• Schertz (near San Antonio)
1.2 Million square feet
Will handle large items
• Coppell (near Dallas)
1 Million square feet
Will handle large items
• Haslet (also near Dallas)Having more fulfillment centers helped Amazon dropping the amount of shipping costs within its yearly budget. In 2011, the shipping costs for the holiday season covered 5.4% of Amazon’s budget for that quarter. In 2012, the amount for that same time period was only 4.5%.
1.1 Million square feet
Will handle smaller items like books, small electronics and DVDs
With the holiday season upon us, we are in a unique situation. We are able to be a part of the retail market that seems to be booming this year. We are able to connect buyers with the items they want and some of us are fortunate enough to make a living do it!
If you sell on Amazon, I am sure you have wondered what happened after your carrier dropped off your boxes and they were checked into the designated warehouse. If you are like me, at some point you have probably wondered what an Amazon fulfillment center looks like. If you have, then you have to see this.
As Cyber Monday rolled around this year, the press seemed to be looking to Amazon to show just how busy Cyber Monday was. From news stories to photo galleries online, nearly every network was talking about Amazon.
Here are a few fun facts about Amazon that were revealed during news stories by Bloomberg TV, ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News:
• Currently, Amazon has about 80 fulfillment centers worldwide. About half of them are in the US.Online, many sites shared videos and photos from inside the fulfillment centers. To see what happens when an item is ordered by an Amazon customer, click here for the NBC News story or here for the ABC News story. To view pictures from inside an Amazon warehouse, click here. (Photos courtesy of Coed Magazine)
• Items are not stored in categories. They go into a free space and are scanned to document its location in the warehouse.
• Amazon’s largest warehouse in Phoenix is the size of 28 football fields (1.2 million square feet).
• On Cyber Monday 2011, Amazon processed 200 orders per second.
• For the 2012 Holiday season, Amazon plans to hire 50,000 seasonal workers.
• Amazon employs 20,000 full-time fulfillment center employees.
• Amazon was the most visited retail site Thanksgiving weekend.
• Amazon uses people instead of robots to pick orders.
• Amazon order pickers walk miles each shift.
• The order picks may also use tricycles to pick orders that contain items that are not warehoused close together.
FBA Sellers, did you spot any items you sell or were you looking for new items to source in the pictures? Were you surprised by the setup shown?
Related posts:
Understanding the Amazon Prime Customer – Become One!
Amazon Fulfillment Course – Automate and Grow Your Business with FBA
The next Amazon FBA Sourcing Workshop in Atlanta is scheduled for October 30, 2012. We will visit a huge grocery store and either a Walmart or Target where I will show you how to source items for Amazon FBA. Seller Engine has been gracious enough to provide a free download of Profit Bandit for iPhone or Android to attendees. Group size is limited to 5 people, so hurry and make your reservation. This class will fill up fast!
This is a great time of year to learn with so many seasonal products and unique buying opportunities available. One day workshop will focus on showing attendees how to source retail items for Amazon FBA using various techniques including smart phone apps, understanding retail marketing and positioning, identifying consumer trends, and more. The purpose of this workshop is to teach participants how to select profitable items to sell using Amazon’s FBA system and concentrates on items that are repeatable. Instructor will explain:
1. Basic scouting tips and shortcuts.2. Types of items that sell well on Amazon FBA and why.
3. Items that appeal to international buyers and why.
4. Items to avoid that may be problematic in the FBA system.
5. Overlooked niche items.
6. How to examine shelf positioning, advertising, and hidden clues that indicate a product may be a good seller on Amazon.
7. How to move away from the herd of Amazon FBA competitors using creative strategies.
8. How to use both free and paid smart phone apps in combination with each other for more thorough and faster sourcing.
9. How to handle questions from other shoppers and employees if purchasing a large amount of inventory.
10. How to secure larger amounts of profitable items using your smart phone.
11. How to identify discontinued items vs items temporarily taken off the market and understand your selling window.
12. How to get deeper discounts on repeatable items.
13. How to scout with poor cell phone service.
Find all the details here, and submit the form to see if you qualify for the workshop.
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Thrift store haul for eBay inventory
1)If you look at the penny book sellers, they usually have thousands of books for sale and a large feedback number. These people are buying by the tractor trailer load, pallet, gaylord, or getting all the leftovers from library sales or storage unit auctions. Some books in those lots will be good to sell, some won't. They can make a few cents on a penny book sale rather than throwing them away. They have huge operations with warehouses and many employees processing books. It works for them to make a few cents on hundreds or thousands of sales a day.
2)Many also use repricers and the prices spiral down to a penny. If you have 3-4 large sellers all using repricers, and no one has set a cut off for the price, the automation of a repricer will allow the price to go to a penny. And these large sellers don't care.
3)There are lots of large sellers using Amazon and eBay for customer harvesting. They can get a sale, and include promotional material in the shipment to entice the buyer to go to their website (20% off your first order!!). Rather than trash a worthless book, they use it to reach a new customer who may become a valuable repeat customer on their own personal website.
Hi [Name],
We know you love shopping on eBay. But sometimes you just can’t wait for shipping. Sound familiar?
If so, we’ve created an exciting new way to shop. Starting today, for purchases of $25 or more, San Francisco shoppers can order products from local stores and have them delivered to their door — at home, at work, or anywhere else in San Francisco. The new service is called eBay Now, and you can download it here for your iPhone®, iPad®, or iPod® touch.
Since eBay Now is in beta, we’re taking $15 off your first order and offering FREE delivery for your first three! After that, each delivery during the beta period is only $5. Your orders arrive fast — usually within an hour! Pretty convenient, huh?
Download the app now [link removed] and try it out. If you like it, share it!
You have three invites for friends and family.
Happy shopping!
The eBay Now Team
Welcome to part 2 of this series. This post will give you some ideas on pricing an item, both Merchant Filled and FBA for which there are no other offers. This is my strategy, ask other sellers you will get other answers. These are just some guidelines I give my clients.
This means that the item has sold on Amazon but is now out of stock. These items are usually hard to find, perhaps discontinued, and buyers really have signed up to be notified when the item is available (when you list it MF or it hits the FBA center), and you can set the price. In this case, you want to go to Google and search for the product to see what it sells for on other sites. (You may find some more to buy this way, too!) Or, view eBay completed listings to check for recent sales. Look closely at the Google results. You may find posts on message boards where people are discussing the product, how it is hard to find, and what they will pay. For example, on the product above, Tone's Steak Dust, I found this article posted recently:
• West Middletown, Delaware
• Spartanburg County, South Carolina
• Chattanooga, Tennessee (Opened 2/2/12)
• Lebanon, Tennessee
• Murfreesboro, Tennessee
• Dinwiddie, Virginia
• Meadowville, Virginia
