
Josh

Hi Gary,

Good question! I am not 100% sure because when my shipment arrived I was able to start selling. So I am now aware of when my shipment arrived vs. when I was able to start selling. Sorry I wasn’t able to help more

Josh

George Allan

Sorry for asking a silly question but what is “PRIME SHIPPING” is that a service that Amazon provides !!

Josh
Josh

Hi,

Prime shipping is a service in Amazon that will ship products for free within 2 days!

Josh

Sam

Hi Josh 😉

I’m a new seller in Amazon,
and i need to understand if i can send 1000pcs like iphone cases or something similar and all of them is same product, same color exactly.

can i choose the individual units instead of the case packed ?
Cause in the case packed there is a limited units per cartoon, and it will make all the shipment very expensive.

Or what is the best way to send out 1000pcs like the product that I mentioned.

Thanks

John

People, do not use Forest Shipping! Here’s how I got screwed over by them for about $4,000 USD. Yea before they get your money they’re all friendly and fast to reply, but once they get your money, they’re going to do things that is most convenient for them, NOT what is best for you! Unless you are 100% sure your products will move without a hitch, then go ahead and use them but don’t say you weren’t warned.

So I was shipping a shipment of goods into the US, and it got detained by the FDA because it had health claims and was classified into a medical device. FDA issued an official notice with specific instructions to register 3 entities in my supply chain (which I only found out after this was all over), each registration costing about $4,000 USD. Instead of passing the document to me so I could follow the instructions myself, Forest Shipping decides they can email me the instructions with their version of English (and if you’ve communicated with them through email before, you will already know that only about 70% of their English is understandable). And so they advised me to register my own device, paid $4000 to the FDA, only for them to come back and tell me the registration is not done! Obviously I had no confidence in the communication anymore and stopped the shipment. When I contacted FDA directly, I was unable to be issued a refund for making a wrong/incomplete registration because it was my fault I did not understand FDA instructions as I should have read their notice. But yet, I had never even seen FDA’s document at all!

And guess what when I approached Forest Shipping about this? Basically their reply was “nah sorry, it is not our responsibility to forward any documents to you, too bad you lost money”. Oh really, an official document containing material information, from a government authority with instructions for registration that is worth more than $10,000USD, and Forest Shipping does not think its important enough for me to see it myself, and that I should rely on their interpretation of what FDA wants.

Guys, when you’ve handed your shipping money over (especially if you use TT), they will do whatever is most convenient for them from then onwards, which may not be what is best for you! STAY AWAY FROM FOREST SHIPPING! Tons of better shippers out there, like Shapiro and fbaforwarder, I was lazy to research on my own before and simply relied on this shipper that my supplier had connections with. Paid a heavy price for it, and I can’t sue them for it because even if I had 100% of winning, the legal costs would overwhelm my claims of $4,000USD.

If you’re like me and have lost money because of Forest Shipping’s negligence, drop me a message and we may be able to work out a feasible lawsuit claim together.

Don’t say you weren’t warned!

Good luck everyone on your FBA business, I am not giving up, but please don’t use Forest Shipping.

Disclaimer: All views expressed are my own and are true to the best of my knowledge.

Wannlong

“In my example, my product fell under the “1 lb. or less” tier so I had to pay $.30 per unit. since I ordered 1,000 units it cost me an extra $300 to ship to only one warehouse.”

Do Amazon ship product form you from China?

Josh
Josh

Hi,

Amazon didn’t ship my product from China my freight forwarder did!

Josh

Keith

Hey Josh,

Great video, I appreciate your easy explaination

Josh
Josh

Glad I could help Keith 🙂

Thanks for your comment

Josh

ZHONG

Deliver to one FBA Center by Inbound setting would cause some Extro-cost, is it? How Amazon charge that?

I asked cnpacksend.com (FBA Forwarder China) to deliver my goods to FBA US, but they said if shipped to 3 FBA Centers in US, then they have to split as 3 shipments and would higher cost, is it true?

Josh
Josh

Hi,

Shipping to one center will cost you a fee from Amazon however, that fee will be cheaper than the cost of having to split your shipment into 3 and send to 3 different centers. (more than likely)

Josh


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