Amazon FBA Inspection and Amazon Packaging Requirements

If you are an Amazon FBA Seller and care about your product reviews, then we highly recommend using our Amazon FBA inspection service in order to fully comply with all the prep requirements required for Amazon FBA sellers.

This guide takes about 7 minutes to read and is divided into the following 7 Sections:

0. Intro: What is Amazon FBA?
1. What is an Amazon FBA Inspection?
2. Why conduct an Amazon FBA Inspection?
3. What is checked during an Amazon FBA Inspection?
4. How is an Amazon FBA Inspection conducted?
5. How does an Amazon FBA Inspection report look?
6. Amazon FBA Labelling and Packaging Requirements
7. Summary

What is Amazon FBA?

Fulfilment by Amazon(FBA) is a service offered by Amazon, which allows third-party sellers to automate their order fulfilment and shipping services. The concept is simple:

1. Sellers send their products to Amazon
2. Amazon stores the products in their warehouse
3. The products get listed on Amazon’s website
4. A customer visits the website and makes a purchase
5. Amazon processes all of the orders as they come in.

If you handle the sales and make sure Amazon stays stocked with your products, the rest will be done for you. 

The service is not free of course. You’ll have to pay Amazon fees for storage, shipping, commission on sales, in addition to a monthly fee.

The cost of storage and the cost of shipping the product to the end customer will depend on the volume, the weight and the country in which you sell the product . In exchange you get:

• Access to the world’s largest marketplace
• 24/7 Amazon customer service
• All fulfilment and shipping costs included (pick, pack and ship)
• Access to one of the world’s most dynamic fulfilment networks
• Rebated delivery charges

There are more than 2 million third party Amazon FBA Sellers worldwide. That's a lot. However, when considering that there are more than 300 million active customer accounts around the world, it is not strange to see that more than 50% of Amazon FBA Sellers have revenue of minimum 100k USD per year.

Amazon is a highly competitive marketplace and one bad product review can damage your brand image in more ways than you can possibly imagine.

To avoid such results for your business, it is highly recommended that you solicit services of professional firms like Inspection Bird Ltd to check your product against Amazon's FBA requirements by performing an Amazon FBA inspection of your products.

What's an Amazon FBA Inspection?

An Amazon FBA Inspection is a product inspection service tailored towards Amazon FBA sellers that aims to check that the products are correctly prepared before being shipped into one of Amazon’s fulfilment centers.

The product inspection is normally conducted when 80-100% of the products have been manufactured, but before the products are exported from the manufacturing country. This allows an Amazon FBA seller to know that the goods are ready to enter one of Amazon’s fulfilment centers.

An FBA inspection is similar to a pre-shipment inspection but has additional requirements to ensure the shipment fully complies with Amazon’s TOS. Inspection Bird provides you with a hassle-free Amazon FBA inspection service which will ensure that your product makes it to the Amazon warehouse and is not rejected because of violations of Amazon FBA TOS.

Why conduct an Amazon FBA Inspection?

There are mainly four reasons to conduct an Amazon FBA Inspection:

1. To avoid rejection by Amazon

Amazon might reject your products at the door if they are improperly labelled, if you are missing some key tags on your pallet or if you violate any other of Amazon’s dozen prep requirements. This can be costly as you might lose out on sales in addition to pay for shipping the products back to your own warehouse, pay for re-prepping and for shipping the goods back to Amazon.

2. To maintain a good product rating

Reviews are everything if you want to be successful on Amazon. Good reviews mean more buyers. More buyers mean more good reviews. If your products are defect you might see the opposite effects. Bad reviews à Less buyers. Ensuring your products meet a certain quality is key to maintaining your brand reputation and to stay competitive on Amazon.

3. To avoid suspension

Repetitive customer complaints and poor reviews can lead to Amazon having your product listing closed. In some cases, they might suspend your FBA account altogether and basically shut down all your income from Amazon. Getting a new account after suspension is a tiresome process and is not guaranteed to be a success.

4. To avoid lawsuits

Critically defective products that harms customers can end up in a lawsuit. As a business owner you are expected to have made your due diligence on the items you sell to ensure that no product has the capacity to harm your users unless the product itself is hazardous and the customer has been warned about the different threats as per the requirements of local authorities.

Some companies fail to meet all of Amazon’s FBA requirements. As a result, their products and at times the complete batches risk being rejected before entering Amazon’s warehouse. Our Amazon FBA inspection will ensure that you get a hassle-free selling experience on Amazon while Inspection Bird takes care of the FBA requirements.

There are additionally many other benefits of conducting an Amazon FBA Inspection:

• The FBA inspections ensure that you are delivering the products that will not get rejected and avoid any troubles that the rejection might cause.
• The Amazon FBA inspections can help you greatly improve the quality of your deliverables
• With proper labelling and packaging, you will ensure that the products will end up at the right warehouse, avoid penalties and/or poor customer reviews.
• The FBA inspection will help you avoid any last minute surprises that can cost you greatly in terms of time, money and customer satisfaction.

What is checked during an Amazon FBA Inspection?

Amazon has provided a comprehensive checklist for FBA sellers. These requirements need to be met in order for an FBA Seller to be allowed to sell on Amazon’s platform.

