Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) enables merchants to store inventory and fulfill orders from Amazon fulfillment centers. As part of this, FBA also manages customer service and returns for all of your orders that they have shipped. Benefits include eligibility for Amazon Prime, free shipping, and winning the Buy Box. (For more information from Amazon on FBA, see the Amazon website.)
Amazon's FBA process is as follows:
Monsoon Marketplace supports FBA for US-based sellers selling on Amazon US, and UK-based sellers selling on Amazon UK.
Monsoon Marketplace is designed to streamline your FBA business. Monsoon Marketplace helps you to:
Monsoon Marketplace manages inventory for all FBA-supported product categories.
To sell products through FBA, you must either use Monsoon Marketplace to get a distribution shipment plan for where to send your FBA shipments, or use Amazon's process to get a shipment plan. (For step-by-step instructions for building an FBA shipment, see Checklist: Create an FBA Shipment Using Monsoon Marketplace.) The following terms describe shipment plans and shipments:
FBA distribution shipment plan: Describes an item you have identified to send to an Amazon fulfillment center and where it should be sent. Building your plan consists of selecting the item (SKU) you would like to send, indicating the quantity of each product, and then, requesting a plan from Amazon.
FBA shipment: Made up of merchandise that you are sending to Amazon. This may be new merchandise that you have received to send to Amazon, or inventory that you have in stock which you are converting into FBA inventory.
The attributes of an FBA shipment include:
Shipment origin: For most FBA sellers this is the same as the address you use for your business on the FBA market. By default, Monsoon Marketplace uses the address in your Address settings (on the Settings tab, in the left pane under My Company). After you enable FBA, you can change this default address and you can add alternate origin locations. This enables you to build FBA shipments from multiple warehouses and also build shipments that your distributors can send to FBA. For more information, see FBA Shipment Origins.
Fulfillment center: The warehouse where FBA inventory is shipped for storage and order fulfillment. Following Amazon guidelines, a merchant prepares, labels, then ships inventory to a fulfillment center. Orders for FBA inventory are shipped from fulfillment centers directly to a merchant's customers. When you add your first item to an FBA shipment, Amazon determines the appropriate fulfillment center for your inventory. A shipment may only contain items destined for the same fulfillment center.
Prep type: Items in shipments are assigned a prep type that depends on the characteristics of the item being shipped. They are Stickerless and Labeled. For more information about prep type, see Building and Managing Settings for FBA Distributions. For more information about preparing items to send to Amazon, see the Amazon website.
FNSKUs: Once you submit products via FBA, Amazon applies an FNSKU (the FBA SKU value) to the inventory you send to their fulfillment centers. FNSKU's are applied to each unique combination of ASIN, Condition, and SKU. If you submit an item with a different condition and the same ASIN, Amazon will create a unique FNSKU for that item.
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