Seller Forums
Sign in
Sign in
user profile
Sign in
user profile
News_Amazon

Seller Fulfilled Prime will reopen new enrollment in 2023

We are excited to announce that we will reopen new seller enrollment for the Seller Fulfilled Prime (SFP) program later this year.

We first launched SFP in 2015. Our goal was to allow sellers to independently handle the fulfillment of their products while also making them available to Prime customers with the same fast, free delivery they have come to expect.

As the program grew, we unfortunately realized that SFP was not providing the same high-quality experience that customers expect from Prime. As a result, we paused new seller enrollment while we worked to make sure we had more support for sellers and clear standards in place for the SFP program to ensure it provides customers a great Prime experience. We appreciate the sellers that have helped us work through this, and we are excited to be at the point where we will soon reopen enrollment.

We will update you in the coming months with enrollment details and updated requirements to ensure that it meets Prime customers’ high expectations. We look forward to the improved customer experience that these changes will bring. For those of you that have been interested in joining SFP and waiting, we thank you for your patience. To learn more about the program, go to Seller Fulfilled Prime.

1.8K views
38 replies
Tags:News and Announcements
710
Reply
38 replies
user profile
Seller_U30yZQJq0ooSf
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

SFP is not worth the hype. Unless you are located in the center of the country the 2-day shipping costs are steep. and then they try to push 1 day shipping. Remember this is Amazon and Amazon will only do something that will benefit Amazon.

Amazon has been consolidating their warehouse space, so by opening up SFP the burden now falls on third party sellers. Don't fall for the BS

301
user profile
Seller_2UQL96K7Patvu
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

We did SFP when we could choose what areas we ship to. We are located in Florida so we chose the south east part of the country. Amazon decided that this was not good enough and wanted us to guarantee two day shipping to the entire county. We had to cancel ourselves from the program as the expedited shipping cost to go to the West Coast ate up all the profits.

Would love to do SFP IF we can choose our shipping locations.

If not, forget it.

300
user profile
Seller_3wzBczgcWe0Ch
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

I enjoyed SFP for ASINs that could still be profitable after the shipping. I have flat rates with UPS on 2DA and NDASaver so there were no surprises on shipping costs-- BUT it really left a foul taste in my mouth, along with many other sellers, when you decided to boot nearly all 3rd party sellers from participating in the program by implementing new metrics that were not in a sellers control and in a lot of examples straight up not possible to maintain.

Under penalty of losing the prime badge you demanded a certain % of page views, from potential buyers that were browsing your listing, show a guaranteed delivery date of 2 days from that moment and another % show guaranteed delivery the next day. Why is this impossible to maintain? Well, let's say you have an order cut off time set to 5pm. Lets say it is a Friday and it is after 5pm. How is any person, that is just looking at your listing, going to see a delivery date of Saturday? Lets now say it is 10 pm on Saturday. The absolute fastest I could have a delivery made would be for Tuesday. Thats a next day air order that would ship Monday. It is not possible to show the potential buyer a delivery date of Sunday or Monday. It When I asked amazon how to achieve this metric in scenarios like this their answer was that it was up to me to negotiate with UPS and USPS Sunday pick ups and deliveries. Amazon also said you were not allowed to turn your prime listings on and off any more either.

I still do not understand why, to this day, I most of the prime listings I see when I am buying show a delivery of 3 days to a week for delivery. If it takes a week to be delivered to me then how is it even prime?

140
user profile
Seller_HSs0QxpFcbJhy
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

What FBA prime orders are actually fulfilled in two days today anyway? Half of my inventory is FBA and the customer rarely gets it in two days. That's why they want to reopen SFP, because we do a better job. I'll only do it if we can do regional prime, otherwise , no thanks! Unless, perhaps, we can actually ship at the rates that Amazon gets from UPS. But, hah, Amazon gets that rate, makes us buy Amazon shipping at the regular rate and they keep the difference.

