Amazon will quickly begin tacking on an additional charge for sellers who don’t use the corporate’s success service, according to reports from Bloomberg and CNBC. Paperwork considered by the retailers point out that Amazon will begin imposing a charge on every product that retailers ship out themselves.
The charge will reportedly go into impact on October 1st and can apply to the sellers who’re members of Amazon’s Vendor Fulfilled Prime (SFP) service. In contrast to Success by Amazon (FBA), the SFP program lets third-party retailers promote Prime merchandise instantly from their very own warehouses as an alternative of getting Amazon deal with the logistics course of. Which means sellers are additionally required to maintain up with Prime’s one- to two-day supply requirements and weekend delivery, CNBC notes.
Whereas Amazon first launched its SFP service in 2015, it shut down enrollment in 2019. The corporate didn’t reopen the waitlist until June of this year — a choice Bloomberg says Amazon made to fulfill regulators. It’s not clear why Amazon is imposing this charge now, and the corporate didn’t instantly reply to The Verge’s request for extra data.
Nonetheless, the added cost may very well be a manner for Amazon to nudge sellers towards utilizing its in-house companies, giving the corporate extra management over the logistics course of whereas letting it money in on rising FBA costs. This will solely end in elevated scrutiny from regulators, as a vendor already accused the company of forcing merchants to make use of its FBA service in 2019.