“Amazon FBA Is Terrible” But Have You Compared Other Logistics Providers?

Everyone who uses Amazon FBA as a logistics provider… complaints about using Amazon FBA as a logistics provider.

• “The storage fees are too high.”

• “It’s impossible to talk to someone.”

• “They took too long to check in my goods so I went out of stock.”

• “Your account can be shut down any minute!”

FBA isn’t perfect, but I will pose the question:

“Is FBA worse than any other logistics provider?”

I seem to have just as many problems, in reality more problems, working with other logistics companies:

1. Years ago, I shipped some goods to a non-FBA warehouse for ‘FBA-prep’. I kid you not, the warehouse burned down, and all I heard was “sorry, what was the value of your goods?”

2. Last year, a shipment was held in USA port with a storage company charging a $150/day fee. They only accepted 3-day bank wires, so I was told (in a very rude tone) to send money for 5 additional days ‘just in case’ because they would wait until the money cleared to release the goods.

3. Last year, we stored ~2,000 units of product at a 3PL warehouse. Quality issues were discovered, so we paid an inspection company $3,000 to check the goods. Unexpectedly, the warehouse company also billed us $5,000 for vaguely ‘helping’ with the inspection.

4. I recently shipped some goods to South Africa with a 3^rd-Party-Logistics company… the shipment disappeared completely.

In comparison, I’ve been relatively impressed by FBA:

1. Accepting shipments of any size, even just 5 units, with no flat ‘handling’ fees.

2. Accepting my goods even when I’ve shipped them to the wrong warehouse.

3. Sending me multi-thousand-dollar full-retail-price reimbursements when they have lost my inventory. (I wish they’d lose it more, actually!)

4. ‘Surprise’ Q4 or Long-Term storage fee hikes in the tens or hundreds of dollars, not thousands.

5. Shipping my smaller goods anywhere in the USA for just $2.58/unit.

6. Charging just $.50/unit to ship goods back home.

I am not an expert in international logistics and I’ve only been selling online for about 3 years, but my perception is this:

1. Complaints about FBA are actually complaints about the logistics industry generally.

2. FBA itself is no worse than the other companies in this space, and in many ways is much better.

I’m sure that directly after writing this relatively positive article, Amazon will smite me with an unwarranted Red ‘Performance Notification’ inside my selling dashboard.

Even then, over the past 3 years I have dealt successfully with every automated ‘blocking’ ‘banning’ ‘pausing’ and ‘restricting’ Amazon sent my way. (The terrifying stories of permanent account shutdowns seem to happen mainly to outright Black Hat-ers.)

Unless I’m blocked from selling permanently and without-cause, my opinion is that Fulfillment-By-Amazon is a transparent, well-functioning (perhaps too-well-systematized) service in the generally murky and unwelcoming logistics industry.