220
user profile
Seller_4lw6ILteSlST6
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

as a former sfp seller, let me just warn other sellers, this program is extremely, extremely costly. Just wait for your first Monday when you realize that you have to overnight half of your shipments that day. SFP simply does not work for single warehouse businesses, unless you have better than 100 percent margins. Just be ready to have your margins squeezed to nothing, and prepare to lose money on many sales.

SFP as it was originally setup worked great. It was a good deal for buyers. Sellers made less but weren’t required to ship things in 2 days, including weekends, and then the crazy time stuff they added on that just destroyed the program. As a buyer on Amazon I used to be able to get pretty much everything prime. Then when these crazy new requirements were put in place, now there are tons of items on Amazon that have no prime offer at all.

Like a lot of sellers we tried fba at that point, and that was a total debacle. Lost merchandise, merchandise in purgatory for years, not months, all getting fees charged on it. Returns like crazy. Crazy merchandise coming back. Empty box returns. It was a train wreck. So we killed SFP and fba, and focused our sales efforts elsewhere. Yeah we sell less now, but we’re more profitable now too. FBA felt like a Rube Goldberg machine to us. Quitting was the best decision I made for our business in a long time. SFP as it is now is much like that. A costly, expensive thing to do.

Oh yeah and that silly metric about page views and estimated delivery dates, which is something we have zero control over. So booting almost all sfp sellers after we built portions of our business around the program was a move that probably soured me as a seller on this platform forever. It made selling on here and building your business on here feel like building it on quicksand. The change was one I couldn’t have imagined coming, because it makes such little sense. It lowered the service level on Amazon on the whole.

160
user profile
Seller_LuY7EhG6PfzN5
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

Been there, done that, lost money, they can keep it. But it would actually be nice get prime purchases in under a week from Amazon and/or FBA sellers. Yet another example of rules for thee but not for me - Amazon in a nutshell.

90
user profile
Seller_usjZPFkqfalYO
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

Will SFP sellers have 3, 4 or 5+ day delivery times like FBA currently offers now? I am in the center of the country and every time I order with prime, it is more than 2 days delivery. But expect SFP sellers to do better? Please be more lenient with SFP delivery requirements and I will change my listings to SFP again.

51
user profile
Seller_3fb5PeetLDQvb
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

When Regional SFP was shut down and the program demanded working Saturdays or Sundays, we were out. This sort of setup just further enslaves the 3P seller to standards that are even beyond what Amazon itself offers.

If Regional Prime returned, it would be a more beneficial system for sellers and truly for the customer. To be the most "customer centric company on earth" means you treat the 3P sellers with respect which trickles to better choices for the customer.

To second day air a low margin item (let's face it the Amazon marketplace can squeeze margins) from the eastern USA to California is a joke.

Return Regional SFP and we will participate. But the current lunacy is your's to keep.

80
user profile
Seller_WVzHFA6EjPZX3
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

Well is Amazon going to set the same standards for Seller Fulfilled Prime as they have for Amazon fulfilled Prime, I know on my personal account Prime has not been 2 days for several years. I see average Prime delivery of 3-5 days and we even have an Amazon Delivery Hub in our town less than 5 miles away. Prime is not what it was, but are they going to let us have the same 3-5 day delivery that they have as standard for Prime now?

60
user profile
Seller_PCshC7t8gZjqm
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

It would have been nice if Amazon fixed this program for Sellers at the same time they were "fixing" the performance metrics to help Buyers.

1. Make Buy Shipping properly support FedEx G/HD on Sundays vs. how often it tries to force 1- or 2-Day Air upgrades after promising an order via ground.

2. Provide USEFUL reporting to diagnose Delivery Speed Promise issues. This needs to be geographic and time of day based.

3. Indicate at the line-level whether a SKU was sold with Prime or not instead of marking the order Prime and including Prime ineligible items in the order.

4. Do a better job with holidays. If the carriers aren't going to commit--at a national level--to move packages on Easter Sunday, stop acting like it is a normal Sunday.

