For many sellers on Amazon, the FBA (or Fulfilled by Amazon) program is the cure to many logistical nightmares. The program, which passes logistics responsibilities and operations over to Amazon for a recurring fee, makes it easy to streamline online order fulfillment, shipping, and returns.
While Amazon is happy to house moving products in their distribution centers, the company wants to make sure products are selling. This is why they have a long-term storage fee, implemented twice a year to stagnant product in their warehouses. For current FBA participants, the next storage assessment date is February 15, which makes the next couple of weeks critical for brands selling on Amazon.
Twice a year, FBA runs an ‘inventory clean-up’ program that checks inventory that has been sitting in distribution centers for an extended period of time. Any product sitting in an Amazon center between 6 months and a year will be charged a fee of $11.25 per cubic foot and anything sitting for more than a year will be charged twice that amount. For smaller brands or brands with niche audiences that might not move product as fast, these timelines can be more than a little daunting.
By working with a single seller like SupplyKick, brands can avoid these long-term storage fees altogether. When we partner with brands, our company actually buys product directly from the sellers and stores it under the SupplyKick name in both our warehouse and FBA distribution centers. This means that SupplyKick can quickly access, reorganize, and even move product when necessary.
When faced with long-term storage fees, the SupplyKick team can pinpoint which products are in danger of fines, pull the products from the FBA warehouses, and then send them back to fulfillment centers to ‘restart the clock’ on long-term fees. Executing on this long-term, multi-faceted plan takes quite a bit of planning from a logistical standpoint, but SupplyKick has the team, resources, and processes to make it happen.
Many single seller partners, including SupplyKick, work diligently to ensure optimal inventory levels for partner products in both our own warehouses and Amazon fulfillment centers. With thousands of SKUs in the system, however, some products may fall into long-term storage. Luckily, the SupplyKick team proactively plans ahead for potential overstock fees. For example, we will be able to mitigate more than 70% of the long-term storage fees that are due to hit our account this February 15th. Plus, as sole owner of our inventory, SupplyKick absorbs all FBA long-term storage fees, with nothing passed along to our brand partners.
If your brand is tired of paying long-term storage fees to Amazon, it’s time to take action. Partnering with SupplyKick will not only help you avoid these unnecessary fees, we can also help optimize your sales across the Amazon marketplace. Ready to get started? Let’s talk!
Photo by Samuel Zeller
