Shopify Fulfillment Services is a Shopify-branded FBA service. It allows you to fulfill orders directly from the merchant’s Shopify store. Merchants who use this service must ship all inventory to an Amazon warehouse and sell through Amazon.com. This is just like other FBA merchants, but on a smaller scale. gofreighthub.io is a Third-Party Logistics Services provider, and aims to provide you the best services.
Shopify charges $1 per unit for fulfilling orders that come in through your Shopify store. This fee does not apply if you place order by yourself on Amazon’s website. Then they ship it using your own process and resources (meaning: “self-fulfillment” or “merchant fulfilled”). For example, if you receive an order from your Shopity Store on Tuesday afternoon and send the shipment out on Wednesday morning with USPS, the order will arrive to your customer by Thursday.
Shopify fees are taken out of your sales before you get paid. So it can be quite expensive depending on how much you sell in a month. If you have an ecommerce business that’s already selling on Amazon, then it makes sense to consider using Shopifiy FBA for orders that come in through your Shopify based website. This way you’ll avoid paying double fulfillment fees when fulfilling orders from both channels. Besides, FBA Masterclass would be a great option for those who are looking for the best fba courses.
Benefits of Shopify Fulfillment Services
There are some other benefits associated with selling on Shopify. These are not available if you only have an existing account with another channel management platform such as Seller Central or Vendor Central (see Future article). Advantages include: running ads to boost your product rankings; use Shopify’s discount codes to promote your products; add a ‘Buy on Amazon’ button to your website. So customers can buy right from your site and have the product shipped directly from an Amazon fulfillment center.
You’ll basically pay Shopify a lot of money for them to handle all order processing, customer service issues, refunds, manage returns and any other related tasks in connection with selling through Shopify. In the meantime, you take care of marketing and running your day-to-day business operations. They take over all marketing fees too. They don’t charge anything extra for that.
It’s important to note that you sign up with Shopify Fulfillment Services as a professional merchant. This means: You cannot fulfill orders yourself by placing your own product listings and shipping them using your own process. Shopify lists all of your inventory for sale on Amazon. You’re responsible for the order fulfillment only (this is also known as Fulfillment-by-Merchant or “FBM”).
Features of Shopify Fulfillment Services
Similar to other FBA services, there’s no monthly fee. According to Shopify: “You pay a $1/unit fee when an order from a shopper in your Shopify store ships out.”
Features such as automated shipment notifications, automated tracking uploads, detailed reports and customer service inquiries are available with Shopify’s Fulfillment Services. According to their website , they can support any kind of package. This includes small envelopes boxes up to 10 lbs.
Even if you’re selling with Amazon FBA, it might be valuable to sign up with Shopify too. Especially if your products are highly profitable. They offer more discounts on their marketing fees compared to other channel management platforms!
Things to Keep in Mind
Keep in mind that you’ll have access to same marketing tools as any other seller who manages their own product listings through Vendor Central or Seller Central. This means they can place ads using one of the supported ad networks (Amazon Sponsored Ads or Google AdWords); run promotions; manage prices. So, it’s only worth considering Shopify if you want an easy-to-use platform for order processing, shipment tracking and customer service issues related to your ecommerce business.
Currently, there are more than 300K merchants using Shopify to run their online business (http://www.shopify.com/partners). This is why they’re offering some pretty big discounts on their fees. The standard fee schedule for using Shopify’s Fulfillment Services starts at $39/month with the first 50 orders processed for no fees. (similar pricing model is offered by other channel management services, such as ChannelAdvisor or Taxamo ).
There are several factors you’ll need to consider before signing up with Shopify’s Fulfillment Services:
1) If your products are already listed on Amazon and fulfilled through FBA. It might not be worth it to sign up for an additional platform that charges more than $40/month just to process orders and help you manage customer service issues. All with the risk of losing some sales to Amazon (if you’re selling on Shopify but getting most of your traffic from Amazon) and additional product returns and shipping costs.
2) If you run an e-commerce business that sells a mix of physical and digital products. It might be worth giving this new offering a try. You can still use Seller Central or Vendor Central for selling digital products. This means no added fees, just pay the commission fee as if they were purchased through any other channel management platform such as ChannelAdvisor or Taxamo.