5. Allow a shipping template change via product data upload even if some other part of the product data is triggering an error. Shipping templates should work the same way as price and inventory (not subject to whether every product content field meets Amazon's requirements).

6. Allow different settings by Seller DC (e.g.: cutoff times, operating days, etc.) or by shipping template.

70
user profile
News_Amazon

Seller Fulfilled Prime will reopen new enrollment in 2023

We are excited to announce that we will reopen new seller enrollment for the Seller Fulfilled Prime (SFP) program later this year.

We first launched SFP in 2015. Our goal was to allow sellers to independently handle the fulfillment of their products while also making them available to Prime customers with the same fast, free delivery they have come to expect.

As the program grew, we unfortunately realized that SFP was not providing the same high-quality experience that customers expect from Prime. As a result, we paused new seller enrollment while we worked to make sure we had more support for sellers and clear standards in place for the SFP program to ensure it provides customers a great Prime experience. We appreciate the sellers that have helped us work through this, and we are excited to be at the point where we will soon reopen enrollment.

We will update you in the coming months with enrollment details and updated requirements to ensure that it meets Prime customers’ high expectations. We look forward to the improved customer experience that these changes will bring. For those of you that have been interested in joining SFP and waiting, we thank you for your patience. To learn more about the program, go to Seller Fulfilled Prime.

1.8K views
38 replies
Tags:News and Announcements
710
Reply
user profile

Seller Fulfilled Prime will reopen new enrollment in 2023

by News_Amazon

We are excited to announce that we will reopen new seller enrollment for the Seller Fulfilled Prime (SFP) program later this year.

We first launched SFP in 2015. Our goal was to allow sellers to independently handle the fulfillment of their products while also making them available to Prime customers with the same fast, free delivery they have come to expect.

As the program grew, we unfortunately realized that SFP was not providing the same high-quality experience that customers expect from Prime. As a result, we paused new seller enrollment while we worked to make sure we had more support for sellers and clear standards in place for the SFP program to ensure it provides customers a great Prime experience. We appreciate the sellers that have helped us work through this, and we are excited to be at the point where we will soon reopen enrollment.

We will update you in the coming months with enrollment details and updated requirements to ensure that it meets Prime customers’ high expectations. We look forward to the improved customer experience that these changes will bring. For those of you that have been interested in joining SFP and waiting, we thank you for your patience. To learn more about the program, go to Seller Fulfilled Prime.

Tags:News and Announcements
710
1.8K views
38 replies
Reply
38 replies
38 replies
Quick filters
Sort by
user profile
Seller_U30yZQJq0ooSf
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

SFP is not worth the hype. Unless you are located in the center of the country the 2-day shipping costs are steep. and then they try to push 1 day shipping. Remember this is Amazon and Amazon will only do something that will benefit Amazon.

Amazon has been consolidating their warehouse space, so by opening up SFP the burden now falls on third party sellers. Don't fall for the BS

301
user profile
Seller_2UQL96K7Patvu
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

We did SFP when we could choose what areas we ship to. We are located in Florida so we chose the south east part of the country. Amazon decided that this was not good enough and wanted us to guarantee two day shipping to the entire county. We had to cancel ourselves from the program as the expedited shipping cost to go to the West Coast ate up all the profits.

Would love to do SFP IF we can choose our shipping locations.

If not, forget it.

300
user profile
Seller_3wzBczgcWe0Ch
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

I enjoyed SFP for ASINs that could still be profitable after the shipping. I have flat rates with UPS on 2DA and NDASaver so there were no surprises on shipping costs-- BUT it really left a foul taste in my mouth, along with many other sellers, when you decided to boot nearly all 3rd party sellers from participating in the program by implementing new metrics that were not in a sellers control and in a lot of examples straight up not possible to maintain.

