Ship directly to Amazon from your factory: The pros and cons of Amazon's Direct Import programme
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If you’re a large vendor or seller on Amazon, you might be able to forget about shipping inventory to Amazon’s warehouses.
With the Direct Imports program, Amazon will collect it directly from your factory.
Here’s everything you need to know about Amazon’s Direct Imports program: what it is, how it works, and who can use it.
What is Amazon Direct Imports?
Amazon Direct Imports is a service from Amazon’s Global Logistics Network, whereby Amazon collects your inventory directly from factories and ships it to its warehouses.
It streamlines the import process, allowing brands to cut out third parties in the supply chain, saving costs and improving efficiency.
It works in multiple big manufacturing countries, including China, India, Vietnam and Sri Lanka, shipping to warehouses in the USA and the EU.
Amazon takes care of everything in the shipping process, including ocean transport, customs clearance and storage. The fee you pay Amazon includes tariffs and import duties.
Who can use the service?
It’s only available to Vendors/Sellers of a certain size - you need to be making revenue of millions. It’s an invite-only programme.
It’s generally for those manufacturing in Asia and importing to the US, UK and EU.
It’s not just for manufacturers, though. The Direct Import programme can be used by sellers to source manufacturers, with fewer links in the supply chain as a result.
What does Amazon get out of the Direct Imports programme?
Amazon has made strides in recent years to make shipping as easy as possible for its sellers: it knows that convenience is a big factor when a business decides which marketplaces to use.
The Direct Import programme also makes things more efficient for Amazon. With its global buying power, and infrastructure already in place, it obviously makes sense to offer Direct Imports as a service for its big sellers, cutting out a lot of middle men and achieving fulfilment more quickly via its own channels.
What are the benefits for vendors/sellers?
The big one is that Amazon takes responsibility for your inventory straight from the factory, saving a lot of effort and cost in shipping, customs clearance and storage.
Rather than you shipping the product from the factory to your warehouse, then to Amazon’s fulfilment centres, then to the customer, it’s all done by Amazon. So as well as saving time and money, there are fewer handovers, ergo less opportunity for stock to get damaged.
You can reduce your domestic warehousing requirements, saving the costs of warehouse space, and the employees needed to repackage and re-ship your product from your warehouses to Amazon’s.
There are other benefits, too. Amazon has low container rates, so it’s a price-competitive way to ship your inventory, even with the Direct Import fee.
There are also extra benefits in time saved: you typically end up with both faster speed to market for your product, and more time for forecasting inventory.
Any cons to balance out those pros?
Amazon obviously charges a fee for doing it. The fee will vary depending on the customer, but will obviously run into thousands.
But taking into account the costs saved on inventory fees, tariffs and duties, and third-party global shipping, it’s ultimately worth it.
Another negative side is you largely cede control of your shipping and stock to Amazon, which not all brands are comfortable doing. We recommend working with an eCommerce agency (like us) to ensure the process is smooth and to liaise with Amazon if any issues arise.