Fulfilling
Amazon continues on the path of opening up all of its services for customers and partners to use. One of the services customers repeatedly asked us for was to open up our fulfillment network for them to use. Currently there are over 1 million small and large active sellers on the Amazon platform and most need to do their own fulfillment and shipping. Which is a big hassle. This has been an area where Amazon has made significant progress in terms of optimization and cost-effectiveness and we already offered this to our partners through our enterprise services program. We are now also opening up our fulfillment network for everyone to use.
This service is dubbed “Fulfillment by Amazon”, and the low pricing reflects the kind of efficiencies that Amazon has been able to achieve. In completely self-service way you can send items to our warehouses and we will take care that the items get shipped to customers once they get sold. But the service is not limited to when your products are sold on Amazon.com; if you use WebStore to build your personalized storefront you will now have both the front-office and back-office of your own store powered by Amazon's technologies. And we handle the returns if necessary...
There are also major advantages from this program for our retail customers; if a 3rd party seller is using Fulfillment by Amazon its products will now be eligible for free shipping promotions and for Amazon Prime.
It was very interesting to see this service come to life. Quite a bit of innovation was necessary at the business, the software and the fulfillment side to completely open up all the functionality in a completely self-service manner to customers.
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A great step forward Werner and congratulations for getting it out. I've blogged it but some questions:
* Are the merchant services costs included in the price bundles?
* Where’s the accounting? (everyone forgets that, we know)
* When’s it coming to the UK? (maybe it is - looking at the reference to global space)
Are you looking to do anything in the SMB/B2B space? I'm thinking those companies that have outsourced manufacture subject to call off by big retail? Or maybe specialist pharma? That would be very cool and put you nicely in the logistics space. Methinks.
This looks great, Werner. I've been thinking recently how Amazon could help some of my friends with large quantities of product. This seems like the perfect answer.
Werner, I blogged this earlier today, here - http://blogs.talis.com/panlibus/archives/2006/09/fulfilment_to_t.php
The trackback bounced, so this is just a quick note to say that libraries are watching with interest! :-)