Courtesy of NewlyPreneurs the below BKM:
“Inventory Placement Service (IPS)
When you setup your Amazon Seller’s Account, your default shipping setting will be Distributed Inventory Placement. Using this option causes your shipments to often be broken up and racks up the cost of shipping. (Less efficient shipments as we touched on already.)
However, if you go into your settings you can change your shipping settings to Inventory Placement Service. This will allow you to ship all of your products to ONE, maximum TWO warehouses if you are shipping oversized products too. Hallelujah!
What’s the catch?
Amazon obviously charges a fee for this service. For standard sized products, pricing will start at $.30 per unit and go up to $1.30/unit for oversized items. Below is the link to the charges. (Keep in mind that these fees are taken out of your disbursements and are not factored into your shipping charges that are displayed when you print your shipping labels.)
In addition to fees, there’s one other catch with IPS. Unfortunately, using IPS means that your inventory will take a lot longer to be received and listed. That’s because IPS makes you ship all of your product to one warehouse and then Amazon breaks up that shipment and sends it to different FBA warehouses all over the country. (Hence, the fees charged.)
Due to this, Nessa and I go back and forth between using IPS or Distributed Inventory Placement. For us, we simply consider if the savings is worth the longer receiving times. Now, if you want to give it a shot…
How do you set this up?
- From your seller’s dashboard, scroll over “settings” in the upper right hand corner.
- A drop down menu will open and you should see “Fulfillment By Amazon” at the very bottom. Click on that.
- There you will see “Inbound Settings.” And under that, “Inventory Placement Option.”
- Click edit on the right hand side and simply select “Inventory Placement Service.”
Now every time you process a shipment, it will all go to the same FBA warehouse! Woohoo!”