Asked Amazon- Send To Amazon Updates

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sending-to-fba
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updates
#1

On June 28th, we held an Ask Amazon live thread focused on answering seller questions about the Send To Amazon workflow. We heard your feedback. You now have more time to transition to the Send to Amazon workflow. The old workflow will remain available through October 16, 2022. You can make edits to shipments created with the old workflow through November 29, 2022 . Please also note that shipments on the old workflow will not be deleted and will be available ongoing as well. This revised date will be updated shortly on the Send to Amazon workflow welcome banner and help pages.

Additionally, leveraging feedback from the seller community, the FBA team has continued to incorporate suggestions and requests into the updated workflow. We will share more details on improvements next week as a follow up to our Asked Amazon event in July.

On the Send to Amazon home page in Seller Central, we invite sellers to join our seller council and share your feedback on features and updates to Send to Amazon.

Your comments, questions and concerns helped us make these updates. We appreciate all of your constructive participation and feedback and will continue to provide updates on further feature changes based on the feedback that has been provided.

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#2

We need the ability to assign shipments (on the same workflow) to both Amazon Partnered Carriers and non-APC. It’d also be nice to send some of them via parcel.

Currently the Send-to-Amazon workflow makes you select one or the other… which is not a viable option if I’m looking to send a full truckload to a FC 30 miles away, and LTL (or UPS) shipments to FCs across the country. APC full truckloads have never been particularly competitive with either pricing or reliability.

#3

We do not want this new system.

I have created this thread to give specifics on the problems Amazon is creating.

The first thing that needs to be done is keep the old system until we are well clear of Christmas season. Now is not the time to learn a brand new system.

Amazon cut our unit storage to below where we need for November/December. We do 50% of our sales in those months. We need simple and the old system works.

I spent years creating a system to manage how much inventory we keep in FBA. Your new system blows up that system and unnecessarily.

#4
  1. Need to be able to name workflows upon creation
  2. Need to be able to load case pack information (dims/weights/qty) in bulk
  3. Need to better generate packlists – the old packing lists were perfect. Literally just copy it.
  4. Need to have 2D barcodes available
  5. NEED to have storage category labeled on SKUs within a workflow. If I exceed limits within a storage category, there’s no way of easily knowing which SKU is the culprit without manually checking each one.
  6. Need to be able to modify quantities after loading with a file upload. Right now you can only modify quantities when you added SKUs to a workflow manually.

To be frank, it looks like you did not consider the vendor-warehouse relationship. The biggest vendors on Amazon have their own warehouses or 3PLs, and need to easily communicate orders. The old workflow generated a packing list with a destination, very easy.

#5

Fantastic news. I don’t have to give up on FBA quite yet!

But I have one nagging question, which is the result of having been a programmer in a former life, that I have yet to see answered:

“What problem is being solved by this change?”

#6

I completely agree with you. To implement a structural modification of this caliber this close to the holiday season is absurdity. Does Amazon not understand that this will ultimately cost THEM their % of all of those missed sales? They must have crunched the numbers and decided it will all smooth out over the long run, because otherwise I can’t imagine that a corporation this large would shoot itself in the foot like so.

We too spent the past season setting up our supply chain and internal system in preparation of the holiday season. With the new "send to amazon’ page, we basically have to scrap the whole thing. And, I’m not even complaining about the lost time and resource - business is business, you adapt, I get it. But why do this right before the peak season?

#7

Sellers will bear the cost in money and time of sending items directly to FC’s where Amazon wants the product instead of to the closest one and then Amazon splitting shipments and diverting products themselves.

#8

Nope. This can happen under the old system; in fact, until a couple of years ago, it seemed (at least for me) to be the norm.
Perhaps the new system makes it a little more obvious that it’s happening, but not a new idea.

#9

With the old system, creating pallets of items all going to the same FC isn’t an issue, and those items get sent all over the country once Amazon splits up the shipment. With the new system, I get all the way to the end of the process, then Amazon makes me split the order and send stuff to 3 or 4 different FC’s after I already packed the pallets to create the order in the first place.

If you know how to avoid this in the new system so I can send stuff LTL the same as in the old system, I would love to know about it.

