E-Commerce giant Amazon is filtering out its shipment of non-essential items to its warehouse after watching a surge in orders of essential products ensuing the spread of novel coronavirus. Amazon informed its sellers that it will allow only shipments of household essentials, medical products, and other products that are more in demand due to virus spread till April 5. This implied that those sellers who are enrolled with Amazon Fulfillment Program, under which they use Amazon storage and delivery system, would not be able to supply non-essential products to Amazon till April 5. These barriers are also applicable to those vendors who wholesale their items to Amazon. This decision of Amazon will not have any effect on customers, they will get their deliveries, but they may face some delay.
Amazon informed its sellers through any email that from now onwards till April 5, it is going to prioritize products of six categories viz., Baby products, health items, beauty and personal care, pet supplies, household items, and groceries and industrial and scientific material. The message from Amazon reads “Hello from Fulfillment by Amazon,
We are closely monitoring the developments of COVID-19 and its impact on our customers, selling partners, and employees.
We are seeing increased online shopping, and as a result some products such as household staples and medical supplies are out of stock. With this in mind, we are temporarily prioritizing household staples, medical supplies, and other high-demand products coming into our fulfillment centers so that we can more quickly receive, restock, and deliver these products to customers.
For products other than these, we have temporarily disabled shipment creation. We are taking a similar approach with retail vendors.
This will be in effect today through April 5, 2020, and we will let you know once we resume regular operations. Shipments created before today will be received at fulfillment centers.
You can learn more about this on this Help page. Please note that Selling Partner Support does not have further guidance.
We understand this is a change to your business, and we did not take this decision lightly. We are working around the clock to increase capacity and yesterday announced that we are opening 100,000 new full- and part-time positions in our fulfillment center across the US.
We appreciate your understanding as we prioritize the above products for our customers.
Thank you for your patience, and for participating in FBA.”
With the increasing menace of COVID- 19, people are more and more trying to remain in their homes, which obviously affected the retail market but e-Commerce markets are enjoying the demand surges for products like groceries, toilet paper, mask, and sanitizers. This demand surge lay more burden on e-Commerce websites which leads to problems like technical glitches, delivery delays, and Labour shortage. Vendors who sell nonessential items to Amazon will see a pause in orders by Amazon, also Amazon extended the delivery Windows for pending orders. Some vendors already speculated this kind of move by Amazon earlier this week after watching the effects of COIVD- 19. Sellers who deal in nonessentials have seen a drop of 40 to 60%, as buyers drastically cut the discretionary expenses due to the virus outbreak. So this kind of step has been taken to counter the changed shopping pattern. Those sellers who have their own warehousing capacity can ship their products on their own, though they are not using Amazon fulfillment service but their products are marked with Prime eligibility and better exposed on a website. Amazon also announced that it is going to hire fresh 1 lakh employees in its warehousing delivery network, also this E-Commerce giant is going to hike $2 per hour for its employees due to extra workload.
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