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Amazon: dual fulfillment (FBA and FBM)

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About this article

This article describes ChannelEngine’s dual fulfillment option for Amazon’s v2 and v3 connections, including how to set it up.

Introduction

Although ChannelEngine offers a hybrid fulfillment solution for merchants selling on Amazon (i.e.: the Fulfillment override offer attribute), the automatic switch from fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) to fulfillment by merchant (FBM) takes approximately 15 minutes. This 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.

Requirements

  • Two fully configured instances of the same Amazon sales channel (e.g.: Amazon DE)
  • A valid FBA arrangement with Amazon
  • FBA and FBM stock

Setup

Before you begin, make sure that the two instances you are going to use are connected with the same Seller ID – with both the categorization and mappings set up.

FBA

  1. Go to the Setup page of the instance you would like to use for FBA stock.
  2. Within the Advanced settings section, change the Fulfillment type setting to Fulfillment by Amazon.
  3. Click Save.

ChannelEngine back-end - fuflillment type.png

FBM

  1. Go to the Setup page of the instance you would like to use for FBM stock.
  2. Within the Advanced settings section, change the Fulfillment type setting to Fulfillment by merchant.
  3. Click Save.
  4. Ask your contact person at ChannelEngine to enable the Append country code to SKU feature. This ensures that your SKUs associated with the FBM stock are different from the SKUs associated with the FBA stock, which creates two different offers for the same product on Amazon.

Once the offer export is done for both instances, each instance can only import orders according to the configured fulfillment type. That is, the FBA instance only imports FBA orders – and vice versa. This is done to ensure that duplicate orders are not imported.

Additionally, all SKUs for the FBM instance are appended with the respective country code. E.g.: 909042_CE_FBM_DE, if the sales channel in use is Germany.

NB: merchants must use the same SKU across all FBA-enabled countries – and changing FBA SKUs is only possible by recalling existing inventory from Amazon. Therefore, the Append country code to SKU feature must be enabled within the FBM instance of your dual fulfillment setup. For more information on this, refer to the article Amazon: SKU suffix.
NB: although optional, it is advisable to change the name of the two instances so you can easily differentiate them. E.g.: Amazon.co.uk (v3) FBA and Amazon.co.uk (v3) FBM.

FAQs

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

As the dual fulfillment setup overrides the fulfillment type on the channel level, you cannot change the fulfillment type per product.

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