FBA Onsite readiness guidelines for high-sales events or seasons

The boost in Amazon sales activity that comes with Prime Day and the holiday season can result in increased demand for your products, even if you’re not running specific promotions and deals during these busy times. The readiness guidelines and checklist below are designed to help you prepare for any high-sales event or season.

Note that FBA Onsite performance requirements remain in effect all year long, including for Prime Day and the holiday season.

For more information, including performance tips, visit FBA Onsite program performance requirements.

Remember to monitor your performance and adjust your capacity to take orders through the Performance Management Dashboard. Note that issues only appear for orders with a missed customer promise.

From the dashboard, you can:

• Set daily order limits based on your forecasted orders and scheduled number of employees. Choose a realistic daily limit to successfully process your orders with no performance defects.
  Note: Limits reset on Saturday and Sunday.
• Disable your Prime badge to reduce incoming orders or set a temporary node closure to stop incoming orders if you become overwhelmed with orders or your facility stops operating. Open a case with the Onsite support team to communicate any impact to your performance.

• Perform inventory audits to ensure the inventory in the warehouse management system (WMS) accurately corresponds with the physical inventory you have on hand.
• Optimize picking throughput by placing deal SKUs or high-selling SKUs as close to pack stations as possible to decrease travel time. Use the Move function to adjust inventory in the WMS.
• Receive inventory in advance. The Onsite support team will prioritize cases for customer orders and any related shipping issues.

• Pack orders before the assigned carrier pickup time (CPT). If an order is packed on a specific day, it must also be physically shipped out that day as well.
• Provide your local carrier with sales volume forecasts (based on estimates from previous years and any deals planned) so they can also better prepare for higher volumes. For example, they may need to send an additional trailer or pickup to your facility. If you have the data, you can also break the forecasts down by box-size ranges or number of pallets to give a more informative estimate.
• Review the box settings tab in the WMS and confirm it includes all the necessary box dimensions, especially if you plan on having a deal or are adding a new product. This ensures the box type is available and automatically chosen in the pack process.
• Add more pack stations and shipping supplies, such as boxes, tapes, pallets, dangerous goods labels (if applicable), and thermal shipping labels to accommodate higher volumes. If your site has been approved to sell dangerous goods, note that you are required to over-box all of your low dangerous goods inventory.
• If you’re overwhelmed with orders, remove your Prime badge or set a daily order limit (see above) and let us know if you think your performance metrics will be impacted.
• Accurately apply labels as prompted by the WMS during the pack process.
• Increase the number of employees to accommodate higher order volumes and plan for any labor shortages.

Warehouse Management System

• Receive your SKUs as early as possible and store into WMS accordingly.
• Input configurations for all boxes being used.

Seller Central

• Ensure that inventory has the correct dimensions and weights in Seller Central.
• Set throttle limits based on forecasted sales and the volume you can handle.
• Train your Onsite managers on what to do in case of an outage or emergency closure.

Carrier

• Contact your local reps with forecasts and the potential need for any additional pickups or trailers.

Physical warehouse

• Move high-selling or deal SKUs closer to the pack area.
• Purchase adequate shipping supplies, such as boxes, tapes, pallets, and shipping labels.
• Add additional pack stations based on forecasts.
• Conduct physical inventory audits with unit numbers in the WMS.
• Hire additional employees and develop a back-up plan.

Dangerous goods only

• Purchase required dangerous goods labels.
• Purchase additional boxes for dangerous goods SKUs.
• Purchase required dangerous goods labels.