Amazon FBA

JMR

Hi,

I'm looking for opinions on whether Amazon FBA might be an option for my business.

I run an e-Commerce business, selling a range of products in quite a niche market. We have 2 websites, one serving the Irish and European market and also a dedicated .co.uk website for the UK market.
In both cases (Ireland and UK), the products are stored in fulfillment houses where we are charged for storage and delivery when an order is placed.

The business should run with minimal input from myself but at busy periods and in particular in the UK, I find myself following up mislaid orders and aligning actual stock count with our website back end. This coupled with charges that I feel I could improve on and the fact that even though we have engaged reputable SEO agencies over the years and are still not where I'd like to be in terms of Google results in the UK, have led me to look at the option of Amazon FBA for the UK market.

My thinking is that I could remove the following costs and take advantage of Amazons dominance in search engine results by doing so
1. Hosting, domain renewal and maintenance for our .co.uk website
2. Customer support calls would be reduced (we pay a company to do this)
3. UK fulfillment house would be replaced by Amazon

The Amazon FBA charges for storage and delivery of our size of product seem far less expensive than we are currently paying.

Has anybody replaced their eCommerce website with selling through Amazon and used their FBA service? Or has anybody got general thoughts on the above?

ixus

Can't really help but am interested in the discussion. Is the risk getting stuck in Amazon ecosystem and they control all the data analytics? Article/interview with Eshopworld in back of sunday business post made that point today. Worth a read. You ever engage them?

The view was Amazon keep all the data analytics etc where eshopworld work for you and try to help you improve. Was looking around their website and they're recruiting logistics jobs. Maybe they're looking to own a further part of the supply chain, provide better costs to customers.

Novice to this area, would appreciate/be interested in any material you're willing to share.

ixus

An interesting article:

https://sampriestley.com/amazon-fba-business/

Amazon will translate to German and other delivery points associates with Amazon UK. If you wanted to expand outside of UK or use that site to do the European delivery. Might make sense depending on volumes etc.