Amazon taps new revenue stream with fulfillment service expansion
By Matt Jansen
Amazon has dominated the online shopping industry for a while, and lately it’s been experimenting with additional revenue streams. One example is the research and development of its own product: Kindle. Another is its Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) service, which can now be managed from an external program.
The news here? Amazon is encouraging third parties to reach into its system and announce incoming or outgoing shipments. That means other web stores or brick and mortar businesses could distribute a product without ever owning or managing any warehouse space.
That positions Amazon to receive a lot of new revenue from businesses looking to focus on developing their products more than how to distribute them.
Here are the details on the new functionality:
The Inbound service gives merchants the ability to create and send shipments to an Amazon fulfillment center (FC). The getInboundShipmentPreview function is used to locate one or more Amazon FCs to receive a particular product. The service may choose to send products to a variety of FCs in order to balance supplies across the entire network. Next, the putInboundShipment function is used to inform Amazon that the merchant will be shipping the product to the indicated FCs. Once the products have been shipped, the setInboundShipmentStatus function is used to inform Amazon that the product is actually on its way.
Many sellers on eBay take advantage of fulfillment by Amazon, which makes sense considering the company’s sprawling 10 million square feet of shipping space with distribution centers throughout the country.
Though customers end up paying for shipping twice, it provides a good way for businesses to put attention toward marketing a sourcing new product.
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March 21st, 2008
I’m Nate and I’m with Shipwire.
I wanted to add that fba.amz isn’t the only company out there doing this.
http://www.shipwire.com
Our API’s have been exposed for a while.
Many shopping carts have already connected. also, integrations with PayPal buy now buttons, eBay auctions, Google Checkout and Quickbooks.
Free Trial. Try us out. No credit card needed to connect and try the warehouse.
http://www.shipwire.com/trial
Multiple warehouses in Los Angeles, Chicago, Vancouver, Toronto and UK (beta).
Ship from multiple warehouses means faster delivery and much lower shipping prices.
Go to Shipwire.com/pricing and hover over the orange Tag at “DHL”. Input your current ship from location and see how much you would save. Then see if you get 1-2 day delivery for the price of ground if you use the full warehouse network.
We build the free trial to be used, so please do try it.
cheers,
Nate