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Amazon FBA for beginners

16 mins read

Fulfillment by Amazon: A guide for beginners

Looking to save time, reduce operational costs, and grow your ecommerce business? Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is here to help, letting you outsource orders to Amazon so you can focus on your business.

Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) can make fulfillment easier, faster, and less expensive. It can also help you increase sales and reach customers around the globe.

Whether you’re new to selling online or an experienced seller, we’ll guide you through how FBA works.

What is Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA)?

Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) lets you outsource order fulfillment to Amazon. Enroll products in FBA to:

  • Store products in Amazon’s global fulfillment network.
  • Offer customers free, two-day shipping through Prime.
  • Have Amazon handle packing, shipping, returns, and customer service.
  • Help lower your costs, increase sales, and get more time to focus on your business.
  • Tap into a fully automated set of services called Supply Chain by Amazon.

Supply Chain by Amazon also includes the option to extend FBA services through Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF). With MCF, you can outsource fulfillment for orders placed on your websites or another sales channel.

Intro to Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA)

Intro to Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA)

Use FBA to offer Prime shipping to your customers and have Amazon pick, pack, and ship orders on your behalf. In this video, you’ll learn how FBA works and where to access additional FBA tools and resources.

Benefits of FBA

  • Lower costs: Shipping with FBA costs 70% less per unit than comparable premium options offered by other major US carriers.
  • Increase sales: Offering reliable two-day shipping to customers through FBA can be a great way to maximize exposure and sales in the Amazon store. Programs like Subscribe & Save also help you secure repeat sales by offering customers regular deliveries of everyday essentials.
  • Save time: Instead of spending time processing orders, handling customer inquiries, and managing returns, FBA lets you stay focused on developing new products and growing your business.
  • Optimize operations: FBA offers several services to make things easier. It also helps streamline operations with programs like Amazon Global Logistics, which lets you ship inventory directly from China to US and European fulfillment centers with competitive rates. Or, if you’re working to build your own direct-to-consumer channels, use Buy with Prime to offer Amazon’s checkout experience and Prime delivery from your own website.
  • Expand your reach: FBA can help you reach customers across borders with programs like Remote Fulfillment with FBA, which lets you sell in Canada, Mexico, and Brazil using your US inventory, or Amazon Export, which lets you sell to customers all over the world.

Interested? FBA is a flexible program, letting you enroll as many (or as few) products as you’d like. New sellers who sign up for FBA are also eligible for discounts and incentives on shipping, returns, and more.

Next, we’ll cover costs to help you determine if it’s right for you.

Did you know?
FBA programs can help increase sales

  • On average, Buy with Prime increases the chance of an off-Amazon customer purchase by 25%.
  • Subscribe & Save products with a 10%-15% discount can drive up to a 1.8X increase in sales conversion on average.

What does FBA cost?

FBA costs depend on the products you sell and the services you decide to use. FBA uses a pay-as-you-go model, with storage and fulfillment costs charged per unit and per order.

Costs can include:

  • Fulfillment cost: Covers picking and packing your orders, shipping and handling, customer service, and returns. It’s based on product type, size, and shipping weight or dimensional weight.
  • Monthly storage costs: Based on product size, volume, average number of daily units stored, dangerous goods status, and the month of the year.
  • Aged inventory: Charged monthly for all items stored in a fulfillment center for more than 181 days. Pro tip: maintaining sound inventory health can help you avoid this cost.

Visit Seller Central to learn more about Amazon selling costs.

Understand your Amazon selling fees

Understand your Amazon selling fees

Learn about Amazon’s core selling fees, types of selling fees you may encounter when selling in the Amazon store and the tools available to help you calculate them.

Did you know?
We can help you identify products that could thrive with FBA

Our FBA Enrollment Opportunities tool uses machine learning to spot products in your existing catalog that could benefit from an FBA program. Browse a list of products and recommended programs, and use an estimated potential sales lift for each recommendation to help make your enrollment decision. You can start the enrollment process directly from the tool.

FBA Revenue Calculator

Understanding your costs and how they impact your profit is an important step in determining your fulfillment method. A helpful tool that can remove some of the guesswork is the FBA Revenue Calculator. Use the calculator to quickly compare estimated costs and profits for FBA and your own fulfillment method to determine if FBA is right for you.