Under penalty of losing the prime badge you demanded a certain % of page views, from potential buyers that were browsing your listing, show a guaranteed delivery date of 2 days from that moment and another % show guaranteed delivery the next day. Why is this impossible to maintain? Well, let's say you have an order cut off time set to 5pm. Lets say it is a Friday and it is after 5pm. How is any person, that is just looking at your listing, going to see a delivery date of Saturday? Lets now say it is 10 pm on Saturday. The absolute fastest I could have a delivery made would be for Tuesday. Thats a next day air order that would ship Monday. It is not possible to show the potential buyer a delivery date of Sunday or Monday. It When I asked amazon how to achieve this metric in scenarios like this their answer was that it was up to me to negotiate with UPS and USPS Sunday pick ups and deliveries. Amazon also said you were not allowed to turn your prime listings on and off any more either.

I still do not understand why, to this day, I most of the prime listings I see when I am buying show a delivery of 3 days to a week for delivery. If it takes a week to be delivered to me then how is it even prime?

140
user profile
Seller_HSs0QxpFcbJhy
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

What FBA prime orders are actually fulfilled in two days today anyway? Half of my inventory is FBA and the customer rarely gets it in two days. That's why they want to reopen SFP, because we do a better job. I'll only do it if we can do regional prime, otherwise , no thanks! Unless, perhaps, we can actually ship at the rates that Amazon gets from UPS. But, hah, Amazon gets that rate, makes us buy Amazon shipping at the regular rate and they keep the difference.

220
user profile
Seller_4lw6ILteSlST6
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

as a former sfp seller, let me just warn other sellers, this program is extremely, extremely costly. Just wait for your first Monday when you realize that you have to overnight half of your shipments that day. SFP simply does not work for single warehouse businesses, unless you have better than 100 percent margins. Just be ready to have your margins squeezed to nothing, and prepare to lose money on many sales.

SFP as it was originally setup worked great. It was a good deal for buyers. Sellers made less but weren’t required to ship things in 2 days, including weekends, and then the crazy time stuff they added on that just destroyed the program. As a buyer on Amazon I used to be able to get pretty much everything prime. Then when these crazy new requirements were put in place, now there are tons of items on Amazon that have no prime offer at all.

Like a lot of sellers we tried fba at that point, and that was a total debacle. Lost merchandise, merchandise in purgatory for years, not months, all getting fees charged on it. Returns like crazy. Crazy merchandise coming back. Empty box returns. It was a train wreck. So we killed SFP and fba, and focused our sales efforts elsewhere. Yeah we sell less now, but we’re more profitable now too. FBA felt like a Rube Goldberg machine to us. Quitting was the best decision I made for our business in a long time. SFP as it is now is much like that. A costly, expensive thing to do.

Oh yeah and that silly metric about page views and estimated delivery dates, which is something we have zero control over. So booting almost all sfp sellers after we built portions of our business around the program was a move that probably soured me as a seller on this platform forever. It made selling on here and building your business on here feel like building it on quicksand. The change was one I couldn’t have imagined coming, because it makes such little sense. It lowered the service level on Amazon on the whole.

160
user profile
Seller_LuY7EhG6PfzN5
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

Been there, done that, lost money, they can keep it. But it would actually be nice get prime purchases in under a week from Amazon and/or FBA sellers. Yet another example of rules for thee but not for me - Amazon in a nutshell.

90
user profile
Seller_usjZPFkqfalYO
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

Will SFP sellers have 3, 4 or 5+ day delivery times like FBA currently offers now? I am in the center of the country and every time I order with prime, it is more than 2 days delivery. But expect SFP sellers to do better? Please be more lenient with SFP delivery requirements and I will change my listings to SFP again.

51
user profile
Seller_3fb5PeetLDQvb
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

When Regional SFP was shut down and the program demanded working Saturdays or Sundays, we were out. This sort of setup just further enslaves the 3P seller to standards that are even beyond what Amazon itself offers.

If Regional Prime returned, it would be a more beneficial system for sellers and truly for the customer. To be the most "customer centric company on earth" means you treat the 3P sellers with respect which trickles to better choices for the customer.

