Glenn is a regular Tamebay reader who sometimes contributes. Here he reflects on Amazon FBA and a nightdress the size of a tennis court.
Creating a new clothing product for inclusion within the Amazon catalogue of products takes time, but isn’t particularly complex.
Products with size and colour variations take a bit longer, but at any stage in the process you can change or correct the entered information.
Unfortunately if you choose to send that same product to Amazon for Fulfilment By Amazon (FBA) you had better make sure that you enter the correct dimensions of the product because once you commit to stating the packing size you can’t change your mind.
I recently took delivery of a range of nightdresses in different sizes and colours and having established that there was no existing product within Amazons range, I commenced to create the product range. At some point whilst entering the dimensions of each variation my mind wandered and I gave the dimensions of eleven of the variations in centimetres and the dimension of the twelfth in metres (Attack of the 50 ft woman? – Ed.)
The software used by Amazon to identify which fulfilment centre to send your products to assumed that the twelfth nightdress was the size of a tennis court (well I did give the measurements in metres) and rejected the nightdress as too big.
I know that once products are received at a fulfilment centre they take very careful measurements and they use their own measurements in calculating storage charges. Unfortunately I couldn’t send the incorrectly measured nightdress to Amazon in order that they could measure it because the software rejected it as too big.
As it transpired, customer services managed to resolve the problem and the offending nightdress has now been successfully submitted.
So it appears that the true size doesn’t necessarily matter, but what matters is how big you say it is.
Be careful if you have any comments!