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Amazon Wants to Help Sellers on Walmart and Elsewhere

Amazon
Amazon Wants to Help Sellers on Walmart and Elsewhere

On April 1st, Amazon lowered its fulfillment fees for non-Amazon orders through its FBA service, known as MCF (multi-channel fulfillment). Now it’s offering select sellers the ability to send their off-Amazon orders in non-Amazon branded boxes at no extra charge.

Marketplace Pulse reported the news in a tweet on Friday, noting the program was called “MCF blank box order fulfillment.”

It explained the significance for sellers – they can now use Amazon FBA for orders placed on sites like Walmart, which doesn’t allow its marketplace sellers to ship orders in Amazon-branded boxes.

Ed Rosenberg, Founder of Amazon Sellers Group on Facebook, said he thinks Amazon recognizes Shopify, Walmart, and eBay are not going away, so it might as well get a share of that growth. However, the program is currently available on a very limited basis, he believes.

The GeekSeller blog published Amazon’s invitation in which it advised sellers that when sending inventory to Amazon FBA, they should indicate if it’s for “Blank box” or “Standard Fulfillment by Amazon.” However, sellers may not know how much of their inventory will be sold through other channels versus Amazon.

The letter continued, “MCF orders will be prioritized to ship in blank boxes when inventory exists in a blank box fulfillment center. Note that inventory in blank box fulfillment centers can be used to fulfill Amazon.com orders.”

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pointed to the FBA program as helping sellers during his testimony to Congress this week, saying it “enables our third-party sellers to stow their inventory in our fulfillment centers, and we take on all logistics, customer service, and product returns.”

He and other high-tech firms appeared before the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee on Wednesday.

Juozas Kaziukėnas, the founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse, said the primary issue with MFN for sellers is its relatively high pricing. “The service would be more widely used if its pricing was more competitive.”

He said sellers are likely to use FBA for Amazon and a third-party or their own warehouse for other channels.

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Ina Steiner
Ina Steiner
Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.

One thought on “Amazon Wants to Help Sellers on Walmart and Elsewhere”

  1. They had this option when I first joined in 2015, then shortly after it went away. They should be offering plain boxes without Amazon branding to all sellers, at all warehouses, even if they come out with a small selection of applicable sizes. Otherwise, customers receive an Amazon box and accuse the sellers of dropshipping. We simply want to leverage Amazon’s logistics to have the big-boy advantage when it comes to shipping our products.

    Take note, bigwigs – if you want to actually support small business in America, come up with affordable package shipping! Otherwise, you will lose your alternative supply chain we provide.

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