With the announcement by Amazon of temporary restrictions on products entering their fulfilment centres (also covered here in an earlier blog post), third party Amazon sellers that depend on FBA, and that have products not included in the allowed categories, are worried about the impact on their businesses. As a result, we created this resource to help.
If you have your own warehouses and are able to handle the fulfilment capacity in-house, there is nothing preventing you from continuing to sell on Amazon. One big question is whether Amazon will open up Seller-Fulfilled Prime to more third party sellers. At present, Amazon states that they’re not accepting new registrations but it is possible to sign up on a waitlist. Regardless, given supply chain disruptions due to this unprecedented (in our era) event, the Prime designation may, for a short time anyhow, be less important. We will monitor any news on this and provide updates.
For those of you dependent on Amazon FBA for much or all of your product fulfilment, you may wish to explore third parties that can help manage fulfilment for you. While the Seller Fulfilled Prime question applies here too, your initial goal is likely just to be able to ship orders. For that, ChannelAdvisor has developed a network of partners that may be able to help. Initially, we’re providing a list here so that you can follow up, if interested. As we work with partners to assess their ability to bring on new third party sellers, we will provide more detailed updates here.
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Please note that due to the severity of current events related to COVID-19, many businesses are operating outside of normal practice, as evidenced by Amazon’s decision to focus on critical products such as household staples and medical supplies. We admire the efforts being taken by Amazon and others to help mitigate the impact on society. We are here for our customers and will pass along any information that we have to help keep your businesses running. We will update this as we learn more.
Thank you and stay safe.
