FBA vendors may be significantly impacted by Amazon Prime Day
See what you can do to minimize any potential problems and how Amazon Prime Day may affect you below.
What is Prime Day on Amazon?
Every July, Amazon hosts a sizable e-commerce event for Prime members, offering significant savings on a wide range of products across the site.
How are importers affected by Amazon Prime Day?
We start to notice a noticeable spike in the amount of merchandise being sent to Amazon FBA warehouses a few weeks before Prime Day.
Delivering your products to FBA in time for Prime Day, may cause delays and, depending on how urgently you need to send them, additional costs.
Problem: Delivery appointments are necessary at Amazon warehouses.
These appointments grow more difficult to secure as products stream in ahead of Prime Day, especially for floor-loaded (unpalletized) FCL shipments since these take longer to unload.
Plan and be ready for delays as a solution. We can trans-load and palletize your freight, and then schedule a delivery appointment for palletized freight (these appointments are simpler to get).
Please note, however, that appointments for Amazon will generally be more challenging to book.
Problem: Although Amazon's LTL prices are competitive, their trucks are overworked before Prime Day. You might have to wait up to 3 weeks for your products to arrive if you use Amazon LTL. To quickly assess the costs and benefits, take into account different last-mile delivery possibilities.
Trucking to Amazon can be arranged by Beeontrade, with delivery occurring within 7 days. This is around 14 days quicker but will cost more than Amazon LTL. (Ask the Beeontrade staff for a price estimate.) Due to a scarcity of open delivery slots, take note that Beeontrade delivery may still be delayed.
Truckers frequently find themselves waiting in a long queue before it's their turn to pull up to the dock at Amazon's warehouses, despite staff members working as swiftly as they can to unload vehicles.
Delays and waiting fees for trucks may occur from this. Unfortunately, there isn't anything that can be done to stop this. Photos from several of our trucking partners from the previous year showed significant traffic jams at multiple FBA warehouses.
How can I prevent these problems?
Simply put, you might not be able to. However, in addition to the details of the recommendations above, we suggest the following:
- Make sure that every carton is correctly labeled at the factory. This will take more time and money to remedy if anything needs to be done at the destination.
- Make sure your Beeontrade team has access to view/edit shipment plans in your Seller Central account if you haven't already.
- If you have an urgent shipment traveling to an Amazon FBA warehouse, let your Beeontrade staff know as soon as possible. In this manner, we can propose and carry out solutions like those mentioned above.
- Customers must make sure they schedule and plan shipments; a CSA associate who handles quotes can provide a window of time or a good general rule of thumb for customers.