For Amazon merchants, logistics is a particularly important link. When opening a store on Amazon, the logistics method to choose is either FBA, which is Amazon’s official logistics distribution, or FBM, which is all other logistics distribution. What everyone basically knows now should be Amazon’s third-party logistics.
Third-party logistics refers to a logistics operation and management method in which a production and operation enterprise, in order to focus on its main business, authorizes and entrusts the logistics activities that originally belonged to it to handle to a professional logistics service company in the form of a contract. At the same time, it maintains close contact with the logistics company through an information management system to achieve full-line management of logistics. It does not own products or participate in product transactions. It only provides customers with logistics services that are governed by contracts, based on cooperation, and are universal, humanized, and information-based.
Take Amazon in the United States as an example:
Amazon’s distribution link is outsourced. Part of the US region is outsourced to the United States Postal Service and UPS, and the international part is outsourced to CEVA Logistics, FedEx, etc. On this basis, a large-scale “logistics center” is built to centralize the scattered order requirements through the logistics center (not only information centralization, but also goods centralization), and then connect with industrialized logistics companies such as UPS and Jihua Logistics to give full play to the large-scale benefits of integrated distribution.
Third-party merchants on Amazon, whether individual merchants or small and medium-sized enterprises, can deliver goods to the nearest Amazon logistics center, and the cost is calculated according to the space and time occupied. After the customer submits the order, Amazon’s employees will be responsible for order processing, packaging, delivery, third-party delivery and return and exchange of goods, and then charge an order execution fee. The biggest highlight of Amazon Logistics is the use of new technologies. From Bezos’s car room 20 years ago to today’s smart robot warehouses and drone delivery, its complete set of e-commerce warehouse logistics methods supported by new technologies has always been the target of other e-commerce platforms to pursue and set.