Looking to hire an Amazon FBA Prep Center?

Finding the right Amazon FBA Prep Center can take awhile and require some back and forth conversations with your top choices before you can make any choices on who to chose for your Amazon business.

We have a shorter post about what you should know before contacting a new prep center, but we wanted to go more in depth to help you feel prepared and ready to establish new relationships. 

When speaking with a new-to-you prep center who works with Amazon FBA sellers, they will have just as many questions for you as you have for them. Here are some questions they may ask you, in no particular order:

1. How long have you been in business? They may want to know a little bit about you and your company so they can best serve your needs. 
2. What products/type of products do you plan to sell? The prep center will want to know if your products will require special handling. (For example, do you sell liquids?)
3. What about hazmat items? What type of seller are you? Are you a private label seller who just needs storage and carton forwarding? A wholesaler who is planning to send high quantity of few skus? Or an Online Arbitrage seller who will send lots of skus with low quantity per sku? This will help the prep center determine which pricing to discuss with you, among other things. 
4. Will your supplier be labeling and preparing the units to Amazon’s standards, or will the prep center be the ones preparing each item with the necessary labeling, polybags, or other supplies 
5. What is the volume you are intending to send to the prep center? Approximately how much are you intending to store, and how much are you intending to send to Amazon?
6. Do you have any other special requests that they will need to accommodate for you? 
7. If they have a proprietary software, are you willing to connect to the software or utilize it? Will you provide limited permissions to your Seller Central Acct? Or are you using your own software such as Inventory Lab? 
8. Do you have a preference for shipping method when your 3PL ships into Amazon for you? (Small Parcel, LTL)

Ultimately, your potential prep center wants to make sure that you are a good fit for each other, so that they can provide the best possible service to you. If they aren’t thorough, that is a good time to reevaluate the qualifications you are looking for in a 3PL. 

In an upcoming post, we will detail some questions you may want to ask them. 

Additionally, if you are not sure what kind of seller you are, check out this blog post to see what fits you best.