When selling on Amazon, customers who have a Prime subscription will be more attracted to your products if they’re available under the Prime program which offers fast delivery and free shipping. Many consumers will habitually tick the Prime box in search and will then only see products which are available under the Prime Program.
In the past, products were only included in Prime if they were placed into Amazon’s warehouses under their FBA program. This not only entails giving control of your stock to Amazon and is also not suitable for all product types such as large or heavy items, slow moving or seasonal goods, items with a large number of variations, high value items, and products which require special handling or preparation such as personalised items.
Amazon introduced a new Seller Fulfilled Prime program to meet the needs of retailers who chose not to put their products into FBA. Seller Fulfilled Prime enables you to list your products with the Prime badge while leveraging your own fulfilment operations. Naturally in order to qualify, there are some criteria you’ll need to meet:
Amazon Seller Fulfilled Prime criteria
- Offer Premium Shipping Options
- Ship over 99% of your orders on time
- Have an order cancellation rate of less than 1%
- Purchase shipping labels through the Buy Delivery Services or the Amazon Shipping website
- Deliver orders with Amazon’s supported Seller Fulfilled Prime carriers
- Seller must agree to the Amazon Returns Policy
- Allow for all customer service enquiries to be dealt with by Amazon
Amazon Seller Fulfilled Prime trial period
Amazon will insist you complete a trial period before they fully enroll you into the Seller Fulfilled Prime program. During the trial period your products won’t attract the Prime badge in search but if you complete the trial successfully then you’ll get the boost from having the logo against your listings and will appear in Prime searches on Amazon.
Ways to qualify in the Amazon Seller Fulfilled Prime trial period
There are two ways to qualify during your trial period, one with perfect performance and the second if you fail to meet Amazon’s Prime delivery promise on an order.
- Ship 50 eligible Prime trial orders with 100% on time delivery,
- Ship 100 eligible Prime trial orders with 99% on time delivery.
You will need to having sales volumes large enough to complete the trial within 90 days, although you can qualify in as few as 5 days. After 90 days if you fail to pass the trial then the trial period will automatically reset so that you can make another attempt.
Apply for Amazon Seller Fulfilled Prime
You can apply to qualify for Amazon Seller Fulfilled Prime on the Amazon website using your registered Seller Central email address.
5 Responses
Does anyone use international SFP? i.e fulfilled from the UK but deliver into Europe?
We have some competitors who are using this and it is beyond us how they qualify.
We know they do not stock hold, they buy the products as they sell, thus meaning same day despatch is very very hard (if they can get hold of the products), thus they are not despatching on time to a large degree.
They have negative feedback rates bouncing between 8 and 12% (88 and 92% positive) yet still offering prime, this is over a couple of month period. Coupled with those competitors having large amounts of negative feedback removed (we monitor them).
Means we have to tweek our business model, fair enough.
This service should only be for companies who can only fulfill to the same standard as FBA sellers who supply into Amazon (ie the product is physically there and always available for same day despatch through the amazon delivery system), otherwise it merely detracts from the quality of service Amazon Prime stands for and negatively effects genuine sellers who do the job properly.
Hi Josh,
No we know exactly who all our competitors are in most things we do, where they buy, how they buy, whether they stock hold, we extensively research all our main competitors, so we know exactly who we are competing against, where their buying from, what they are roughly paying for products and where, even down to how their financed (debt, trade credit, self financed) etc. Then we can know which competitors we can beat easily and which to respect and not pick fights with.
Anyway, back to the competitors with the delivered by amazon. They even turn their amazon store off on a weekend as they cant go and pick up the stock.
They do get a huge amount of negative feedback removed, which all state the same thing, words to the effect, item not received on time when im a prime member or similar. Hence their feedback yoyo’s.
Obviously Amazon delivery is not perfect as is no courier , but Amazon do not deliver late the sheer amout of items being claimed not delivered in their feedback.
We can only presume theirs some glitch in the amazon system where you can say youve despatched it and given it to Amazon when in fact you havent