The crude but (usually) effective way some people (me) avoid having their FBA shipments split.
(Update: I added 6 more tricks submitted by readers in this new article.)
I’m usually on the side of “what’s best for
So whether it’s FBA fee hikes or weird FBA policy changes that make no sense, I’m usually on
But split FBA shipments are the worst.
And I’ll do anything I can to circumvent them, hack them, or render them inoperable through militant sabotage.
Why do I conveniently exempt split FBA shipments from my “What’s best for
How I used to deal with split FBA shipments
I did what a lot of us do: I’m listing 100 books. 90 go to one FBA warehouse. The other 10 are split between 5 other FBA warehouses. So I delete the 5 tiny shipments, set them aside, and hope
It can be effective at circumventing a split FBA shipment. It is also effective at delaying profits and driving me crazy.
Then I noticed something when I was traveling…
I’m always shipping in big FBA shipments from the road. I’ll be on a road trip in some weird town, seek out tons of inventory, and fund the whole trip via FBA. Usually this involves a patchwork of appropriating public space to do my listing (i.e. Whole Foods), hotel printers, dumpster-dived boxes, and the nearest Staples for drop-offs.
(To illustrate how much I do this, my tax return in 2013 showed I spent over $200 using the printer at various Staples’ around the country. Consider that’s 50 cents a shipping label [over 400 boxes]. Then consider I use printers that aren’t at Staples at least a third of the time = over 500 boxes shipped from the road in one year.)
The way you’re supposed to ship from the road is to update your return address to reflect wherever you’re staying. That way,
Since I inadvertently do everything the sloppiest way possible, I always forgot to do this.
And I noticed it was a little odd how no one seemed to care I was in one state, shipping a box with a return address from a totally different state. The UPS Store or Staples didn’t care – in hundreds of incidents they never mentioned it. And
The return address literally didn’t matter.
It hit me, this could be the way out of split FBA shipments
There is no way to know
Most of us fall somewhere in the middle: Our FBA shipments will be split for stretches of time, and not others. It’s apparently random.
So let’s examine this problem in a more Socratic fashion…
The two main factors that determine where your shipments go are:
Amazon ‘s formula, that is always changing and can’t be controlled or predicted.- The return address we provide
Amazon .
Yes, the contents of your shipment play a role, but we can bundle this in to “
So had my lightbulb moment when I considered two facts:
- Some people have their FBA shipments split, and not others.
- The return address doesn’t matter.
Do you see where this is going?
I started going into my listing software and playing around with the return address. Some days I was shipping from Fargo, North Dakota. Other days, Tucson, Arizona.
And the results I got were dramatically different. Some return addresses got me 10 FBA shipments with 4 books each. Others got me every book in a single shipment.
Remember that Staples or the UPS Store doesn’t care what your return address says (if they notice at all). It makes no difference.
But it made a huge difference to the ease of my FBA shipments.
When I found a return address that resulted in my books going into one shipment, I saved it and used it for every FBA shipment. Problem solved.
But nothing lasts forever…
There’s no point in speculating why this happens.
When my shipments started splitting again, I’d wait
Sometimes this was just a fluke. I’d do another shipment to make sure this problem probably wasn’t going away. And if it didn’t, I’d start shopping around for a new return address until I hit one.
I told you this was “crude but effective”…
To find a new return address that wouldn’t result in split FBA shipments, I picked addresses at random.
I do one or two shipments a week, so I can experiment a little. Sometimes it took a few weeks, but I’d hit on another address where
Real-time proof
The most rewarding moment of split-shipment hacking came when I was sitting in the living room with my girlfriend. She was listing with her home address as the return address. I was shipping with a return address of Salt Lake City.
She tossed books around the room in a rage, with her inventory spread across the carpet in no less than 7 shipments. I had all mine going to exactly two.
Same place. Same IP address. Same type of inventory (books). Vastly different results.
I always prefer to use my home address
So every once in a while, I’ll go back to my home address and test it out. And often,
(By the way, forget trying to reverse-engineer
This is not as easy as it sounds: What can go wrong
I don’t want to glorify this as a cure-all. It doesn’t always work.
One common snag is that there seem to be periods where
Other times,
Still another caveat: This works best with books, or sellers who otherwise are generally shipping in one of each item. If you’re shipping in multiples of each SKU, there’s nothing that will keep your shipments from getting split.
Lately, its gotten worse
I won’t lie. This isn’t working as well as it once did.
But I’m still rarely getting my shipments split into more than two. And from what I hear, that’s much better than most.
As always, I’m your canary in a coalmine
I don’t have an incentive to prosthelytize on this tactic, or recruit the
But if you have concerns about
On the flip side, let
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Hey Peter,
Quick question…Doesn’t the place from which you ship determine the price you pay? Isn’t distance part of the shipping equation?
