How to use Amazon FBA to fulfill wholesale purchase orders

Yes, there is a way to use Amazon's FBA (Fulfilled By Amazon) service to fulfill orders to your wholesale customers by leveraging the Multi-Channel Fulfillment Option.

Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) allows you to place a fulfillment order on Amazon and have them send the product(s) directly to your customer. This is often used when a Seller has an online e-commerce store in addition to selling on Amazon. MCF works like this:

1. A customer purchases an item on your e-commerce site

2. You place a fulfillment order with Amazon either by manually creating an order in Seller Central, or by utilizing a software program to automatically communicate new orders from your e-commerce cart to Amazon

3. Amazon charges you the standard pick & pack & weight handling fees for your category

4. Amazon fulfills the order and sends the product(s) directly to your customer
    

The same system can be used to fulfill Wholesale orders. Keep in mind that you'll be paying a Pick & Pack and Weight Handling fee on each item that's fulfilled, and those feed could add up quickly depending on how many units are in your wholesale PO.

If that’s the case, you could create a new product listing on Amazon which is a case pack or master carton of your products. You’ll need to assign a SKU and UPC for this new ‘product’, but once you do, you can ship those to Amazon’s warehouse and have them fulfill it whenever you need to fulfill a PO.

You probably don’t want those wholesale case packs showing up in the public online website though. You can submit a request to Seller Support to ensure that your product listing will not show up on the website.

Then, when you have a wholesale Purchase Order to fill, you can create a MCF order for your customer, and only pay Pick & Pack fees for each case pack, rather than each individual unit.

This is a perfect solution for smaller companies who want to streamline their warehousing and only use Amazon for their inventory storage & fulfillment.
 

Want to learn more about using Amazon's Multi-Channel Fulfillment capabilities for retail orders? Read our new blog post about using MCF for retail orders on other sales channels.  
 

*Note: this post was written in September 11, 2015 and a few things have changed since then! Find the updated Multi-Channel Fulfillment  MCF fees right here.