Received in an email this morning from Amazon, and effective February 25th, 2012:
"Dear FBA Seller,
Effective February 25, 2012, inventory may be assigned to multiple fulfillment centers at the ASIN level during the shipment creation process to help better position it to reach customers at the delivery speeds they choose. We anticipate that both you and customers who purchase your products will benefit from this change, including for the following reasons.
- Products located in multiple fulfillment centers can gain a competitive advantage over products located in a single fulfillment center. Order cut-off times for Prime and expedited shipping can be extended by as much as three hours with inventory in multiple fulfillment centers, so your offers will more likely be available for last-minute orders in more locations.
- Products can be available for fulfillment to customers sooner than if you shipped them to one fulfillment center, and we then transported them to other fulfillment centers.
- The impact of regional and local events on your products will be reduced. Events such as snowstorms, flooding, and earthquakes can disrupt transportation in a region or local fulfillment center. Having your inventory in multiple locations during these events increases our ability to ship orders to customers on time.
At first, this seems like it will take a bit of getting used to, especially for FBA booksellers who ship multiple quantities of the same item. It may require setting several boxes aside, in addition to your normal ABE3 Pennsylvania warehouse location.
I will be glad to provide an attractive, brand new 2012 day planner to the first bookseller to provide a logical and workable solution to streamlining this process. My initial idea is just to keep several 12 X 12 X 18 boxes (which I get from ULine) going at once, with the appropriate warehouse labeled on the side.
