Here’s How Shipping with Amazon (SWA) Works

With Amazon raising the bar for ecommerce delivery experiences, fast and free deliveries have become an expectation rather than a perk. In fact, 62% of shoppers now expect to get their orders in three business days without paying any additional fees on shipping.  

But meeting this expectation can be challenging for small to mid-size ecommerce brands. Without the infrastructure, capital, or experience of giants like Amazon, these brands often struggle to provide a quick and affordable delivery experience.  

Fortunately for merchants, solutions such as Ship with Amazon (SWA) are making it possible to offer fast and reliable shipping at minimal cost.  

In this article, we’ll cover what Amazon SWA is and how it can help you provide an outstanding post-purchase experience for customers.  

What is Amazon SWA? 

Besides timely shipments, brands that use SWA have access to 24/7 tracking, can file claims, and contact dedicated support. Pickups and deliveries take place throughout the week, and there are no extra charges for weekend deliveries. Packages are delivered between two to five days after they’re shipped. 

To get a better understanding of how Amazon SWA works, here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how to ship with Amazon: 

• 1. Purchase shipping labels from Amazon. 
• 2. Schedule a pickup. 
• 3. Amazon picks up the packages from your or your fulfilment partner’s warehouse.  
• 4. Amazon delivers the packages to your customers’ doorsteps. 

Amazon SWA vs. FedEx vs. UPS 

When it first launched in 2018, Amazon SWA was restricted to merchants with Amazon listings selling on the company’s marketplace. The pandemic slowed down its growth, with the company having to put a pause to the service in 2020, but came back stronger than ever after a rebrand to Amazon Shipping.  

By 2022, it was already handling 22.5% of packages shipped within the U.S. according to a Pitney Bowes estimate. This put it ahead of FedEx, which was handling 19.1% of shipments, and just falling behind UPS’s share of 24.3%. The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon Shipping has since grown to surpass FedEx and UPS as the biggest delivery business in the U.S. with 5.9 billion packages delivered last year alone.  

Amazon owes this massive success to the speed and reliability of its logistics network. More importantly, SWA boasts a price advantage over these two competitors, as sellers using SWA can take advantage of simple rates without any residential fees or weekend delivery charges. Combine this with the fact that Amazon regularly waives surcharges during peak season, and the service has become a go-to option for ecommerce sellers looking for fast and reliable shipping minus the high costs. 

All this being said, there are still some ways in which Amazon Shipping doesn’t yet fully stack up to its competitors – namely, its limited delivery network and pickup restrictions.  

As of this post’s publishing, pickups can be done only in 15 metropolitan areas, which puts many sellers at a disadvantage if they do not have warehouses within these areas. Moreover, Amazon Shipping still limits deliveries within the contiguous U.S. This means you won’t be able to use the service to fulfil an order to a customer based in London or Hawaii, for example.  

Ecommerce brands should weigh the pros and cons of different last-mile logistics providers carefully, and decide for themselves which solution makes the most sense for their business.  

Types of Amazon orders ShipBob can fulfil 

Amazon will ship your orders – but who fulfils them? The answer can be complicated. Merchants have several fulfilment options when selling on Amazon’s platform and others, including: 

• Seller Fulfilled Prime orders – Qualified sellers handle their own inventory storage and fulfilment for Amazon orders, but are permitted to display the Amazon Prime badge on those orders.  

• Amazon Fulfilled by Merchant (FBM) – The seller handles inventory storage and fulfils Amazon orders themselves (either through their own facilities or leveraging a third-party logistics partner’s services).  

• Amazon Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) – Amazon stores inventory on the seller’s behalf and fulfils Amazon orders for them. Brands can also leverage Amazon’s Multi-Channel Fulfilment (MCF) solution to have Amazon fulfil orders from other channels (such as their website or other marketplaces).  

If you work with a professional fulfilment partner, you will need to choose a fulfilment strategy that is compatible with their services.  

ShipBob, for example, can fulfil Fulfilled by Merchant (FBM) orders. Brands can store their inventory in any of ShipBob’s dozens of fulfilment centres across the continental US and have ShipBob’s team of experts pick and pack Amazon orders on your behalf. However, ShipBob cannot at this time fulfil Seller Fulfilled Prime or Amazon FBA orders.  

Advantages of choosing ShipBob for Amazon FBM 

Many sellers use Amazon FBM to avoid Amazon’s strict FBA requirements and keep costs low. But to get the most out of your Amazon FBM strategy, you’ll need a fulfilment partner like ShipBob by your side.  

Here are some of the benefits of leveraging ShipBob’s solutions to optimise and streamline Amazon FBM for your brand.  

Direct Amazon integration 

ShipBob offers direct Amazon integration, meaning that orders placed through your Amazon storefront are automatically processed and synced with ShipBob’s platform. This not only allows you to automate order processing, but also helps you maintain up-to-date inventory counts and track your orders in real time. 

