Fulfillment can make or break your Amazon business. These guides cover FBA strategy, inventory management, 3PL partnerships, and supply chain optimization from brands shipping millions of units.
Learn About Our Warehousing & 3PL ServicesDeep-dive guides from our team who manage $2B+ managed on Amazon.
The complete FBA guide covering enrollment, fees, prep requirements, and optimization strategies.
Read the full guide →A decision framework for choosing between FBA and FBM based on your product type, margins, and volume.
Read the full guide →What to look for in an FBA consulting partner and red flags to avoid.
Read the full guide →Real stockout and overstock horror stories, plus the systems we built to prevent them.
Read the full guide →How to cut fulfillment costs without sacrificing delivery speed or customer experience.
Read the full guide →Everything you need to know about 3PL partnerships, from selecting a provider to negotiating rates.
Read the full guide →The honest answer for most brands is a mix. FBA buys Prime eligibility and the conversion rate that comes with it. FBM keeps control and usually keeps margin on large, heavy or slow moving products. A third party warehouse gives you room to do things Amazon will not, such as kitting, bundles and inserts.
Keeping more than one route open is the point. During the pandemic, FBM listings ranked higher for a period while FBA was overwhelmed and restricted to essentials, and sellers who were not already in a warehouse could not get into one. Having a single path to the customer is a risk rather than an efficiency.
Storage, especially in Q4, and returns. Both are easy to leave out of a margin calculation, and both scale with exactly the products you are trying to grow. A product that looks profitable on unit economics can be unprofitable once a quarter of storage and a realistic return rate are applied.
Amazon's multi channel fulfillment lets your FBA inventory fulfil Shopify or TikTok Shop orders. Amazon has been discounting TikTok Shop fulfilment through it at around 35%, which can be the right call for a brand for several months even when the agency advising them owns its own warehouse. Both Walmart and TikTok Shop increasingly push sellers toward their own fulfilment to get full value from the platform, so the practical question becomes how much complexity is worth carrying.
Running out of a ranking product means fighting back to a position you already held, and that takes longer than the stockout did. This is why inventory planning belongs alongside advertising rather than beneath it, and why restock timing should be visible to whoever is setting bids. There is more on how that connects in our PPC resources.
A surprising amount of what grows a brand happens physically: an insert that moves an Amazon buyer onto your email list, a bundle that lifts average order value, an influencer package, kitting for a seasonal variant. Our own Kansas City operation is about 20,000 square feet, which is deliberately small. It means a test can run a hundred units at a time rather than requiring a new scope of work, a quote and an approval before anyone learns anything.
Storage, especially in Q4, and returns. Both are easy to leave out of a margin calculation and both scale with exactly the products you are trying to grow.
Far enough that advertising decisions and stock decisions are made together. Pushing ads on a product that is weeks from running out spends money to arrive at a stockout sooner, and recovering a lost ranking takes longer than the stockout did.
Not usually. Large or heavy items, slow movers and products with awkward storage economics often do better on FBM or through a third party warehouse. A hybrid across FBA, FBM and AWD is the normal answer rather than the exception.
You lose position and then have to win it back, which costs more than the missed sales did. That is why inventory planning sits alongside advertising rather than beneath it.
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