Watch: How the FBA Revenue Calculator works

Watch: How the FBA Revenue Calculator works

How to become an Amazon FBA seller

  1. Hover over the Gear icon in Seller Central, then click Account info.
  2. Click Manage on the Seller Account Information page.
  3. Select the option to Register for FBA.

What are the requirements to be an Amazon FBA seller? Review the terms and conditions for becoming an Amazon seller, as well as requirements for adding inventory to FBA.

FBA inventory requirements

Many products eligible for sale in the Amazon store will be eligible for FBA.

Some products may be eligible for sale in the Amazon store while not being eligible for FBA, or eligible with specific requirements. For example, alcoholic beverages and tires are not eligible for FBA. Similarly, dangerous goods, also known as hazmat, typically cannot be sold through FBA. Also, if you sell products with expiration dates, be sure to review product-specific requirements related to shelf life before enrolling them in FBA.

Amazon FBA inventory requirements

Watch 11:24
Amazon FBA inventory requirements

Explore eight core Amazon FBA inventory requirements that sellers in the Amazon store must follow: product title, item condition, packaging and prepping, product bar codes, shipment labels, shipping and routing, inventory storage limits, and box content info.

How Amazon FBA works: 6 steps

Let’s cover how to use FBA to meet your business goals—from enrolling products to sending your first shipment to the Amazon fulfillment network.

Step 1: Decide on a fulfillment strategy

You can use FBA to fulfill all the products you sell, or some of them, depending on your needs. You can even use FBA to fulfill orders from your other sales channels through Multi-Channel Fulfillment and connect your channels with pre-built applications or directly through APIs for order automation. Want to harness the ease of FBA for selling across boarders? Remote Fulfillment with FBA lets you offer your US FBA products to customers in Canada, Mexico, and Brazil.

Step 2: Add products to FBA

  • When adding new inventory, select Amazon will ship and provide customer service (FBA) in the Offer tab.
  • If you’ve already added products and want to convert them to FBA, hover over Inventory in the Seller Central main menu and click Manage All Inventory. Click Edit to the right of any product and choose Change to Fulfilled by Amazon.

Whenever you add or convert products to FBA, be sure to double check you’ve entered product dimensions correctly to help avoid inventory issues down the road.

Step 3: Prep, label, and pack products

To create your first FBA shipment, you’ll start by prepping, labeling, and packing your products. Proper preparation can ensure your products get transported safely and securely, and will make your items available to customers quicker.

To ensure a smooth check-in at Amazon fulfillment centers, be sure to follow FBA packaging, prep, and labeling guidelines and have these items handy when relevant:

  • Ship-from address
  • Product measurements
  • Case sizes
  • Boxes to ship the items in
  • Poly bags and bubble wrap
  • Shipping scale
  • Printer for labels and barcodes

Need help creating labels? Amazon’s FBA label service is an option available to Amazon sellers through FBA. You can select this option if you would like us to apply barcode labels to your inventory for a per item cost. Learn more about how labels work in the Amazon store.

How To Succeed With Fulfillment By Amazon

Expertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author.

| Membership (fee-based)
Apr 09, 2025, 08:15am EDT

Tom Wicky is the co-founder and CEO MyFBAPrep, a global warehouse network that serves top Amazon sellers and enterprise brands.

High angle view, merchandise packages stores on shelf rack in factory warehouse. Logistic industry business, industrial job career, factory work environment concept

Amazon is the largest online marketplace globally, and its Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) service helps support the platform’s competitiveness by providing fast and efficient warehousing and fulfillment through its internally managed systems.

The program puts next-day shipping, Amazon’s customer service and near-global distribution within reach of even small startups or private-label brands. With costs lower than many competing logistical services, I think FBA can also prove to be a smart investment for large businesses.

But to gain the full benefits of FBA, you must meet strict packaging and inbound requirements, which can easily overwhelm sellers.

Prep Is A Must For Smooth Fulfillment

The FBA program is a great service when you follow the rules. That means you have to prep packages inbound to Amazon’s warehouses properly, which includes:

• Labeling and barcoding

• Using proper packaging

• Enrolling for SIPP (Ships in Product Packaging) or standard packaging

• Boxing products for shipment in accordance with Amazon’s guidelines

• Planning shipments to minimize or avoid inventory placement fees

• Managing throughput to maintain the 30 to 60 days of stock to avoid fees for standing or low inventory

Air-tight FBA prep ensures your products are packaged to meet those requirements. This can be as simple as manually packaging items in boxes and applying FNSKU barcodes, adding warning labels to poly-bags or labeling sets “sold as a set.”