Also, will you be sharing your thoughts on Amazon’s changes to free shipping thresholds(from 35.00 to 49.00, except for 25.00 for books? .I’m thinking if I’m buying something that will cost me bucks to get it shipped, I might just buy 25.00 worth of books that I want to read….or buy a prime membership which also helps FBA sellers) I’d like to hear whether this will change your pricing strategies.
As always, thanks for your insights! They have been beneficial to me.
Distance does determine price, but your address doesn’t determine distance. You could live next door to an FBA warehouse in Memphis and Amazon will have you ship to Pennsylvania. Algorithms are weird.
It’s hard to see the shipping threshold increase creating much of a spike in book sales. More likely people will just purchase other items in the category they’re already buying in.
There is an easier way to do this. In seller central click on “settings” (top right)>”Fufillment by Amazon”> “edit Inbound Settings”>”Inventory Placement Service” . Then all shipments will go to a single warehouse to be determined by Amazon. There will be a fee to distribute your items to their other warehouses if they do that. Much easier that the return address hunt and peck. The setting will remain in place unless/until you change it. Hope this helps.
I’m aware of this, but the cost has always been a deterrent for me.
I just spent an hour on the phone with Amazon FBA about. I sent in a box of books with 25 SKU’s 26 items on 3/9/16. They received it on 3/15/16 as of 3/17/16 it is still not finished processing plus 24 items are marked reserve (FC transfer and FC processing). I chose to send all items to one location which means I will pay the per item fee for the transfer. (1 lb. or less $0.30 and 1-2 lb. $0.40) which means they are transferring all but two items. In my case, it will cost me an additional $7.50. They tried to convince me that I should select the default (Distributed Inventory Placement) which means there is no charge for the transfers no matter how many different centers they break it down to. So great right? Not necessarily and here is why based on my other shipments that I broke down I paid for packaging, ink or toner plus my time to separate the shipment. Most of the time my shipments are to 3 or 4 different locations at an average cost of $5.57. The cost for me to ship to 1 location is between $8.00 and $12.00 depending where it goes the latter being the most often charge I pay. So to wrap it up, in my opinion, it is cheaper and faster for me to process and ship to one location. And now that I am using AccelerList it cuts my time down even further. When I started doing this 6 weeks ago it took me 4 to 5 hours to price, scan, list and ship (yeah I’m slow) but after developing new processes I am sure I can cut that time down to 20 minutes and do twice the processing.
Always love your articles. Our books have been going to one or two warehouses recently, so I’m knocking on wood a lot to keep that going!
Thanks – as always!
Great tip Peter. Something I had never thought to try.
One trick I have used sometimes is to add a dummy item to an order, and tinker with the quantity. If I have a shipment of 100 books, and it gets split to 3 warehouses, I will click back and add a book with say 20 quantity. If I click through and the shipment is no longer split, then that book can be deleted from the shipment. This works only some of the time though. But I have noticed (for me at least) that the Amazon algorithm seems to “give up” sometimes when I do something weird to the shipment, and it just sends it all to one place. Unfortunately, this usually means the one place is simply the first stop in the journey though, and I will have to wait longer for the items to be in stock, as they get transferred to other FCs. There is no real solution to the problem, we can only play with the system and hope for the best.
Very interesting. I’m going to try this. Thanks for sharing.
I always create a duplicate order early on, then tinker with it. If the result is split, I will delete it, go back, and clone another order to tinker with, always keeping a master order copy available. So, if Amazon has me ship everything to one warehouse but 10 or so items, I will try deleting those items from the order on a clone and see if they revert to having me ship everything to one warehouse, then I’ll throw those items in on the next order. Often, they will not want them shipped to the same warehouse on the second order.
The algorithm seems to change day to day, as well. If I create a clone from a master order, and wait to long to finalize it, in a day or two they may change it all around.
Sometimes TRON or whoever is in charge of the logarithm seems adamant that I have to split my shipment. I will delete some copies, try again, and find they now want some different items split off and sent to a different warehouse, as if to punish me for trying to game the system. But most of the time, it works.
If I have duplicates of a particular item, I will usually list one copy, then go in and add extra copies in the final stage to make sure they all get sent to the same place.
You’ve put some serious work into gaming the system here. All of this sounds very smart and useful.
What do you use for your listing program? Are you winding up having a bunch of printed labels that are just thrown out?
Currently using ListScan. I don’t print out any labels until I get to the final Amazon screen for shipping, and I print out the pages for each warehouse (if it does get split) separately. The books are all stacked in the order in which they were scanned, so I just take the pages of labels and start sticking them on (in reverse order) from whichever order is largest. When I don’t find the book, that tells me to switch over to the other page of labels. Easy way to sort books into the right order.
Even when I was using a Dymo label printer and tagging each book as I individually listed it, if I tagged a book and deleted it from the listing, the same label was still good if I put it in a later shipment – the bar code and SKU doesn’t change (as far as I know).
