Amazon don’t want to send anything to landfill unless they absolutely have to and that will now include your inventory under the FBA Donations programme.
Don’t worry… they’re not going to immediately start donating the products you put into Amazon’s warehouses for fulfilment. It’s only when you fill out a disposal order to request Amazon to bin your products that they’ll be considered for donation.
You always have the option of having distressed or unsold stock returned to you, but there’s a fee for retrieving your stock. As an alternative, you can create and pay for a disposal order which is often more cost effective. In the past, you could have specified that your unwanted stock would be destroyed, or opted in to have goods donated. The only difference from next week is that Amazon won’t let you opt out of donating stock – if you fill out a disposal order and the stock is eligible for donation then it will no longer be destroyed.
This is all part of Amazon’s efforts to be a greener company and gentler on the environment. It’s a good thing. If however you disagree and don’t want your stock donated, simply opt instead to have it returned to you and you can sell it as distressed stock through other channels.
In order to adapt our fulfilment operations for contributing to our circular-economy commitment, we are disabling the opt-out functionality from the FBA Donations programme for FBA inventory stored in UK. Effective June 15, 2022, FBA inventory stored in our UK fulfilment centres that is designated for disposal (for example, unfulfillable inventory that you have elected not to have returned to you) will be routed for donation through the FBA Donations programme if we determine that the product is eligible to be donated.
– Amazon
