How to deal with the increasingly strict FBA warehousing policy?
On July 26, Lawrence, the North American operation director of Yima Technology, brought sellers a live sharing of the FBA warehousing compliance policy interpretation and practical suggestions.
During the live broadcast, Lawrence explained the details of the new regulations and the logic behind them, and discussed the supply chain management and activation paths under visualization technology.
The following is a summary of the content of this sharing:
1. Interpretation of FBA warehousing policy
As early as January this year, Amazon officially issued an announcement to implement new FBA warehousing regulations from April 1. According to the content of the announcement, the Amazon fulfillment center will reject the following 3 kinds of goods:
• Shipments deleted by sellers after approval of the inbound plan.
• The seller sent the shipment the wrong way, ie the shipment was sent to the wrong Amazon fulfillment center.
• The seller sends an incomplete shipment, for example, a shipment with a “cancelled” or “deleted” status.
At the same time, if there is any illegal operation, the seller’s permission to send other goods to Amazon may also be suspended.
How to deal with the increasingly strict FBA warehousing policy?
(Image credit: Amazon)
To avoid delays, Amazon recommends that shippers follow these tips:
• When creating a shipment, identify quantities, contents, and other information that may affect shipment allocation.
• After approval of the shipment plan, be sure to send the shipment to the designated FC in the quantity and content specified in the plan.
• After approving a multi-destination shipment plan, do not delete any part of the shipment or route the shipment using a different route. Ensure that all shipments in the multi-destination program are delivered within 30 days of FC receiving the first shipment.
• Make sure the FBA box ID label is clearly visible.
• The logistics provider ensures that the goods are delivered to the address indicated on the ID label on the FBA box on time.
It can be seen that the implementation of the new Amazon FBA warehousing policy means that the “skills” that sellers and logistics providers used to send and replenish goods will no longer be feasible, and irregular operations will lead to direct rejection of goods. Not only do sellers add extra shipping, but they even miss the best time to sell due to handling exceptions.
2. The logic behind the increasingly strict FBA rules
To understand the reason why Amazon’s FBA warehousing policy is becoming more and more strict, you must first know the Amazon FBA warehousing process:
•From the time a seller creates an order for forecasting, Amazon will bind the seller, logistics provider and warehouse related to the order.
• Amazon will notify the warehouse of arrival information and logistics provider information, and the warehouse will be staffed to prepare for scheduling.
• The logistics provider collects the goods, ships them, and delivers them to the warehouse.
• The FC warehouse receives the goods, scans and confirms that the information is correct, and then puts them into the warehouse and puts them on the shelves.
How to deal with the increasingly strict FBA warehousing policy?
(Image credit: Surpath)
For Amazon, it is most efficient to send all FBA orders to the warehouse according to the online standardized process, and then directly enter the warehouse and put them on the shelves after scanning. At present, the volume of FBA goods accounts for 60% of the total warehouse volume of Amazon FC. Most FBA sellers entrust trucks to be responsible for delivery of warehouses, and the situation is particularly chaotic. All kinds of illegal operations such as PO expiration and wrong delivery of FC make Amazon FC face additional operation processing and costs. Shipments that are not scheduled to be delivered to the warehouse may cause delays in the delivery of other compliant sellers with scheduled shipments.
Amazon S&OP is the planning center of Amazon. One of the key points of the team’s assessment is whether the FBA volume is in accordance with the plan, and it enters the correct FC through the warehousing appointment at the correct time.
The implementation of this new policy is the result of Amazon’s further strengthened management of FBA, which also puts forward higher requirements for sellers and their logistics providers.
In these links, there are three important information that must be filled in correctly, namely, the correct appointment number (electronic POD), the correct FBA number, and the correct PC number.
In this way, after the goods arrive at the warehouse, they can directly enter the fast lane, and immediately transfer or put on the shelves.
If there are one or more filling errors, the delivery may be rejected on the spot, or the goods cannot be quickly received after entering the warehouse and sent to the exception handling area. The processing time of abnormal parts will vary according to the busyness of the warehouse. During peak periods, there may be more than a week of processing time and delays in listing.
If the FBA warehousing policy is violated, the potential risks that sellers will face are as follows:
• Violation records: Although there is no obvious penalty mechanism, all FBA illegal warehousing information is recorded and retained in the account.
• Rejection/Revocation: Shipment rejection, permission to send additional shipments may be revoked, ie no replenishment.
• Risk of account ban: In the future, there will be a risk of account ban based on the non-compliant reservation record of FBA warehousing.
3. How to effectively deal with stricter warehousing regulations?
As mentioned above, this new FBA warehousing policy is Amazon’s purpose to improve the operation efficiency of its own warehouses. Then, to ship strictly in the way the warehouse wants, the following should be done:
• Valid PO: According to Amazon’s definition, a PO can be considered a valid PO within 60 days from the date of creation.
• Delivered to the correct warehouse: It is especially important for sellers to be able to effectively manage the compliance operations of end-haul service providers.
•Do not cancel the shipment after sending it to the warehouse: After the shipment is canceled and then sent to the warehouse, it will become a problem.
• If the same PO is delivered in batches, the batch interval should not exceed 30 days: Amazon hopes to more effectively control the reservation and delivery schedule.
• Submit the FBA number and PRO to the service provider: The service provider can use the FBA number as PRO when making an appointment, and Amazon can track down each FBA number in the appointment record, and contact Amazon’s background in the appointment system. The seller system is paired up.
We can see how Yima Technology helps sellers realize warehousing and planning operations through the following figure:
How to deal with the increasingly strict FBA warehousing policy?
(Image credit: Surpath)
It can be seen that the system information granularity of Yima Technology can be refined to the PO level, thereby ensuring more accurate binding of sellers, logistics providers and warehouses, and more timely information flow.
Yima Technology has an expert team composed of former Amazon US warehouse and operations managers to plan the overall process to ensure that the entire vehicle delivery process can strictly abide by the rules, compliant warehousing, put on the shelves quickly, and realize the whole process of online inspection.
4. Supply chain management and activation path under visualization technology
The purpose of visualization can be summed up in two aspects, that is, full-process monitoring and timely feedback.
Only by organically combining all the dynamic data in the process (the event node where the event occurs) and the static data (the information of commodity reservation and delivery) can a complete whole-process monitoring be formed.
The importance of timely feedback is reflected in the fact that the large database will be supplemented and revised after each data return, so that timely early warning of abnormal situations can be achieved, and the freight situation in the future can be pushed through the calculation to guide sellers to make more wise decisions. Purchasing, logistics and stocking decisions.
As a provider of digital supply chain solutions, Yima Technology aims to help sellers achieve omni-channel inventory supply chain management and one-stop solutions to multi-account and multi-site cross-border supply chain problems.
At Yima Technology, we can control key information such as inventory, timeliness, and cost in real time through the MIT merchant intelligent control tower to achieve visualization.
If sellers are interested, we will explain the principles of MIT in detail in the next column.
