Amazon is a diversified multinational corporation with businesses across numerous industries including ecommerce, cloud computing, healthcare, supermarkets, consumer electronics, and entertainment.
The company has also established itself as a leader in the logistics industry. With over 200 fulfillment centers and 200 million square feet of space, Amazon has built the world’s largest fulfillment network. But is Amazon actually a third-party logistics (3PL) provider?
A 3PL provider offers a range of logistics services for businesses interested in outsourcing portions of their supply chain operations, like warehousing, inventory management, fulfillment, and more.
Two of Amazon’s businesses – Fulfillment by Amazon and Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) – can be classified as 3PL providers. Fulfillment by Amazon (or FBA) handles fulfillment for orders placed on Amazon.com. MCF, however, is a 3PL solution that offers order fulfillment for any off-Amazon sales channel – regardless of whether a business sells on Amazon.com or not.
Indeed, a common misconception about MCF is that you need to sell on Amazon.com to use our 3PL solution. MCF supports the successful growth of businesses, whether that’s on or off Amazon.
In this blog, we will explore MCF’s 3PL services and highlight how they can benefit businesses of any size and in any industry.
MCF’s 3PL services
MCF offers a variety of 3PL services that you can leverage including:
Order fulfillment
MCF helps businesses handle one of the most challenging parts of the supply chain, order fulfillment. With MCF, you can streamline your logistics operations by letting Amazon manage the picking, packing, and shipping of your off-Amazon orders. MCF allows you to deliver customer orders placed on any sales channel, with tracking every step of the way from checkout to the customer’s doorstep.
Inventory management
Managing an ecommerce business across multiple channels can be made easy with MCF, as you can fulfill all of your orders using a single pool of inventory. Consolidating your inventory with one 3PL can help you manage your stock, cut costs for storage and shipping, and gain better visibility over your inventory levels so you can optimize for each channel. With MCF, you also have access to 100+ pre-built and developer-friendly integrations to automate your inventory management.
Expedited shipping
Reliable and on-time shipping is a priority for customers and vital to the success of an ecommerce business. With MCF, you can deliver your products as quickly as 1, 2, or 3 business days with a greater than 97% on-time delivery rate. MCF automatically distributes your inventory across the Amazon Fulfillment Network to get your products as close as possible to customers (and minimize shipping times and costs).
Reverse logistics
MCF offers reverse logistics services through MCF if your customer would like to return your product. If a customer wishes to return your product, you have the option for them to send the return back to Amazon’s fulfillment centers. You can track the status of your return on Seller Central. Once the item is received, Amazon associates validate the product state. With this method, the return can be incorporated back into your Amazon inventory.
Conclusion
Choosing the right 3PL partner can have a positive impact on your business. MCF enables businesses to leverage Amazon’s fulfillment network to power their growth with fast, reliable order fulfillment.
