How to Create Shipping Templates for Fulfillment by Merchant (FBM)

For a video walkthrough of this blog article please watch this youtube video!

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If you want to sell products merchant fulfilled on Amazon and don’t want to pay unnecessary shipping costs, you’ll need to have your shipping templates set up correctly. This post will go through everything you need to 

To get to the shipping templates page, you’ll go to the gear menu in the top right of the seller central page, then hit shipping settings, from there, you’ll hit create new template. 

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This is a basic shipping template example to use, and you’ll build your own strategies overtime. It’s important to not that when you sell on Amazon FBM you don’t pay FBA fees, but you do pay individual shipping costs, and when you sell on Amazon FBA you don’t pay individual shipping, but you do pay Amazon FBA fees. Which are both based on size and weight, so there typically isn’t much extra profit in general for selling a product with either fulfillment type, the one exception is items that are above $20+ but well below 1lb, which tend to FBM really nicely. Just make sure you actually run the FBM numbers in SellerAmp when calculator your numbers.

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To start, we recommend doing free shipping for economy and standard orders for all areas, as shown below:

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Now here’s where it gets fancy, for next day, 2 day, and expedited orders you probably do want to charge something between $30-50 + $1/lb, if you don’t want to unnecessarily lose profit in some cases. Amazon does however weirdly police some people on this and others not, so if you get an email from Amazon saying you are charging too much just update it.

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In Q4, TONS of customers will pay big $$$ for shipping to get their items to you sooner, if you have your shipping templates set up correctly, you’ll make extra profit and never get caught overpaying out of pocket for shipping.

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In terms of purchasing shipping for FBM orders, always buy whatever is cheapest via Amazon, occasionally Amazon will be super expensive, in which case you should test PirateShip.

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If a customer pays for $42 expedited shipping for an order and when you go to buy shipping on Amazon it gives you the option to pay $12, you just made an extra $30 on that sale, it just means that even the cheaper shipping will still get your order on time to the customer.

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Overtime you’ll get fancier and charge specific amounts extra for certain locations far away from you, and may even do shorter transit time as well, just make sure your customers are happy.

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0 Day Handling time is another great way to increase your FBM buybox share, found via hitting shipping settings then general shipping settings.

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Boxes from Walmart and polymailers from Amazon in 9x12 and 12x15.5 are great places to start for FBM suppliers.

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Boxem now offers FBM listing, on top of FBA shipments, 2D barcodes, and advanced analytics, you can get a 2 week free trial here.

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Hope this helps!

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