Is Multi-Channel Fulfilment 33% unreliable or have we just been unlucky?

#1

A while ago we decided to try Amazon’s Multi-Channel Fulfilment. In the past when we’ve had a holiday shutdown we’ve suspended our listings on Ebay, Etsy etc, but this time decided to keep them open and use MCF to fulfil orders using our FBA stock. After the first couple of days we had to stop doing this because of the six MCF orders we’d placed, Amazon had sent two wrong items!

What we found most surprising was that Amazon had sent another of our products instead, in fact a very similar product, the same size and colour, the only difference was the customers had ordered leather wallets but Amazon had instead sent two of our faux leather wallets. I’ll be honest I didn’t realise Amazon would store products by the same company side by side in their warehouses, I mean, this is obviously how we store them in our building, so unless we’re careful we can obviously make the same mistake, but (unlike us) surely Amazon use barcodes to pick an item, so how can they make that mistake? I did ask them that question but received a copy and paste reply (and a refund!)

We have another holiday shutdown looming soon and wondered if we have just been unlucky or have others also had poor fulfilment results from MCF.

Fred

#2

They don’t typically. Not only do they spread your stock across the country, they also spread items within a single warehouse. The most likely explanation is that the items had the wrong labels on them.

#3

Have you had any prime customer issues with those products ?

Do you label them or amazon ?

#4

I’ll be honest, my first thought was that we’d made a mistake with labels and in fact Amazon asked us to send photos to confirm the labels were correct, but when we received the items back from the customers it was clear they both had correct labels on them.

So it looks as if the barcode directed the picker to the right area of the warehouse, but then they picked an item that ‘nearly’ matched the description on the label. My problem now is if Amazon are storing our items close to each other are they likely to do this again? 4 correct out of 6 is pretty poor!

#5

We label them and they were labelled correctly. I have no idea if Amazon do this on a regular basis with our FBA orders. We get emails from them saying that items have been returned but there’s never any feedback, so we don’t know if customers have changed their minds or if they have been sent the wrong product.

closed #6

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