Third-party sellers and brands alike have had to adapt to a lot of changes in the past year. Amazon has thrown a new curveball to Amazon sellers when it comes to Amazon Prime and Prime eligibility. They announced these changes to Seller Fulfillment Prime (SFP) in August 2020, but they went into effect on February 1st, 2021. SFP is a fulfillment method that allows professional Amazon sellers to display the Prime badge on orders fulfilled via their own warehouse or third-party logistics providers. To be eligible for this you have to have been a Professional Amazon seller for at least 90 days and must meet some requirements for a trial period of 30 days (sometimes it can be less). These include:
These sellers have the option to show Prime offers and get the attention of countless prime members. Having that badge can often gain more sales for you and shorter delivery times for the customer. However, less than 16% of all SFP orders have been meeting Prime’s two-day delivery guarantee, according to Amazon, mainly because many sellers do not operate on weekends. This is where the new requirements come in:
These requirements can create issues for sellers. If your warehouse doesn’t already operate on weekends, you’ll have to change that. You will also have to negotiate with your carrier partners like UPS, USPS, or FedEx to do pickups on either Saturdays or Sundays.
Meeting the one-day delivery promises has also created issues. This requirement states that the one-day delivery option must be available to at least 30% of your page viewers for standard size items (5% for oversize). Two-day delivery options must be shown to 55% of viewers for standard items (30% for oversize). They have loosened these requirements due to COVID-19, one-day delivery is down to 5% instead of 30% until June 1st, 2021. This can create issues for all sellers for different reasons. Say you are on the East Coast, but most of your orders come from West Coast areas? How could you fulfill that order with the one-day delivery promise? Regional Prime offers, which are based on zip code, limit your buying audience and you may not reach your page view goals. If you only have one warehouse or very few, meeting that one-day promise sounds impossible or at least quite expensive. If none of your warehouses are near major populated areas with a lot of orders such as California, Texas, New York, Illinois, or Florida this can also make this one-day delivery promise hard to keep.
The reason Amazon may be doing this is to push more sellers toward FBA. Losing Prime eligibility can often cost you the Buy Box on product listings. Losing that, your offer is less likely to get noticed, which will lead to far fewer sales. Plus, there are over 126 million customers engaged in Amazon’s Prime loyalty program, making them eligible to order items with Prime benefits. This stat is growing more as Prime benefits are being expanded upon for the customer. Being without Prime offers with that large of a customer base is going to cost you as well. So, do you have a plan for your company to adapt to these new standards? Are you experiencing issues with trying to meet the requirements which are costing sales?
If you are trying to sell products on Amazon, but are having a tough time keeping up, it may be better to partner with a third-party seller that is set up to meet these new challenges. Here at Avalanche, we’ve quickly adapted to Amazon’s new way of doing things and we are prepared to meet any future challenges as well. One of our goals for our partners is to take on the difficult tasks that come with selling on Amazon. If you have any questions about how we can help you with selling on Amazon you can contact us here on our site. Also, leave a comment with your experience with these new requirements, we love to hear other seller’s feedback.