Creating Your First Shipment

Your stock is listed but not yet sellable. It becomes sellable when it reaches an Amazon fulfilment centre. This lesson walks through building a shipment, labelling the units, and getting the box collected.

Amazon has revised this workflow more than once, so screen names may differ from the video. The steps and the decisions are the same.

Starting the shipment

1. Go to Inventory, then Manage Inventory.
2. Tick the products you are sending.
3. Open Actions and choose Send/Replenish Inventory.
4. Choose to create a new shipping plan, or add to an existing one you have not yet sent.

Quantities

Set how many units of each product you are sending. This is not final; you can adjust it later, which matters because the number you can actually fit in a box only becomes clear once you are packing.

Preparation requirements

Amazon tells you which items need special preparation before shipping: poly bagging, bubble wrapping, or being sold as a set. Most ordinary items need nothing.

Take the requirements seriously. Stock that arrives without required prep can be refused, or Amazon can prep it for you and charge a per-unit fee that will exceed your margin on a cheap item.

Labelling

You choose who labels the units. The option used in the video, and the usual choice for arbitrage, is to print the labels yourself. The alternative is to use manufacturer barcodes, which changes how Amazon tracks your stock and mixes it with other sellers' identical units.

Then:

1. Select the label sheet format. This has to match the labels you actually bought. Common sizes are 27 labels per A4 sheet and 44 per sheet.
2. Click Print labels. Amazon generates a PDF with one label per unit.
3. Print it and apply one label to each unit.

Cover every other barcode on the item completely. This is the single most important instruction in the lesson. A fulfilment centre scans whatever barcode it finds first. If the manufacturer's barcode is still visible, your unit can be logged as somebody else's stock, and recovering it is slow and sometimes impossible.

Amazon decides where it goes

Amazon then allocates your products across fulfilment centres, and it may split one shipping plan into several shipments to different addresses. That is normal and not something you control.

It is also the reason for the earlier advice to avoid large items at the start: oversized goods go to different centres from small ones, so mixing them means more boxes and more shipping cost.

Approve the shipment and click through to work on it.

Packing and booking the carrier

1. Adjust quantities if the packing did not go as planned.
2. Choose the carrier. Amazon's partnered carriers usually offer discounted rates, which is normally the cheapest route.
3. Say how many boxes you are sending, one or several.
4. Enter the weight of each box. This is what the scales are for. Guessing causes billing corrections and, if it is far out, problems at the receiving end.
5. Enter the dimensions of each box.
6. Confirm, then Calculate. Amazon shows the shipping cost.
7. Accept the charges.

Box labels

Accepting the charges enables Print box labels. Print them, and attach one to the outside of each box.

This is a different label from the unit labels, and both are required. The unit label identifies the product; the box label identifies the shipment to the fulfilment centre. Then click Complete shipment.

Getting it collected

Either take the box to a carrier drop-off point, or book a collection on the carrier's website.

Booking a collection is usually worth it. In the UK the video quotes a flat fee of around £2.50 per collection regardless of how many boxes are in it, so one box and ten boxes cost the same to collect. Prices change, but the shape of the pricing is the point: the fee is per collection, not per box, so sending more boxes at once is cheaper per box, and it is another argument for accumulating stock rather than shipping items one at a time.

After it ships

Amazon receives and checks in the stock, which typically takes a few days. Your listings go live as it is checked in, and the products become sellable. You can follow progress under Shipping Queue.

That completes the first cycle: source, list, prep, ship, sell. Everything else in this course is a variation on it.