When should you use a prep center?

Everyone knows that Amazon is a large, finely tuned machine. If you are thinking of selling a high volume of products through their marketplace, you need to make sure you have certain processes in place.

Amazon fulfillment centers are a sight to see, they are currently employing around 150,000 warehouse workers and over 15,000 robots, to get hundreds of thousand of order shipped every day. Amazon is currently shipping around 35 items per second! Amazon spends multiple billions per year on just shipping costs.

The reason that Amazon is able to do so much, is because they have streamlined their inbound process and removed an extra steps that they would normally need to do to ship their products. Amazon has strict rules and guidelines for what need to done to inventory that is shipped to their warehouses, and if they are not followed exactly, then you will get charged expensive fees, have lost inventory, or possibly lose the ability to ship items to Amazon fully!

So with the above said, it's obvious how important it is to get your items shipped to amazon correctly. That's where a prep center comes in. Amazon prep centers of a wide variety of services, but at their core they will obviously prep your units for you. That would include:

• Quality Control

• Repackaging

• Labeling

• Bubble Wrapping

• Bundling

• Expiration Date labels

Now that you understand the importance of Amazon prepping, you're probably wondering if you should be doing it yourself, or hiring a prep center like us.

Sadly getting that answer isn't easy. You have to take into account multiple different things:

What's your profit margin?

How much do you sell your products for, and how much of that sale is profit? If you have extra room in your margin, it probably makes sense to outsource your FBA Prep to use. Then you can focus on building your brand, expanding your product line, finding new wholesale suppliers, etc. It's important to keep in mind your profit margins, you don't want to break even after using a prep service!

What packing materials are needed?

Do you have to bubble wrap every item that you sell, and keep various sizes of bubble bags, poly bags, boxes, tape etc? Using a prep center will mean that you don't have to worry about keeping all of these packing materials in stock, which could save you hundreds if not thousands a month!

How much space do you have?

If you are like most people, you are probably prepping and packing your items out of your garage or a small warehouse, sometimes even your living room! This would get your family their space back, and possibly save you thousands in rent per month.

Is your product seasonal?

Maybe it makes sense to have your product prepped by us during it's peak selling season when you need to send more inventory in, but not during off seasons when you are only selling a fraction of them.

Are you ready to hand off your FBA Prep to us? We are here to help guide you through the entire process.