Amazon Survey Finds Most Sellers See Lift from Using FBA

Amazon.com recently conducted a survey of sellers to collect feedback about Fulfillment by Amazon, or FBA as it's also known. The company said the majority of respondents saw an increase in unit sales, and a third of respondents saw benefits of using FBA to fulfill orders on additional channels in addition to sales generated on Amazon.

Unit-Sales Lift from Using FBA
A majority (87%) of the respondents reported that their unit sales increased on Amazon.com since joining FBA. Of those sellers, 61% reported an increase in sales on Amazon.com of 20% or more. (This excludes sellers who reported being too new to accurately answer.)

Reasons for Joining FBA
The two primary reasons for joining FBA identified by the respondents were “Increased Sales” and “Enables Me to Focus on Other Aspects of My Business.” These two categories accounted for 75.5% of the responses.

Using FBA's Multi-Channel Fulfillment
The two primary benefits of using Multi-Channel Fulfillment identified by the respondents were “Maintaining a single pool of inventory across all sales channels” (37%) and “The cost of fulfillment and shipping is competitive” (23%).

Amazon to Face Competition in Fulfillment Services
Amazon's success with offering third-party merchants fulfillment services has not gone unnoticed. eBay said last year it was testing an end-to-end fulfillment service and was evaluating how it could facilitate fulfillment, shipping and delivery. Its pilot included two tests for eBay.com sellers - one for a limited number of domestic sellers, and another test for China-based sellers who ship into the U.S.

And Buy.com is readying its own fulfillment service for third-party merchants and conducted its own survey about fulfillment.