To second day air a low margin item (let's face it the Amazon marketplace can squeeze margins) from the eastern USA to California is a joke.

Return Regional SFP and we will participate. But the current lunacy is your's to keep.

80
user profile
Seller_WVzHFA6EjPZX3
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

Well is Amazon going to set the same standards for Seller Fulfilled Prime as they have for Amazon fulfilled Prime, I know on my personal account Prime has not been 2 days for several years. I see average Prime delivery of 3-5 days and we even have an Amazon Delivery Hub in our town less than 5 miles away. Prime is not what it was, but are they going to let us have the same 3-5 day delivery that they have as standard for Prime now?

60
user profile
Seller_PCshC7t8gZjqm
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

It would have been nice if Amazon fixed this program for Sellers at the same time they were "fixing" the performance metrics to help Buyers.

1. Make Buy Shipping properly support FedEx G/HD on Sundays vs. how often it tries to force 1- or 2-Day Air upgrades after promising an order via ground.

2. Provide USEFUL reporting to diagnose Delivery Speed Promise issues. This needs to be geographic and time of day based.

3. Indicate at the line-level whether a SKU was sold with Prime or not instead of marking the order Prime and including Prime ineligible items in the order.

4. Do a better job with holidays. If the carriers aren't going to commit--at a national level--to move packages on Easter Sunday, stop acting like it is a normal Sunday.

5. Allow a shipping template change via product data upload even if some other part of the product data is triggering an error. Shipping templates should work the same way as price and inventory (not subject to whether every product content field meets Amazon's requirements).

6. Allow different settings by Seller DC (e.g.: cutoff times, operating days, etc.) or by shipping template.

70
user profile
Seller_U30yZQJq0ooSf
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

SFP is not worth the hype. Unless you are located in the center of the country the 2-day shipping costs are steep. and then they try to push 1 day shipping. Remember this is Amazon and Amazon will only do something that will benefit Amazon.

Amazon has been consolidating their warehouse space, so by opening up SFP the burden now falls on third party sellers. Don't fall for the BS

301
user profile
Seller_U30yZQJq0ooSf
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

SFP is not worth the hype. Unless you are located in the center of the country the 2-day shipping costs are steep. and then they try to push 1 day shipping. Remember this is Amazon and Amazon will only do something that will benefit Amazon.

Amazon has been consolidating their warehouse space, so by opening up SFP the burden now falls on third party sellers. Don't fall for the BS

301
Reply
user profile
Seller_2UQL96K7Patvu
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

We did SFP when we could choose what areas we ship to. We are located in Florida so we chose the south east part of the country. Amazon decided that this was not good enough and wanted us to guarantee two day shipping to the entire county. We had to cancel ourselves from the program as the expedited shipping cost to go to the West Coast ate up all the profits.

Would love to do SFP IF we can choose our shipping locations.

If not, forget it.

300
user profile
Seller_2UQL96K7Patvu
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

We did SFP when we could choose what areas we ship to. We are located in Florida so we chose the south east part of the country. Amazon decided that this was not good enough and wanted us to guarantee two day shipping to the entire county. We had to cancel ourselves from the program as the expedited shipping cost to go to the West Coast ate up all the profits.

Would love to do SFP IF we can choose our shipping locations.

If not, forget it.

300
Reply
user profile
Seller_3wzBczgcWe0Ch
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

I enjoyed SFP for ASINs that could still be profitable after the shipping. I have flat rates with UPS on 2DA and NDASaver so there were no surprises on shipping costs-- BUT it really left a foul taste in my mouth, along with many other sellers, when you decided to boot nearly all 3rd party sellers from participating in the program by implementing new metrics that were not in a sellers control and in a lot of examples straight up not possible to maintain.