I use Scanpower currently, but I’ll be honest and say I haven’t tested any other listing programs.
There is a new one coming in a few months. I am in the Bata test and I will say its awsome even early in the bata test I can scan 30 – 40 books in 15 to 20 min and have them uploaded in the cataloge. This new scanner screams look for it around May 2016.
Seems like a lot of work? I just pay the .30 and get rid of them and move on to the next batch. I found its actualy cheaper to let them split it. The only draw back is your inventory is in resurve for 72 hours after it gets to the warehouse OR LONGER!
I imagine Amazon’s algorithm has to do with many variables that add up to “load balancing” for their operation. This would be a lot like load balancing with data farms and the point in both instances is not incoming efficiency but outgoing (delivery) efficiency. They’re looking (in real time) at their storage AND order-handling resources, perhaps even including the current staffing of order pickers, etc. or package handling equipment that’s out of order temporarily, etc. You can prepare packages the SAME DAY using the SAME RETURN ADDRESS and find that one time the order is split, the other time not. It’s happened to me.
More to the point, Amazon is telling you something by splitting up your order. You’re just not listening because it’s causing you some inconvenience. They’re telling you HOW THEY CAN BEST DELIVER YOUR PRODUCT in terms of their package handling. Perhaps you ought to be thinking about the fulfillment side a bit more and the incoming side a bit less.
I did made the point at the beginning of the article that Amazon does everything to optimize their processes which benefit both of us. That said they are a logistics company first and foremost, and they are forcing their logistics issue on sellers, who are not in the logistics business. I would much prefer having a few-day delay while Amazon shuffles my inventory where it needs to go than forcing that burden on me as a seller.
We’re all in logistics, believe me, and logistics always includes not just what Amazon does, but what we do as well.
So you want to shove this back onto Amazon – “let them shuffle my inventory around” – as if doing so is free to Amazon, and they just eat the cost. Apparently you’re not aware that Amazon’s costs always get charged back to sellers one way or another. Down to the last penny..
In my business, there are so many other places where I can more profitably improve my business that if and when this shows up at the top of my to-do list, I will be a very, very successful entrepreneur. YMMV.
I’ve solved my split shipment problem by keeping the number of books in a box to less than 21. ANY shipment with more than 21 individual items (books,CD’s,DVD’s) triggers a split shipment for me. I ship from my home address, and the ship-to warehouse varies from time to time. Lately it’s been same state, but usually PA or TN. Late last fall, they would delegate 2-3 books to be sent across country to Arizona, and I would delete the items entirely, since it eliminated any profit for me. That stopped after I deleted two shipments. Maybe they figured two books to any warehouse was better than no books at all. More likely, it was a fluke.
This sounds like an even better solution. It sounds like you’re saying you take the number of books and divide by 21 to get the minimum number of boxes. My question here is: The warehouse is set before you enter the number of boxes, so can you explain more how this works?
I’ve thought about that, but shipping large amounts triggers a drop in my postage rates (I think Peter has cited discounts at the 50 pound point and then again at the 200 pound level.
Plus, I would rather package and ship all my accumulated inventory in one orgy of prepping, listing, and shipping than do a little at a time.
I’ve deleted shipments when there were too few items to want to pay to ship to a different warehouse. Sometimes I’ve doubled the number of boxes in a single shipment so that they all go together. I send maybe once or twice a week, like you, but if they decide to go crazy on splits, I go back to their “let us distribute them” option for that shipment so that I won’t be wasting so much paper printing. I know it costs more, but sometimes it’s less aggravating.
Oh, and I live in NJ and I’ve had several orders be sent to Robbinsville, NJ, and even more to Middletown, DE. Nice and quick deliveries.
Lately I have been making one box shipments to avoid the splitting. If Amazon splits a few books off I just delete that shipment. With multiple copies I can add them back into the shipment at the end just by changing the quantity under the modify units tab. I always set up my shipments on the Amazon page. I tried out Inventory lab for a month and doing the shipment through them was a disaster. For some reason when using Inventory Lab my shipments got split into many more parts than just going through Amazon directly. I wasn’t shipping many books at that time so I cannot say that this would hold true for books but it certainly was the case with toys.
Interesting. I had wondered if using third party software contributed to split shipments. Worth experimenting with.
I use InventoryLab and virtually never have split shipments.
Good to know.
I use inventory placement service and my book shipments never get split. It costs extra but saves me a lot of trouble.
Last I looked at the prices for this service, I considered the cost to be to big too consider.
Thanks for the tips, Peter.
I live in the western part of the country, and I get frustrated having to constantly send books to the east coast – like Delaware or New Jersey. They may let me send 6 books to California or Arizona, but the rest goes to NJ or TN. I would love to be able to send closer to home more often. I do find the shipping to be cheaper, and, of course, the books get there more quickly.
