Amazon is expanding its Multi-Channel Fulfillment service to support merchants' sales on Walmart, Shopify, and Shein as part of its efforts to help brands “reach customers wherever they shop–while relying on Amazon's fulfillment network to deliver for them.”
If you're unfamiliar… Amazon’s Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) is a service that lets merchants use Amazon’s fulfillment network to store, pick, pack, and ship orders placed on non-Amazon sales channels such as a brand’s own website, eBay, or Shopify. Sellers send inventory to Amazon’s warehouses, and MCF handles delivery, including options for 1-day, 2-day, or standard shipping, with unbranded packaging. It first launched in 2006 as an extension of Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) and has since expanded globally.
Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon VP of Worldwide Selling Partner Services, wrote:
“When sellers use FBA and MCF, they have a single pool of inventory across their sales channels, driving, on average, 19% fewer out-of-stock rates and improved inventory turnover by an average of 12%. That means less wasted inventory sitting in warehouses, more products in customers’ hands, and stronger business results for sellers.”
Since its launch, MCF could technically fulfill any order from any channel as long as the seller manually imported the order into Amazon via Seller Central, spreadsheets, or 3rd party platforms. However now, Amazon is rolling out direct integrations with those platforms, so merchants don’t need to rely on third-party tools or manual imports.
Plus long term storage and transportation to Amazon fulfillment centers just got a major upgrade.
Amazon also announced that its expanding their Amazon Warehousing and Distribution (AWD) capabilities globally through a new service called Global Warehousing and Distribution (GWD), which enables sellers to hold products in bulk at lower cost near the point of manufacture, and then release the products to various destination countries when the time is right.
Mehta wrote:
“Once inventory is ready to move across borders, sellers have historically had to patch together a network of freight providers with their own timelines, limited visibility across them, and each provider managed independently. A missed connection at port or an unexpected delay could throw an entire selling season off track. That’s why we’re continuing to launch more direct arcs that connect the largest and fastest-growing manufacturing hubs directly with the most popular destination countries where sellers sell their products… That breadth of coverage means fewer handoffs, more predictable schedules, and a faster path to getting inventory positioned for same- and next-day Prime delivery.”
To simplify and speed up the customs experience involved with importing items, Amazon is using generative AI to help sellers pre-populate required fields, reuse information across documents, and flag potential mistakes, which it says is cutting their customs paperwork time by more than half.