Under penalty of losing the prime badge you demanded a certain % of page views, from potential buyers that were browsing your listing, show a guaranteed delivery date of 2 days from that moment and another % show guaranteed delivery the next day. Why is this impossible to maintain? Well, let's say you have an order cut off time set to 5pm. Lets say it is a Friday and it is after 5pm. How is any person, that is just looking at your listing, going to see a delivery date of Saturday? Lets now say it is 10 pm on Saturday. The absolute fastest I could have a delivery made would be for Tuesday. Thats a next day air order that would ship Monday. It is not possible to show the potential buyer a delivery date of Sunday or Monday. It When I asked amazon how to achieve this metric in scenarios like this their answer was that it was up to me to negotiate with UPS and USPS Sunday pick ups and deliveries. Amazon also said you were not allowed to turn your prime listings on and off any more either.

I still do not understand why, to this day, I most of the prime listings I see when I am buying show a delivery of 3 days to a week for delivery. If it takes a week to be delivered to me then how is it even prime?

140
user profile
Seller_3wzBczgcWe0Ch
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

I enjoyed SFP for ASINs that could still be profitable after the shipping. I have flat rates with UPS on 2DA and NDASaver so there were no surprises on shipping costs-- BUT it really left a foul taste in my mouth, along with many other sellers, when you decided to boot nearly all 3rd party sellers from participating in the program by implementing new metrics that were not in a sellers control and in a lot of examples straight up not possible to maintain.

Under penalty of losing the prime badge you demanded a certain % of page views, from potential buyers that were browsing your listing, show a guaranteed delivery date of 2 days from that moment and another % show guaranteed delivery the next day. Why is this impossible to maintain? Well, let's say you have an order cut off time set to 5pm. Lets say it is a Friday and it is after 5pm. How is any person, that is just looking at your listing, going to see a delivery date of Saturday? Lets now say it is 10 pm on Saturday. The absolute fastest I could have a delivery made would be for Tuesday. Thats a next day air order that would ship Monday. It is not possible to show the potential buyer a delivery date of Sunday or Monday. It When I asked amazon how to achieve this metric in scenarios like this their answer was that it was up to me to negotiate with UPS and USPS Sunday pick ups and deliveries. Amazon also said you were not allowed to turn your prime listings on and off any more either.

I still do not understand why, to this day, I most of the prime listings I see when I am buying show a delivery of 3 days to a week for delivery. If it takes a week to be delivered to me then how is it even prime?

140
Reply
user profile
Seller_HSs0QxpFcbJhy
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

What FBA prime orders are actually fulfilled in two days today anyway? Half of my inventory is FBA and the customer rarely gets it in two days. That's why they want to reopen SFP, because we do a better job. I'll only do it if we can do regional prime, otherwise , no thanks! Unless, perhaps, we can actually ship at the rates that Amazon gets from UPS. But, hah, Amazon gets that rate, makes us buy Amazon shipping at the regular rate and they keep the difference.

220
user profile
Seller_HSs0QxpFcbJhy
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

What FBA prime orders are actually fulfilled in two days today anyway? Half of my inventory is FBA and the customer rarely gets it in two days. That's why they want to reopen SFP, because we do a better job. I'll only do it if we can do regional prime, otherwise , no thanks! Unless, perhaps, we can actually ship at the rates that Amazon gets from UPS. But, hah, Amazon gets that rate, makes us buy Amazon shipping at the regular rate and they keep the difference.

220
Reply
user profile
Seller_4lw6ILteSlST6
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

as a former sfp seller, let me just warn other sellers, this program is extremely, extremely costly. Just wait for your first Monday when you realize that you have to overnight half of your shipments that day. SFP simply does not work for single warehouse businesses, unless you have better than 100 percent margins. Just be ready to have your margins squeezed to nothing, and prepare to lose money on many sales.

SFP as it was originally setup worked great. It was a good deal for buyers. Sellers made less but weren’t required to ship things in 2 days, including weekends, and then the crazy time stuff they added on that just destroyed the program. As a buyer on Amazon I used to be able to get pretty much everything prime. Then when these crazy new requirements were put in place, now there are tons of items on Amazon that have no prime offer at all.