Or it can be as complicated as breaking down inbound shipments from China and repackaging them to meet FBA requirements, then sending those shipments into an Amazon warehouse.

For many sellers, it’s a lot of hands-on work that quickly becomes oppressive without a robust infrastructure with labeling and sorting capabilities. When considering a third-party logistics (3PL) partner to help with your FBA prep and management, here is my advice and overall factors to consider:

Plan Inbound Shipments To Avoid Fees

Amazon introduced multiple new fees in 2024, including an inventory placement fee, a low inventory fee and fines for deleting inbound shipment plans. That means you can no longer use tricks like planning multiple inbound shipments until you find one with minimal fees. Instead, you’ll have to create a single plan based on expert knowledge of fee structures and optimize from there.

Given these constraints, it’s important to reduce or completely eliminate inventory placement fees by shipping at least four to five boxes and ensuring item distribution allows them to go to four different regions.

You also want to maintain stock levels so you don’t get charged for low or aged inventory, all the while minimizing storage utilization fees. Lastly, proper planning and prep can help you avoid fees for shipments that arrive at the wrong location due to incorrect labeling.

Prep Products To Qualify For SIPP Programs And Discounts

FBA has a strict list of requirements for packaging products before they’re allowed to move into an Amazon warehouse. They also apply if you’re enrolled in Ships in Product Packaging (SIPP) for the FBA program. In both cases, you’ll have to package and label items according to Amazon’s instructions for that product.

With SIPP enrollment, you enjoy discounts on FBA fulfillment (because Amazon doesn’t have to re-box the product for you) and can send products in branded boxes. However, you’ll still have to design and test products to ensure they meet requirements and then consistently prep those shipments to meet Amazon’s standards.

Supplement FBA Listings With Your Own 3PL Fulfillment

FBA’s current restock limits are set on a three-month sales throughput basis, with many Amazon sellers experiencing peak periods from October through December during the holiday season. If you want to increase your restock limits, you’ll have to increase stock first.

To manage this, consider fulfilling orders through other channels to avoid stockouts during peak sales events and help maintain sales velocity, which can, in turn, improve your FBA restock limits.

For instance, if you anticipate that your FBA stock will run out, you can clone your product listing, create a new SKU and fulfill it directly through another fulfillment method, such as a 3PL or your own storage. While this clone won’t be eligible for Prime unless enrolled in Seller Fulfilled Prime, it can still help you maintain availability and prevent lost sales.

Keep Large/Slow-Moving Products Out Of FBA

FBA is best for standard-sized items with high sales velocity. If you sell large or slow-moving items, it can hurt your FBA allotment, and you’re charged a warehouse utilization fee based on how much inventory remains in storage at the end of the month. You’re also charged an aged inventory fee that can reach up to $6.90 per cubic foot if your product has sat in the warehouse for a year.

I’ve witnessed how large, slow-moving inventory can easily eat up your allotted storage and inventory maximums, making it a poor fit for FBA. A 3PL can deliver those products so you can use FBA for better-suited items.

Infrastructure As A Service

One of the most compelling reasons to shift to FBA is to take advantage of Amazon’s infrastructure. However, you still need to manage shipments from your supplier or manufacturer, prep individual units, repackage pallets from the supplier to boxes for Amazon, and handle shipping plans and delivery to Amazon.

Due to that consumption of resources, it can be more cost-effective to outsource logistical operations to a 3PL that’s capable of maintaining and improving those procedures rather than investing in “good enough” processes in-house.

Wrapping Up

FBA is a vital tool for Amazon sellers, but it’s essential to stay organized and plan ahead to avoid penalties and maximize its potential. By understanding Amazon’s rules and preparing your products effectively, you can minimize fees and maintain a smooth operation.

Whether you’re managing your fulfillment in-house or working with a 3PL partner that can help complement your current services and scale operations, following these best practices can help your business succeed in the competitive Amazon marketplace.

Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?

https://sell.amazon.com/blog/amazon-fba-for-beginners

https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2025/04/09/how-to-succeed-with-fulfillment-by-amazon/