Is Your Warehouse Primed for Amazon Prime?
If you sell products through Amazon or fulfill orders on behalf of Amazon sellers, you should be doing everything you can to become qualified as a Seller Fulfilled Prime (SFP) member, or help your customers achieve this status.
Launched in 2015, this program allows qualified Amazon sellers to display the Amazon Prime badge on products and orders fulfilled by their own warehouse or a third-party logistics provider.
The Prime badge is a big deal. By Amazon’s own analysis in the first quarter of the SFP program, seller-fulfilled listings that became Prime-eligible “experienced an average sales uplift of more than 50%.”
This is hardly surprising when you consider that Prime offers free shipping, and past research indicates that Prime members spend nearly twice as much as non-Prime shoppers.
These numbers alone should inspire you to think about what you can do to be part of Amazon’s SFP program. But there are additional benefits as well. Sellers can eliminate Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA) shipping and handling fees, avoid long-term FBA inventory storage fees, get more control over returns and refunds, earn more profits on big and bulky items, and gain access to Amazon’s 50+ million Prime members to boost sales.
Earning SFP eligibility isn’t an easy task, though.
How to Earn Amazon SFP Eligibility
The first part of qualifying for SFP is having a Professional Seller account on Amazon and being eligible for Amazon Premium Shipping.
This means that during a trailing 30-day measurement period, the seller must meet the following criteria for Premium Shipping orders:
On-time delivery rate of at least 92% for Premium Shipping orders
Valid tracking ID for at least 94% of Premium Shipping orders
Cancellation rate of less than 1.5% for Premium Shipping orders
If you meet these requirements, you can participate in a Prime trial and potentially qualify for SFP. However, the Prime trial has even more stringent requirements. During your trial, you’ll need to meet the following performance requirements on a minimum of 200 Prime trial orders:
On-time shipment rate of at least 99% for Prime trial orders
Same-day shipment of all Prime trial orders, regardless of the shipping speed the customer selects, as long as the customer has placed the order before your cutoff time
Buy Shipping Services must be used for at least 95% of Prime trial orders
Cancellation rate of less than 1% for Prime trial orders
Your trial period will last between 5 and 90 days depending on when you satisfy the performance requirements for a minimum of 200 Prime orders. If you fail to fulfill the requirements within 90 days, the trial period resets automatically, and you can try again.
If your warehouse isn’t already hitting these high marks when it comes to on-time orders, speed, and performance, then you need to think about the best ways to increase your fulfillment productivity, efficiency, and accuracy.
What It Takes to Meet SFP Eligibility Requirements
The best way to meet SFP requirements is to invest in better automated systems for data collection, receiving, picking, packing, shipping, and tracking.
At Riedman Workflow Design, we can help you meet Amazon’s SFP requirements by implementing the right solutions for your warehouse, including mobile and wearable computers, barcode scanners, RFID, printers, and services from our partners at
Contact our experts now for a free consultation and find out how to become SFP-eligible and start reaping the benefits for your business.
Questions? Give me a call - the warehouse guy -- at 585-394-6597, or email: rich(at)riedmancomm.com.