I just filled up my Lowes heavy duty small box with textbooks, taped it up, slapped some shipping labels on it and brought it down to my UPS store.
Overall, it was a pretty easy and straight forward process.
Amazon - The Beast
I am even more impressed with Amazon after going through my first FBA experience. They have done an excellent job simplifying and streamlining a complex distribution and logistical network.
The fact that an end user like me can sign up, send them junk, and have them sell & ship it for me is an incredible feat. After going through this experience with them I want to buy more Amazon stock. Even if it is at an ATH.
I have read plenty of complaints about Amazon from the FBA and FBM seller end, but at the end of the day I get the following benefits from them:
Free traffic to their platform and eyeballs on my products
Amazon handles shipping, customer service, and returns
I aggregate 10-15 books, send them to Amazon and they handle the rest
I’ll probably lose a decent amount to their FBA fees. But at the end of the day, having AMZ deal with shipping, customers, and getting traffic frees up a lot of my time while I still will hopefully make a couple bucks.
Inventory
I watched UPS tracking meander its way to the delivery center. Even encountering a “carrier delay” which thankfully ended up being nothing.
Then at 4 AM I received an email that my shipment was checked in at the fulfillment center. One minute later, I received another email that they were in the process of “receiving the inventory” for my shipment.
When I woke up that morning, I checked my FBA inventory and saw that all of my listings were now Active. But I did run into a new issue that I had offers that weren’t eligible to be a featured offer due to being priced too high.
All of my inventory is going through a “FC transfer” where Amazon moves the products to new fulfillment centers based on their logistical optimizations.
But my inventory does now show up on a listing page. The expected delivery date is about two weeks from now. I expect the FC transfer to take anywhere from 3-30 days and then my products will be ready for fast & free prim delivery.
Now, all we can do is refresh the sales page until our first sale comes in.