One thing I’ve done to change the shipping they are requiring once I have my books all listed is to wait over night before approving the shipment.. Several times, it’s totally changed in the morning. Or I can play around taking a book or two off. If I have multiple copies of a book, they tend to split them off to different locations, so sometimes lowering my number changes things. It can be very time consuming and frustrating. I don’t think I’ve had to ship to more than 3 different locations at a time, though, but my shipments are usually fairly small at a time (30-40 books).
On a slightly different note, I also notice that keeping my boxes at 12 inches or below on any side seems to keep my shipping lower. Anytime I go over 12 inches, I notice a rise in the shipping cost.
Waiting overnight is an interesting trick, though I’m not sure how this would work with third party software given that it sets the warehouses immediately. Maybe the software is part of the problem here?
Perhaps. I don’t use software but go directly through Amazon.
Nice timing with this post. I currently have 10 stacks of book going to 10 different warehouses sitting on my table, and have only been able to get full boxes for 2 so far. Most are from 1-20 books per stack. I was lucky the past few months to have 99% of my shipments go to a warehouse 5 miles from my house and the cost was only about $7.25 per box. Besides taking forever to get a full box of books, it costs me from $20.00-40.00 to ship these boxes that ALL go to the east coast from where I am on the west coast. The higher costs really takes a bite out of profit for the cheaper books. At first when I could see how this was going, I would delete a shipment, then try to list the same books later and see if it would go to a closer warehouse or at least one where I already have several books ready to go. Sometimes this works, but not the last couple weeks, no. Everything to the east coast, 1 book here, 1 book there. Very frustrating. Maybe I will try your method. Thanks for the info.
Have you thought about using a proxy site when doing this method? With proxy sites you actually get a completely different IP address. This might make a difference.
In my experience the IP hasn’t been a factor.
The one and only time I shipped from a city that was different than the address I had entered as ship from, I received an email from Amazon saying this was a no no. And it wasn’t even intentional on my part, I left my Chattanooga address as ship from and physically dropped off at a UPS store in Jacksonville FL. It wasn’t books though, it was diapers, so that likely played a role.
Very strange. I have had Amazon reject addresses at the “complete shipment” stage, but never an email.
A couple of things I have noticed that have helped us avoid split shipments:
It seems that the more books in the shipment the more likely it is to be split. We print out the sku labels ourselves and use the 30 per page Avery labels so we keep all our shipments at 30 books. Another advantage of this is that most of our shipments are under the 50 pound limit and can ship in one box (unless we are shipping in big textbooks). Splitting an order into two boxes going to the same place adds about $3 to the shipping total. I also noticed that once we kept our shipments to 30 books each, some of our books would hit the warehouse and instantly go into an inactive state while Amazon moved them on to another warehouse. I assume that under a certain number Amazon assumes the burden and ships them to the other warehouses themselves. I am in the Dallas area and we had an FBA warehouse open up here about 9 months ago. Since then about 95% of our shipments have been going to Dallas. It’s been great as shipments get there overnight at an average cost of $7 a box.
One thing I also noticed is that sending in a mixed media box, such as half books and half CDs, the CDs would often go in one direction (California) and the books another (New Jersey). The solution was to keep each order to the same type of media. I found that slipping one or two CDs didn’t cause an issue, but 5 or 10 did.
Just this week after riding the Dallas warehouse gravy train, Amazon has started to split our shipments again into 2 or 3 locations. I started to think why would this be happening now, what has changed? One possible reason could be that long tern storage fees just hit and several sellers could have purged a lot of old inventory, leaving several warehouses around the country with empty shelves to fill. If this is the case I expect things to settle down over the next few weeks as those holes are filled.
Awesome tips. These comments are turning into a bible of avoiding split shipments.
Another thing to help w split shipments (and honestly I might have read it here or on another blog so don’t shoot me if I’m repeating already stated info) is always list an odd number of books (81,83,87) instead of even number and NEVER edit a shipment or change inventory after you start a shipping plan. I’ve shipped at least 9 shipments from Chicago since I started using this information and not once have I had to split shipments… my only challenge these days is trying to make 101 books fit in only 2 boxes! Love your posts Peter, very informative to someone only 6 months in the biz!
So much awesome advice being shared here. Maybe worth compiling all these tricks in to one master tutorial on avoiding split shipments.
Or write another mini book! Lol
Hi
For us newbies, can you please comment on all the downsides (not only cost) of split shipments and why we should avoid ?
There’s a really easy solution to your problem. When setting up your items to ship, select “case’packed” items. If I want only 6 items in one box, I say 6 in a case. If I want to ship 32 items in one box, I say there’s 32 in a case. There’s only one shipment that way and Amazon sorts it out for themselves when they get it.
This seems to be most logical. Thanks.