Buyer buys more than 1 of an item, amazon ships in 1 box, charges me full fee for every item
Hi,
Using FBA can be great but I just had my first order for a significant quantity of same item, or variations of the same item.
Customer ordered 12 of our bath bombs, amazon charged us nearly £30 in fulfilment fees and then commission on top of that, the sale value was £72, amazon took nearly £40. If we had sent that order from our warehouse the cost of shipping would have been £4+VAT.
Is there not a fee discount available for when a customer orders multiples of your items that reflects the savings amazon would make on this sort of sale?
Many thanks.
35 replies
Seller_7VbclcPFFRTnc
That’s correct, they do not combine fees etc for multi quantity purchases unfortunately
Seller_XDzJ9YBdCj3SY
Hi,
Without sounding rude, if you had shipped from your warehouse then you would have kept the savings from only one set of shipping charges rather than 12 I guess. I doubt you would have given back to the customer.
I’m not a fan of most Amazon practices but I think most sellers would act in the same way as Amazon has on this occasion.
Seller_DTufFoxJuMU0M
Fulfilment is per item not per postage box, as you have learnt - this is the one downside that I have found so far.
However I look at it as “would I have sold those 12 items in the first place if they weren’t delivered by Amazon on prime?” - I find myself more and more often specifically looking for prime items that Amazon themselves will deliver as I find it a more reliable and faster service than SFP, and that before the fact that its super handy to be able to see exactly when an order will be delivered and even have a map for the 10 stops before me, meaning I don’t have to sit in all day waiting.
So while you see the downside of the “additional” fees for those 12 bath bombs, why not look at the fact that you just sold 12 bath bombs. Does it really make THAT much difference if they were to the same person, or to 12 different people.
Seller_DTufFoxJuMU0M
Yeah same here, 10 items which I could have posted for about 70p, but I paid £6.00
But again this item is not offered on SFP so I probably wouldn’t have made the sale in the first place.
Seller_k4H5v9VB5NnjF
This reminds me of a classic line from when I was in the music business in regards to how much the “evil” record companies took from the artists and how much the artists would make without them.
“Do you want 10% of millions or 100% of f**k all!”
Amazon is just the modern version of the scenario. We have a contract with the devil!
But take heart! In the 50s record companies paid artists an hourly or day rate for their time in the recording studio. By the mid 60s artists were on a small percentage. By the 90s record companies were on their backside. Now the record companies are on a small percentage and that’s if artists even bother using them instead of promoting themselves on YouTube. One day Amazon will go the same way!
Seller_PtSZDCRO4f7e5
I remember a fellow poster saying this a couple of years ago.
Reason it is like this is because it may be that your item is in multiple Amazon warehouses & shipped separately.
Don’t remember the poster. But hits could be one of the reasons.
Can you not limit the amount a buyer buys with minimum order quantity? 
Seller_pSmOMHxVIzqsN
This is nothing to worry about, as if you’d sold all individually you’d not be complaining. I understand your point, and it is a good one, but alas it is far less of a problem to you than other things could be. For instance, the buyer could return all the items bought for a refund! Then it is a big problem as you lose out big time.
So I have had this happen to my company in the past. Ironically, it would seem a well known multinational company bought just under 40 units of two ASINs we were selling via FBA. They did this as it was their own licensed product and seemingly they were checking for authenticity. Of course they were authentic, and instead of keeping them all they just returned the whole lot to Amazon. That basically cost us in excess of £100 in fulfillment fees that we could never recover.
Frustrating, huh!
Seller_DZN91J2W23FWV
If you find that people are ordering multiples of an item then you can always sell them in larger quantities which would then reduce the fulfilment costs.
Seller_24Bec1n3QCVmi
I don’t really understand the complaint to be honest. You say that on your own website the customer pays just one shipping per order, so presumably your item prices are significantly lower on your own website and your prices on Amazon are calculated to take into account the ‘per item’ shipping?
If that’s the case, it sounds like you’d hoped to cash in on the additional postage paid by the customer on Amazon which isn’t how it works unfortunately. If anyone was to get a discount it should have been the customer, but again, not how it works.
That being said, I do get where you are coming from. We had a customer last year who ordered 80 items from us. That sale cost us £192 in FBA fees, whereas if we’d sent it from our warehouse it would have cost £12+vat. The way I chose to look at it though was if it hadn’t been FBA, the customer would probably have purchased from someone else, so at least I got the sale, which in this case, was a £700 order.
