These new placement fees...

Sending in about 900 units, sized at about 2.5 x 4 x .5 inches in size each. The shipment was split into 2 parts. The items are so small, that I can out them all in the same small box without issue. Prices were as follows..... what a joke.

Total placement fees:

$194.74

Total estimated shipping fees:

$16.07

You are telling me that it costs me $16.07 to ship these 2 boxes, but it is going to cost Amazon $194.74 to "redistribute" them to other warehouses?

And ya, the average reduction in FBA fees is $0.20. That is average for all standard sizes. The smalls like this are $0.16 I believe, which does not make up for the new placement fees. Plus those fees are upfront, so Amazon has our money no matter if the item sells or not and they get that money upfront to send to Bezos now and not later.

Just saying, placement fees for 2 small boxes of products should not be $194.74!!!

Since the new placement fees went into effect, we have been having success with splitting our shipments into 5 equal boxes.... several sku's in each box with the same quantity of each sku in each box. We have had no placement fees with this approach.

Until last night. Suddenly this is no longer working and even though we set it up with the 5 separate boxes, after the confirmation the only option it's giving is to put everything in one box with the maximum placement fees. I double-checked my inbound placement settings and it is still set correctly to amazon-optimized shipments.

Has anyone else had this happen? Or any suggestions?? We set up workflows every Monday and it has been fine until yesterday.

Has anyone else noticed a recent change in placement fees?

Amazon is now including a note that says to qualify for Amazon optimized shipment splits, each item on the shipment plan must have 5 cartons of the same item.

Up until this week, that meant if we had 5 boxes with the same item and quantity on the shipment, we'd qualify for the full split. It could just be one SKU that had 5 boxes, and we'd qualify for the full split with zero placement fees.

Now Amazon has moved the goal posts and said every single line item on the shipment must have 5 boxes of identical quantities to be able to qualify for the full split. Not just one SKU anymore.

We were able to avoid placement fees thanks to our high volume items we send in. That seems to be a thing of the past now.

It seems Amazon has caught on and put the squeeze on, now requiring every single item on the shipment to need 5 boxes in the same quantity to qualify.

Pretty lame to keep moving the goal posts like this, but idk why we should expect anything else.