Amazon: dual fulfillment (FBA and FBM)

About this article

This article describes how to implement a dual-fulfillment workflow with Amazon, combining the marketplace fulfillment and direct fulfillment models in a single view, on ChannelEngine.

Table of contents

Introduction

Requirements

Setup

Managing FBA and FBM orders

Hybrid fulfillment

FAQs

Introduction

ChannelEngine makes it easy to support one or a combination of fulfillment models with Amazon:

• FBA fulfillment - products are fulfilled via Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). FBA is a service where Amazon handles inventory storage, packing, shipping, customer service, and returns for products sold by merchants on its platform.
• FBM fulfillment - products are fulfilled via Fulfillment by Merchant (FBM). FBM is an option for Amazon sellers to handle the entire order fulfillment process themselves. 
• Hybrid fulfillment - ChannelEngine automatically switches a product’s fulfillment between FBA and FBM based on the available stock levels from Amazon and from your warehouse(s). 
• Dual-fulfillment - for high-volume sales, simultaneously manage fulfillment via FBA and FBM, without needing to choose between one or the other.

Although ChannelEngine offers a hybrid fulfillment solution for merchants selling on Amazon, the automatic switch from FBA and FBM takes approximately 15 minutes. This lag time may be negligible for some merchants on most days, but it matters on high-volume days.

Therefore, ChannelEngine offers the possibility to configure two instances of the same Amazon sales channel within the same tenant: one handling only FBA stock and the other handling only FBM stock. Offers for FBA and FBM appear separately for the same product on Amazon.

Requirements

• One fully configured Amazon sales channel (e.g.: Amazon DE), including complete categorization and mappings.
• A second instance of the same Amazon sales channel. Contact the ChannelEngine Support team to get this second instance set up in your tenant.
• A preferred SKU suffix. Check out Amazon: SKU suffix.
• A valid FBA arrangement with Amazon

Setup

Contact the ChannelEngine Support team to get the second instance of your Amazon sales channel set up in your tenant.

1. To ensure that FBA and FBM offers stay separate on Amazon, choose a SKU suffix.
2. For deeper guidance on which SKU suffix option to choose, check out Amazon: SKU suffix.
3. Make the request to the ChannelEngine Support Team to set up the second Amazon instance. Include your SKU suffix preference.

ChannelEngine configures the dual-fulfillment model for you:

1. Your original Amazon instance is configured to manage only FBA listings.
2. The second Amazon instance is configured to manage only FBM listings.
3. ChannelEngine renames each instance to indicate which one is used for FBA or FBM.

Managing FBA and FBM orders

After offers are exported to Amazon from both instances, each instance imports orders according to its respective fulfillment type. That is, the FBA instance only imports FBA orders, and the FBM instance only imports FBM orders. ChannelEngine keeps FBA and FBM orders separated to avoid duplicate orders.

Hybrid fulfillment

Hybrid fulfillment is a variation of the dual-fulfillment workflow with Amazon. ChannelEngine automatically switches a product’s fulfillment between FBA and FBM based on the available stock levels from Amazon and from your warehouse(s). The switch-over time is typically 15 minutes. Therefore, hybrid fulfillment is appropriate if you do not expect extremely high sales velocity.   

You only need one instance of your sales channel to implement hybrid fulfillment.

To check if your Amazon plugin supports hybrid fulfillment:

1. Go to Setup, Advanced settings.
2. In the Use fulfillment service field, Yes should be selected.
3. By default, this is correctly configured. However, if you wish to change either your FBA or FBM instance to a hybrid setup, contact the ChannelEngine Support team to complete the hybrid fulfillment setup.

In the hybrid-fulfillment setup, once the stock of the FBA version of a product is replenished, ChannelEngine deletes its FBM version and replaces it with the FBA version, i.e.: the product without the SKU suffix. One offer is exported for the product. If the stock of an FBA offer goes to zero, then ChannelEngine automatically changes the fulfillment type on that offer's SKU to FBM, if there is available stock.

Override the fulfillment type

To create a one-time FBA shipment on an FBM product or vice versa:

1. Go to Mappings, Offer mappings.
2. Go to the fulfillment: Fulfillment Override attribute.
3. Set the product's fulfillment override to FBA.
4. ChannelEngine then deletes the FBM SKU and creates the FBA SKU on Amazon.
5. When the FBA SKU is created, create the marketplace-fulfilled shipment.
6. The product remains on FBA until Amazon has processed the fulfillment shipment.
7. Once the processing is done, manually change the fulfillment override back to Automatic.

FAQs

After setting up dual fulfillment, I can no longer see the ‘Fulfillment override’ offer attribute. What happened?

The dual-fulfillment setup overrides the fulfillment type on the channel level. Therefore, you cannot change the fulfillment type per product in one of the instance’s Mappings steps.