On Sunday, July 28th, we will be releasing a major update to the Amazon FBA transportation workflow. The main goal of this release is to support the future transition to Amazon’s updated workflow for FBA shipments, and another release will be following this one in the coming weeks to release access to those workflows.
That said, many tweaks have been made along the way to improve the transportation process. These are the major differences you will notice:
- FBA plans that we receive from Amazon will now be linked to an outbound shipment, rather than being the shipment itself (see below for more details).
- The Send Shipment to Amazon button is replaced by a single Arrange Transport button. This button leads to our new unified transport page, which currently allows you to send to Amazon FBA or Self-Arrange (purchase shipping labels from outside the software), and in the future it will support destinations like Walmart Fulfillment as well.
- Greater visibility for the shipping mode (partnered vs. non-partnered, LTL vs. small parcel)
- Submitting shipment data to Amazon has been broken up into steps, allowing for easier resolution of Amazon errors at the time they occur, and provides a quick way to re-submit data when those errors have been resolved.
- More control over label generation, including re-fetching labels from Amazon and converting labels to thermal paper sizes on demand.
Generating Shipping Plans
Previously, there was a separate split shipment step that would take the plans that Amazon returned and break up the shipment into splits. Now, plans are stored separately from shipments so the original shipment item and quantities remain unchanged.
As mentioned above, the Send Shipment to Amazon button has been removed, and instead the Arrange Transport button page will take you to a new unified transportation page, allowing you to select between Amazon FBA and Self-Arrange.
List of Shipments
FBA shipments are now shown as sub-items of the shipments which they were generated from, and marked clearly as FBA shipments. In addition, they have their own statuses that can be tracked separately from the overall shipment status.
Important Note: Existing FBA shipments will not be migrated to the new system when you navigate to the Arrange Transport page. Existing shipments will still be displayed in the list of shipments, but not using the new design until you have visited the Arrange Transport page for that shipment.
Shipment Setup Options
In the previous system, we displayed a dropdown box with the various options of shipping modes, such as partnered or non-partnered, and FTL/LTL or small parcel. We have increased the visibility of those options and made them the first step on the page, so it’s clear which shipping mode you are using.
In addition, you no longer need to select 2D barcodes during the shipping plan step. Instead, you can select 2D barcodes from the configuration page.
(Never heard of 2D barcodes? See here for more information: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/fba-help/QRG/FBA_2DBarcode_Requirements_en-US.pdf)
Submissions
Previously, handling Amazons submission errors had proven difficult to understand and resolve, and we didn’t have a clear record of submissions made to Amazon for the corresponding shipment.
In this release, each step of submitting data to Amazon will have its own button to submit, and if there is an error in that submission, the error will be displayed on section for that specific submission.
As before, we will automatically submit each step as it completes, but you can disable this behaviour by turning off Auto Submit (click the Auto Submit toggle to disable), giving you complete control over the submission process.
Box Contents Improvements
We have improved the design of some of the elements on the box contents page, and made some improvements to the workflow:
- Default dimensions are now stored on your device, so if you make a change to the default dimensions, you do not need to re-enter those dimensions for each shipment
- Box labels can be printed in advance, even for non-2D labels, so no need to go back to already packed boxes to figure out which one it is
- Box numbers are more consistent and a bug that caused some box numbers to overlap has been fixed
Label Generation
Previously, when getting the labels for a shipment, if there were any errors in the process, the labels would not be generated and there would be no way to retrieve those labels. Now, you can request labels as many times as needed for each label type, and convert them to thermal labels on demand.
Other Notes
- Items in closed shipments will now be properly displayed in the reports sections for shipped outbound items.
- If you are an API user that relies on data about FBA shipments in our current API, please contact us for migration guidance.
- Importing a shipment from Amazon will now create three resources: an inbound shipment, outbound shipment, and an FBA plan.
- Ship from / ship to have been removed from the main shipment page and moved on to the FBA plan page
- The stock status is not affected by the FBA plan status. You must close the outbound shipment in order to remove the stock from your inventory counts and generate billing for the shipments.