Seller Fulfilled Prime is a joke

I don’t know if this is the right sub for this but I just need to vent about Amazon as someone who sells.

I work for a mid-size company that has been selling on Amazon for 7 years. We offer both on FBA and FBM, but FBA has always seen more success for us.

Over the last year we’ve seen steady and consistent cost increases associated with FBA, which has eroded our profit margin from ~60% in 2020 to about ~38% in 2023. In September we were invited to participate in Seller Fulfilled Prime. We thought this could be a great opportunity to reduce expenses while still offering the Prime experience to customers.

What an absolute disaster.

For starters, we had to participate in a 30 day trial during the month of October. Okay, fine. However, after purposefully depleting our FBA stock in preparation for this, we only found out after starting the SFP trial that the Prime badge is removed from all product listings that are participating. That’s right. You have to offer all the benefits of Prime to the customer while receiving none of the recognition. This one action alone halved our sales over night and our primary ASIN fell from #6 in it’s category to #20+.

Despite that, we pushed on, and managed to complete the trial and become enrolled in SFP. Yay! This happened last week (Thursday). I thought the worst was behind us.

This morning I come and see that almost every order we got over the weekend is premium 1-day shipping, with most of them requiring air freight. Orders that were $40 were costing $45-50 just to ship.

There’s been no explanation for this. Nothing was changed in our shipment settings and this didn’t happen during previous weekends when we were participating in the SFP trial.

In total, our next Amazon payment that’s scheduled to disburse on Wednesday has us at about 10% margin. This doesn’t even cover the manufacturing cost of the products.

As I write this, its November 6th. There’s absolutely no way we can send inventory into Amazons FCs in time to get it back on FBA for the holidays. We’re completely screwed for the next two months.

Has anyone experienced anything similar?