At Inspection Bird we look through all these requirements in addition to your own and our internal requirements to ensure a thorough inspection process. Among the things we check are:

• Whether the quantity ordered is the same as the quantity produced
• That the product quality is in accordance with the specifications provided by the customer and with the quality one expects for similar products.
• We carry out product tests to ensure conformity with the material specifications
• We measure the weight and size of the products and the shipping cartons to ensure compliance with FBA’s size requirements
• We test the scannability and the readability of product and carton labels
• We verify correct design of product packages
• We verify proper labelling and markings of the products including FNSKU labels, suffocation labels, carton labels, sold as set labels etc.
• We conduct drop tests to test whether shipment can handle a bumpy transit
• We confirm whether the shipment is as per the Amazons FBA packaging requirement

All our findings are summarized in a comprehensive FBA inspection report with images, text and our conclusion. You can download a sample report by clicking here.

There are too many requirements to list out without making this guide 10 pages long. You can however get more details about the most common requirements by reading the following article or by following the link in chapter 6.

How is an Amazon FBA Inspection conducted?

Inspection Bird send inspectors, who are experienced with conducting Amazon FBA inspections, to the factory site. The inspector will then meet with the production manager and be shown the room where the inventory is stored.

The inspectors will then pick cartons at random as per AQL, which is an internationally recognized sampling technique, to make our findings statistically significant.

How does an Amazon FBA Inspection report look?

Our Amazon FBA Inspection report will list a comprehensive checklist that we have followed during the inspection. It will indicate the points in the checklist that have been met by the supplier and the points that the supplier has ignored or failed to meet. Each part of the report will be backed with pictorial evidence to help illustrate the issues you might have at hand.

Major sections of our report include:

• A summary of the entire report made by our Inspector
• Workmanship: This section will summarize the workmanship of the supplier and summarize all the discrepancies found during the inspection.
• Quantity: This section will show the quantity of the products and compare against the customer requirements in a tabular format.
• Product conformity: This section will show the shortcomings of product quality against our internal requirements, international standards in addition to your requirements
• Amazon packaging and labelling requirements: This section will highlight issues related to the labelling and packaging requirements for Amazon FBA requirements. It will list up all shortcoming found
• Product Test: This section of the report covers all the tests performed on the products and the corresponding results
• Measurements: The measurement section of the report highlights if any issues are found with the measurement and if they are not as per the customer requirements and as per Amazon’s requirements

Download a sample fba inspection report here.

 

The report will provide you with a solid overview of your shipment and whether it is ready for departure. 

Amazon FBA Labelling and Packaging Requirements

Amazon has many requirements for packaging and labelling. These requirements typically depend on the country that you will ship to. Amazon UK's packaging requirements are different from Amazon US' packaging requirements, which again are different from the Amazon requirements in Germany.

In this section we will look at the requirements which are mutual for all of Amazon’s marketplaces.

FNSKU Labelling

FNSKU stands for Fulfilment Network Stock Keeping Unit and is the name of the barcodes that has to be applied on each individual product that you send to Amazon’s fulfilment centers. The barcodes make it possible to connect the products to the correct FBA seller.

Amazon also allows sellers to label the products with UPC/EAN codes instead of FNSKU labels if that is more feasible for the seller, The most important is that you don’t apply both labels on the products.

All sellers are required to apply one FNSKU/UPC/EAN label on each product. If not Amazon will reject the shipment.

Amazon has 11 different FNSKU label specifications available in their menu. The seller can choose one of these options. FBA sellers usually goes with the option product label option “40-up labels 52.5 mm x 29.7 mm on A4”.

We have enlisted all the options for printing out FNSKU labels.

Sold as set labels:

Fulfilment by Amazon requires either a “Sold as Set” or a “Ready to Ship” label on a bundle of items that will be sold as a single sellable unit. Units that are bundled (for example, a bundle of two headphones, sold as one unit) must be marked as sets on their packaging. A label must be added to the bundled unit that clearly states that the products are to be received and sold as a single unit. For example, "Sold as set", "Ready to ship", or "This is a set. Do not separate.".

Suffocation Labels:

Suffocation warnings labels are mandatory for poly bags with an opening of 5 inches or more. The label has to read:

 “WARNING: To avoid danger of suffocation, keep this plastic bag away from babies and children. Do not use this bag in cribs, beds, carriages or play pens. This bag is not a toy.”

The warning label has to be placed in a legible font and on the prominent face of the product. The font size of the warning labels can be determined by following the table below.

Summary

Amazon FBA sellers are required to meet with dozens of standards to sell products through Amazon’s FBA program.

An Amazon FBA Inspection is an inspection service tailored towards Amazon sellers. The inspection ensures that the products are functional, properly labelled and packed for shipment as per Amazon’s TOS.

Failure to meet any of Amazon’s requirements can lead to rejection at Amazon’s doorstep and/or fines. Defective products on the other hand can lead to your listing being closed, your account getting suspended, and in rare cases, a lawsuit.

Ensuring that your products are properly prepped, and non-defective is key to being successful as an Amazon seller. Fully functioning products means happy customers, which means good reviews, which means more customers and so on.

We at Inspection Bird know all there is to know about prepping goods for Amazon. If you have any questions about our FBA inspection service, or if you need help with setting up an inspection at your factory, please do not hesitate to contact us on [email protected]

If you have any questions about our inspection services, or if you need help with setting up an inspection at your factory, please do not hesitate to contact us on [email protected].