Like a lot of sellers we tried fba at that point, and that was a total debacle. Lost merchandise, merchandise in purgatory for years, not months, all getting fees charged on it. Returns like crazy. Crazy merchandise coming back. Empty box returns. It was a train wreck. So we killed SFP and fba, and focused our sales efforts elsewhere. Yeah we sell less now, but we’re more profitable now too. FBA felt like a Rube Goldberg machine to us. Quitting was the best decision I made for our business in a long time. SFP as it is now is much like that. A costly, expensive thing to do.

Oh yeah and that silly metric about page views and estimated delivery dates, which is something we have zero control over. So booting almost all sfp sellers after we built portions of our business around the program was a move that probably soured me as a seller on this platform forever. It made selling on here and building your business on here feel like building it on quicksand. The change was one I couldn’t have imagined coming, because it makes such little sense. It lowered the service level on Amazon on the whole.

160
user profile
Seller_4lw6ILteSlST6
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

as a former sfp seller, let me just warn other sellers, this program is extremely, extremely costly. Just wait for your first Monday when you realize that you have to overnight half of your shipments that day. SFP simply does not work for single warehouse businesses, unless you have better than 100 percent margins. Just be ready to have your margins squeezed to nothing, and prepare to lose money on many sales.

SFP as it was originally setup worked great. It was a good deal for buyers. Sellers made less but weren’t required to ship things in 2 days, including weekends, and then the crazy time stuff they added on that just destroyed the program. As a buyer on Amazon I used to be able to get pretty much everything prime. Then when these crazy new requirements were put in place, now there are tons of items on Amazon that have no prime offer at all.

Like a lot of sellers we tried fba at that point, and that was a total debacle. Lost merchandise, merchandise in purgatory for years, not months, all getting fees charged on it. Returns like crazy. Crazy merchandise coming back. Empty box returns. It was a train wreck. So we killed SFP and fba, and focused our sales efforts elsewhere. Yeah we sell less now, but we’re more profitable now too. FBA felt like a Rube Goldberg machine to us. Quitting was the best decision I made for our business in a long time. SFP as it is now is much like that. A costly, expensive thing to do.

Oh yeah and that silly metric about page views and estimated delivery dates, which is something we have zero control over. So booting almost all sfp sellers after we built portions of our business around the program was a move that probably soured me as a seller on this platform forever. It made selling on here and building your business on here feel like building it on quicksand. The change was one I couldn’t have imagined coming, because it makes such little sense. It lowered the service level on Amazon on the whole.

160
Reply
user profile
Seller_LuY7EhG6PfzN5
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

Been there, done that, lost money, they can keep it. But it would actually be nice get prime purchases in under a week from Amazon and/or FBA sellers. Yet another example of rules for thee but not for me - Amazon in a nutshell.

90
user profile
Seller_LuY7EhG6PfzN5
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

Been there, done that, lost money, they can keep it. But it would actually be nice get prime purchases in under a week from Amazon and/or FBA sellers. Yet another example of rules for thee but not for me - Amazon in a nutshell.

90
Reply
user profile
Seller_usjZPFkqfalYO
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

Will SFP sellers have 3, 4 or 5+ day delivery times like FBA currently offers now? I am in the center of the country and every time I order with prime, it is more than 2 days delivery. But expect SFP sellers to do better? Please be more lenient with SFP delivery requirements and I will change my listings to SFP again.

51
user profile
Seller_usjZPFkqfalYO
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

Will SFP sellers have 3, 4 or 5+ day delivery times like FBA currently offers now? I am in the center of the country and every time I order with prime, it is more than 2 days delivery. But expect SFP sellers to do better? Please be more lenient with SFP delivery requirements and I will change my listings to SFP again.

51
Reply
user profile
Seller_3fb5PeetLDQvb
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

When Regional SFP was shut down and the program demanded working Saturdays or Sundays, we were out. This sort of setup just further enslaves the 3P seller to standards that are even beyond what Amazon itself offers.

