I recently added WooCommerce to a site and part of the build was to use WooCommerce Fulfilment by Amazon I thought a case study to explain what that is all about would be useful.
What Is FBA?
Fulfilment by Amazon is a service unsurprisingly offered by Amazon, in brief you put your products in their warehouses and they will pick and ship your items for you when you send them an order.
The charge a fee for storage of your stock and another fee for shipping and handling, the prices are here if you are interested.
Let’s ignore their shocking staffing policies and realise that Amazon are pretty awesome at getting physical stuff from their warehouses to your door, so this seems to be a no brainer if you are looking to outsource your shipping and handling of products.
You can stock your products in multiple locations so if you sell Europe wide or Across all states in the US you can put your products in the East and West coast locations to speed up delivery time and reduce shipping costs.
You will send your stock into Amazon they will scan it in and store it in their warehouses.
How WooCommerce Fulfilment by Amazon Works
To make this work we need a premium addon for WooCommerce this costs $129 per site
The key to making this work is SKU code that matches on FBA and your WooCommerce product, when an order is created in Woo, it is automatically sent to FBA once payment has been approved.
You can switch FBA on and off, so perhaps you only need a few of your major sellers to be fulfilled you can do that,.
The stock levels in FBA and WooCommerce are automatically synced so you don’t create an order that cannot be fulfilled.
A really cool feature of this setup is that your customers can track their package from their account page. They login to their account and the two way sync of Woo and FBA will show your customers where their package is.
FBA creates a series of email alerts when items are shipped so you always know the status of your fulfilment, a brilliant feature for control freaks like me.
Fulfilment statuses are also synced back to your order dashboard in WooCommerce so you don’t have to login to two dashboard to monitor your orders.
Cancelling an order in Woo will stop the shipment, again only one dashboard is required.
Setup is fairly simple you add a couple of API keys from Amazon into the plugin are all that is required,
What Are The Benefits Of FBA
Time!
It frees up your time to not pack, ship and post your products.
Cost!
It frees you up from having to rent storage space or it gives you back your garage which is currently full of your stock.
Proven Systems!
You know that Amazons are Boss Level at shipping stuff to customers.
Wrap Up – Case Study: WooCommerce Fulfilment by Amazon, Never Lick A Stamp Again
Do people lick stamps anymore or do they all have an adhesive backing? Am I showing my age?
If you are getting to that point in your eCommerce journey that you are struggling to ship all your orders I would recommend FBA over getting your own storage space and staff to do the shipping and handling.
If you need help setting up a fulfilment or shipping service for your WooCommerce store give me a shout.
Photo by Cameron Venti on Unsplash
