It wasn’t that long ago that simply having a sophisticated warehouse management system (WMS) was a major selling point for third-party logistics (3PL) providers. Over time, however, this technology has become commonplace, with just about all 3PLs having their own WMS bells and whistles to advertise.
But, while having a full-featured WMS may no longer be a differentiator for 3PLs, the way a 3PL uses the system certainly can be.
If you’re selling online, chances are you’re selling on Amazon. And, if you’re selling on Amazon, you want to be Prime-certified to reach Amazon’s 100+ million Prime customers. These ‘frequent flyers’ spend an average of 1,400 per year[i] on the site.
To become Prime-certified, many sellers go straight to the source and let Amazon handle fulfillment through their Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) program. But there is another Prime-friendly option available to you: Seller Fulfilled Prime (SFP). In this article, we’ll take a closer look at this Amazon seller fulfillment program and the ways in which it differs from FBA.
Just as Scotch is to transparent tape and Kleenex is to tissue paper, Amazon is synonymous with eCommerce. If you’re selling products online, chances are a sizeable portion of your efforts take place on Amazon’s site with its 197 million users per month.
But, just because Amazon’s marketplace is where you want your products to be, doesn’t mean that Amazon’s fulfillment service (Fulfillment By Amazon – FBA) is the best method for you to store your products and ship them after sale on Amazon or anywhere else. There are many third-party logistics (3PL) providers that, although smaller than FBA, are just as adept at handling your eCommerce fulfillment services.
For online sellers, Amazon.com is a major double edged sword.
On the plus side, the marketplace gives sellers direct access to 250 million buyers. According to Forbes, 4 of every 10 dollars spent online goes to Amazon. Sellers can’t afford not to list their goods there, and Amazon knows it – which brings us to the other side of that very sharp sword.
What is the key to a successful business? We all have a common goal and that is to grow our businesses. The key is to bring in new partners and not just customers. You want to form new partnerships and not categorize them as customers. Here are the principals to the partnership approach -
With more and more consumers shopping online, companies have had to adapt fulfillment to handle picking and shipping of individual items. Operationally, multi-channel fulfillment is a big shift. So big, in fact, that many companies have chosen to separately manage fulfillment of bulk retail orders and fulfillment of individual eCommerce orders.
According to the Fall 2013 “Big Box Velocity Index” from Jones Lang LaSalle, even though just 5.5% of current retail sales are online, fully 12% of the U.S. requirements for warehouse space are eCommerce related. The reason? eCommerce fulfillment is increasingly moving to a one-day and same-day delivery model. So companies, like Amazon, have to increase the number of distribution centers to get physically closer customers.
(Mimi Ma is Director of Quality and Compliance at Weber Logistics)
13530 Rosecrans Avenue
Santa Fe Springs, CA 90670
855.GO.WEBER (855.469.3237)
info@weberlogistics.com
a 
Capital Management
Portfolio Company