Inventory storage & management  

Send your inventory to a ShipBob fulfilment centre, and our team of experts will receive, stow, and store it for you. That means you can outsource all the complex and time-consuming aspects of inventory storage and handling to the experts, so you can focus on running your business.  

You can also manage your inventory remotely through ShipBob’s dashboard, which presents real-time inventory levels as well as key data and metrics to deliver more insights and drive better decisions.  

A network of fulfilment centres

ShipBob has dozens of fulfilment centres across the continental US, which merchants can use to split their inventory.  

By storing your inventory in multiple strategically located ShipBob fulfilment centres, you can place inventory closer to customers. This will allow you to fulfil each order from the fulfilment centre nearest to its destination, bringing down shipping costs and transit times. In other words, you can deliver orders faster and for a fraction of the cost. 

ShipBob even offers an Ideal Inventory Distribution tool that can calculate the optimal inventory split for your business using previous order data.  

Customised packaging 

ShipBob’s services are also ideal for Amazon sellers who choose FBM because they want a more customised, branded unboxing experience.  

While other Amazon fulfilment options use the standard Amazon packaging, ShipBob offers a customisation suite that lets you send items in branded packaging. This helps you create a consistent brand experience regardless of which platform your customers use to buy your products. 

“When we first started out, our packaging process was really simple – we just picked the product, stuck it in a brown box, and shipped it. Because ShipBob can support custom packaging, we’ve leveled up our strategy to include Bloom-branded boxes, marketing inserts, and the ability for customers to add personalised gift notes to their orders.

The level of customisation that ShipBob supports helps us reinforce our image as a premium-quality product, and lets us curate a branded experience at scale for customers as soon as their package arrives on their doorstep.”

Neil Blewitt, SVP of Operations at Bloom Nutrition 

Reduced costs

For sellers that don’t need custom branded packaging, ShipBob packs orders in plain brown boxes at no extra cost. This, coupled with free packing supplies like tapes and inserts, allows you to drastically cut down on packaging costs. 

Additionally, ShipBob customers can enjoy cost savings in various other aspects of fulfilment, such as discounted shipping rates with major U.S. couriers. 

Unlock the best of both fulfilment worlds with ShipBob and Amazon SWA 

Chances are, you didn’t start your business to handle logistics – so it makes sense to outsource these tasks to experts and reap the benefits.  

Pairing ShipBob’s fulfilment solutions with Amazon Shipping’s last-mile transportation capabilities gives ecommerce brands the best of both fulfilment and shipping. The two work seamlessly together to provide Amazon FBM merchants with the fast, reliable, and affordable delivery experience their customers expect – and make merchant’s lives a lot easier.  

Speed up deliveries 

ShipBob’s distributed fulfilment network lets you store your inventory closer to your customers to cut down on transit times and facilitate faster deliveries. And with Amazon delivering your SWA orders in 2-5 days, you can rest easy knowing that orders shipped from ShipBob’s fulfilment centres reach your customers quickly. 

Streamline multi-channel fulfilment 

Amazon’s SWA service is now not only available for orders placed on Amazon, but also for orders placed on your website and other sales channels. However, managing all these sales and fulfilling them can be a complex process. 

The good news? ShipBob’s platform integrates with major ecommerce and marketplace platforms (including Amazon, Ebay, retailers like Walmart and Target, TikTok, and more), so you can manage orders across all your sales channels using the ShipBob dashboard.  

ShipBob will automatically process orders placed across all your sales channels and sync your inventory data accordingly, saving you to the trouble of switching between multiple platforms and tools to track your inventory or manage your orders for different sales channels.  

Amazon will then handle the pickup and last-mile fulfilment for all these orders, giving you a reliable way to deliver ecommerce orders. This simplifies your supply chain and ensures that you have a single source of truth to maintain consistency.  

“Along with Chewy, we’re also fulfilling orders through Amazon, as they are the two biggest online pet sales channels in the US. We utilise ShipBob’s EDI solution that is connected to our 3rd party EDI platform SPS Commerce for our Chewy orders, and when we don’t ship directly to Amazon, we rely on ShipBob’s direct integration with Amazon for FBA orders. We’re even exploring additional channels that ShipBob supports, such as Walmart.com.

Being an omnichannel brand is critical for us, so we can reach more pet lovers from more places. We’re glad that ShipBob helps us keep up with demand from all the places we reach our customers.”

Stephanie Lee, COO at PetLab 

Together, ShipBob and Amazon’s solutions help you streamline multi-channel fulfilment and keep track of everything in one place. 

For more information on how ShipBob’s solutions can elevate your Amazon selling and fulfilment strategy, click the button below. 

Amazon SWA FAQs 

Below are answers to common questions about Shipping with Amazon.