If Regional Prime returned, it would be a more beneficial system for sellers and truly for the customer. To be the most "customer centric company on earth" means you treat the 3P sellers with respect which trickles to better choices for the customer.

To second day air a low margin item (let's face it the Amazon marketplace can squeeze margins) from the eastern USA to California is a joke.

Return Regional SFP and we will participate. But the current lunacy is your's to keep.

80
user profile
Seller_3fb5PeetLDQvb
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

When Regional SFP was shut down and the program demanded working Saturdays or Sundays, we were out. This sort of setup just further enslaves the 3P seller to standards that are even beyond what Amazon itself offers.

If Regional Prime returned, it would be a more beneficial system for sellers and truly for the customer. To be the most "customer centric company on earth" means you treat the 3P sellers with respect which trickles to better choices for the customer.

To second day air a low margin item (let's face it the Amazon marketplace can squeeze margins) from the eastern USA to California is a joke.

Return Regional SFP and we will participate. But the current lunacy is your's to keep.

80
Reply
user profile
Seller_WVzHFA6EjPZX3
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

Well is Amazon going to set the same standards for Seller Fulfilled Prime as they have for Amazon fulfilled Prime, I know on my personal account Prime has not been 2 days for several years. I see average Prime delivery of 3-5 days and we even have an Amazon Delivery Hub in our town less than 5 miles away. Prime is not what it was, but are they going to let us have the same 3-5 day delivery that they have as standard for Prime now?

60
user profile
Seller_WVzHFA6EjPZX3
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

Well is Amazon going to set the same standards for Seller Fulfilled Prime as they have for Amazon fulfilled Prime, I know on my personal account Prime has not been 2 days for several years. I see average Prime delivery of 3-5 days and we even have an Amazon Delivery Hub in our town less than 5 miles away. Prime is not what it was, but are they going to let us have the same 3-5 day delivery that they have as standard for Prime now?

60
Reply
user profile
Seller_PCshC7t8gZjqm
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

It would have been nice if Amazon fixed this program for Sellers at the same time they were "fixing" the performance metrics to help Buyers.

1. Make Buy Shipping properly support FedEx G/HD on Sundays vs. how often it tries to force 1- or 2-Day Air upgrades after promising an order via ground.

2. Provide USEFUL reporting to diagnose Delivery Speed Promise issues. This needs to be geographic and time of day based.

3. Indicate at the line-level whether a SKU was sold with Prime or not instead of marking the order Prime and including Prime ineligible items in the order.

4. Do a better job with holidays. If the carriers aren't going to commit--at a national level--to move packages on Easter Sunday, stop acting like it is a normal Sunday.

5. Allow a shipping template change via product data upload even if some other part of the product data is triggering an error. Shipping templates should work the same way as price and inventory (not subject to whether every product content field meets Amazon's requirements).

6. Allow different settings by Seller DC (e.g.: cutoff times, operating days, etc.) or by shipping template.

70
user profile
Seller_PCshC7t8gZjqm
In reply to: News_Amazon's post

It would have been nice if Amazon fixed this program for Sellers at the same time they were "fixing" the performance metrics to help Buyers.

1. Make Buy Shipping properly support FedEx G/HD on Sundays vs. how often it tries to force 1- or 2-Day Air upgrades after promising an order via ground.

2. Provide USEFUL reporting to diagnose Delivery Speed Promise issues. This needs to be geographic and time of day based.

3. Indicate at the line-level whether a SKU was sold with Prime or not instead of marking the order Prime and including Prime ineligible items in the order.

4. Do a better job with holidays. If the carriers aren't going to commit--at a national level--to move packages on Easter Sunday, stop acting like it is a normal Sunday.

5. Allow a shipping template change via product data upload even if some other part of the product data is triggering an error. Shipping templates should work the same way as price and inventory (not subject to whether every product content field meets Amazon's requirements).

6. Allow different settings by Seller DC (e.g.: cutoff times, operating days, etc.) or by shipping template.

70
Reply

Similar Discussions

Similar Discussions

Go to original post