Global Shipping with Amazon FBA
When you’re in the business of global shipping from China to the US, you learn a thing or two about business practices. For those shipments that come through our US custom brokers warehouse, we see success selling to Amazon. That is if they use Amazon FBA.
With this program, you don’t have to worry about getting any employee visas. Just ship your product to Amazon’s warehouse and let their employees do the work. Interested in the specifics? Continue below for details.
What is Amazon FBA?
Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is a program that lets people who need global shipping from China to the US stay at home. You send all your product to Amazon’s warehouse and they charge you a very small per cubic foot fee to store it. When one of your products sells, instead of you paying someone to pack and ship it, Amazon handles that. They use their employees and shipping practices to send your products. It’s that easy.
It’s easy, but it’s not free. Amazon charges a fee for each product sold. These fees include shipping, handling, pulling, customer service, and return shipping if needed. The fees change with the size of the product but have one flat shipping rate. Let’s say you make a $6 profit on each item you sell. Amazon charges a $2.31 fee for shipping that product out.
Is it worth it? Most of the time, Can you afford to set up, rent, and run warehouse space in America or lose customers to long shipping times? Do you want to find, hire, and pay employees to do exactly what people who work for Amazon do? Probably not. But since it’s a business decision, you shouldn’t guess.
Amazon makes the process easy for business owners with their free FBA calculator. This website takes into account your profit margin, wholesale cost, overheads, and cost of shipping compared to an FBA fee. It’s almost always cheaper to use Amazon’s fulfillment process.
If you’re paying for global shipping from China, that’s another way FBA services can save you money. You won’t have to pay US Custom Brokers fees or shipping costs on each individual product. You can send everything you have to one of Amazon’s warehouses and save by paying one big fee instead of many little ones.
When you use FBA, customers get to access your product with Amazon’s 2-day free shipping (for prime members). It will have a Prime logo, and the shipping will say Amazon Prime shipping eligible. Consumers love to be able to get their products quickly and this way you don’t pay any crazy rush prices.
The only thing Amazon FBA doesn’t do for you is the customs process. You’ll need a US Customs Broker to help you with that. Our company works out of the Seattle port, close to Amazon’s headquarters. We have years of experience bringing foreign goods into US ports.
If you’re thinking about selling to Amazon but don’t know how, you do now! Just send us over your stuff and Amazon and JC Logistics will take care of the rest for you.