Linnworks is capable of managing Fulfilment By Amazon, you can keep track of FBA orders, inventory levels, submit orders to FBA from external channel and combine FBA stock with your internal levels. This enables you to continue selling on eBay, your own website and any other selling venue and get Amazon FBA to fulfil orders from these channels, as well as update stock levels on eBay, Magento, PixMania, Play and your own website with real-time FBA stock levels.

How it works?

The concept is based around so-called Fulfilment Center functionality in Linnworks. In a nutshell Fulfilment Center is simply a location in Linnworks, you can set any stock location to be a fulfilment center. When it comes to Amazon FBA, Linnworks will do it for you automatically (i.e. when you set an Amazon account as FBA Enabled, Linnworks will create a location and set it as Fulfilment Center).

Some facts to know about location which is set as Fulfilment Center

• Fulfilment Center location should NOT be used for processing orders
• Order allocated to Fulfilment Center should be locked (Linnworks will lock them automatically)
  Inventory Levels in Fulfilment Center CANNOT be changed directly in Linnworks.
• You should NOT process orders from Fulfilment Center from Linnworks. Orders Processed from Fulfilment Center will not take stock from fulfilment location, instead stock will be deducted from your set Location as usual
  Order Processing is done automatically
• You can allocate orders from Default (or your own location) to Fulfilment Center in Open Orders screen (or run Macro to automatically allocate orders)

When Amazon account is set as FBA Linnworks will do the following:

• FBA orders placed directly through Amazon will be downloaded and can be viewed in Open Orders (by selecting Fulfilment Center). Both pending, processing order will be downloaded. These orders will be set to Locked status and cannot and should not be processed in Linnworks
• When Amazon despatches an order, the order will be marked as Processed in Linnworks, tracking number recorded.
• Linnworks will synchronize stock levels in Amazon FBA location, i.e. your current stock levels in FBA will be reflected in Linnworks.
• If you allocate an order to Fulfilment Center manually (for example an eBay order moved to Fulfilment Center location), next time you synchronize Linnworks will submit this order to be fulfilled by Amazon FBA. The order will then be locked and FBA order tracking will be activated.
• Order that have been submitted to Amazon FBA from Linnworks, will be tracked and status will be updated when you synchronize (you can see the state of FBA order by looking at the audit trail)

Setup amazon as FBA Enabled.

To setup your Amazon account as FBA enabled, go to Amazon configuration and set FBA Enable checkbox. This will create new Location and automatically configure this location as Fulfilment Center. The name for the new location will be [Merchant Name] FBA.

Submitting Orders to Amazon FBA manually

If you have Fulfilment Center in Linnworks, it will be shown in the Open Orders screen. You can switch open orders view from Default (which is your processing location) to Fulfilment Center by selecting the location from the drop down box.

To submit new order to Amazon FBA (so called Outbound Shipment)

• Select the order you want to submit to fulfilment center
• Right click on the selected orders
• Select Action > Bulk Change > Move to fulfilment center > choose the fulfilment center name
• Once the order is moved, it will be locked down and next time you synchronize it will be sent to Amazon FBA.

Tracking Status of the FBA outbound shipments

• Once an order is sent and accepted by Amazon FBA, the Label Printed status on the outbound shipment will be set to true.
• If there was an error attempting to submit an order to FBA, Linnworks will display Label Printing error and the exact Error Message. Linnworks will retry to submit the order next time you are synchronizing.
• Linnworks will keep track of FBA state changes
• Once the order is shipped by FBA FULFIL_STATUS will change to Complete and the order will be assigned tracking number (if specified) and moved to Processed.

Shipping

It is only possible to set 1 of the following 3 options for shipping when submitting orders to Amazon FBA

• Standard
• Expedited
• Priority [Not available in EU]

To use one of these methods an appropriate Linnworks Postal Service Method must be assigned to the Order in Linnworks before the order is assigned to Amazon FBA. To ensure there is is no confusion it is recommended to set up 3 specific Linnworks Postal Service Methods as follows.

• FBA Standard
• FBA Expedited
• FBA Priority [Not available in EU]

It is then possible to set the shipping service to be used by Amazon FBA through the following options

• Manually set the shipping service
• Use postal service mapping on the other channels to auto assign a service
• Use a script to auto assign the service

Notes:

• An external order submitted to FBA and processed by FBA will be marked as shipped on the channel as normal. For example if you sent eBay order to FBA, once it is despatched, Linnworks will mark it as shipped on eBay
• If you have submitted an order to FBA it cannot be cancelled from Linnworks. You can try to cancel it from Amazon Seller Central, if the order is still in Pending state. Linnworks will automatically receive CANCELLED notification and display Label Print error for the error.
• Once an order is sent to FBA you cannot move it from Fulfilment Center back to default, unless it is cancelled by FBA. If you need to move it out of Fulfilment Center, cancel it manually on Amazon, sync, unlock and move manually.
• An order can fail to be submitted to Amazon FBA for multiple reasons. Most common reasons are; invalid address, incorrect country and invalid FBA SKU. To correct the issue, unlock the order, make changes, lock it and re-synchronize.

Inventory Synchronization

Linnworks will automatically synchronize stock levels in fulfilment location with the stock levels in Amazon FBA. You can view the changes in the stock levels in the item stock level history and review current stock levels from My Inventory screen.

The stock levels in the FBA location are part of your combined inventory and under normal circumstances will be propagated to all other channels. For example if you have 5 of Product A in your local warehouse and another 10 in FBA, Linnworks (unless instructed otherwise) will submit the available quantity of 15 to all other channels (eBay, Magento, PixMania, Play, website etc).

Configuring Linnworks not to update Amazon account inventory levels for FBA items

Since FBA will maintain the stock level for your product fulfilled by Amazon automatically. It is a good idea to stop Linnworks submitting stock levels for FBA items. You need to set all FBA items as Ignore Sync. The easiest way to do this is to run Inventory Mapping tool for Amazon and check all FBA items as Ignore Sync.