#10

Hi @Picks_by_Nisha, Over the last 2 months, we have launched these Send to Amazon features based on seller feedback,

Merge your Shipments and Workflows
In the Confirm shipping step of Send to Amazon, you can now merge new workflows with existing workflows. The workflows must contain shipments that have the same ship from address, mode and fulfillment center destination. The workflows will be merged into a single workflow that contains all of the merged and non-merged shipments.

Active Workflows Now Have Up To 30 Workflows
In the Active Workflow model you can now see up to 30 of your most recent active workflows. This has been increased from the previous limit of 9 workflows.

Box weight dimensions will now allow for decimal points: Sellers can enter decimal values for box weight and dimensions through case pack templates (in Step 1) and for non-case pack/Individual units (in Step 1b).

Deleting workflows and cancelling shipments process improvements . Sellers can now delete workflows and cancel shipments through a more prominent button at the bottom of STA page

We plan to continue to listen to seller feedback and work on rolling out changes and updates.

(cc: @No_NSFE_For_Me)

Wyatt

#11

I send only small packages, so we have different experiences.

Yeah, this sounds like some of the issues I’m looking at. The old system let’s me generate a list, pack what I can, and then modify the list. The new system, at least as far as I’ve looked at it, makes me define first exactly what will fit into a box, then finish the process. Since I sell used books, every shipment is different, so I don’t know for sure what fits until I pack it.
Nothing wrong with the old system; although I understand that for some people the new system works great. Why not the choice for the seller?

#12

At least some of these “features” are improvements Amazon has made to STA based on our feedback, but not actually improvements to the existing FBA workflow. The 9 workflow limit, for example, was a limit imposed on the first version of STA, but not a limit on the existing workflow. I do not believe these “features” qualify as problems with the existing workflow that STA is needed to resolve.

#13

Amazon is opposed to seller choice. Amazon is in favor of everyone doing everything the same way all the time so that bots can monitor us more efficiently. Don’t believe me? How is the high price bot working out for you?

#14

So this is different from the old system how? In the old system, I can add to a previous shipment; or even merge a shipping plan into an already created shipment if going to the same place. But glad to hear that the new system has been improved in this aspect to give us what we always had.

I’ll admit, this doesn’t apply to me, so I can’t comment on the usefulness or what the old system was like. Ditto for box weight.

Again, this was always possible through the old system.

I’ll agree, based on the comments of some, that the new system has advantages for some sellers. But that doesn’t answer the question, “what problem is solved by taking away the old system?”
Amazon has been able to handle people using the old system while others used the new system for well over a year now. What is accomplished by forcing those of us for whom the old system is perfect to go to a new system that is less well designed for our particular business setup? Why not keep the option past mid-October?

#15

It’s pretty evident the issue being solved is addressing the ballooning costs for moving inventory internally between FCs. A side benefit may be less FBA sellers competing directly with Amazon as a result of this change.

#16

Hi @Random_Username, We prioritize our feature launches based on the feedback provided by all Sellers. We appreciate your feedback and will continue working on the feedback you have given in efforts to enhance your experience using the Send to Amazon workflow.

Wyatt

#17

We understand that amazon doesn’t want us to erase entire shipments after they are generated. This is something we have adhered to from the beginning. Being able to erase entire lines, and adjusting qtys per case pack without decreasing the total number of units sent on individual shipments is paramount to us. Is there a possibility that this will be implemented into STA workflow in the future? thanks for you feedback!

#18

Hi @Shelf_Cleaning_Capit, The Product team appreciates your feedback based on your business processes. I will take this back to the product team so that they can work on bettering your experience using the workflow.

Wyatt

#19

Hi @Present_Paper, Thank you for listing the features that directly impact your business processes. We are continuously working on the feedback you listed here in efforts to enhance your experience using the Send to Amazon workflow.

Keep an eye out for feature updates coming soon!
Wyatt

#20

As I said above, up until a few years ago, the old system was often giving me multiple destinations; sometimes 3 time zones away. If this is the issue, it doesn’t require a new system that makes many other parts of the process needlessly difficult.