FBA stock transfer improvement
Hey David,
We use warehouse transfers to manage this. We transfer it to a "ghost warehouse location "Sent to FBA" and adjusts the stock levels accurately with audit trail and date and then set them to zero in the sent FBA location, this ensures there is no sales data on them until they are sold at FBA. Doesnt help with the labels etc but the sales date is more important for us to be correct :)
But a FBA solution in linnworks would be a great feature :)
Stuart Cameron
@Stephen, Mark Aldous suggested this to me, but frankly it is a crap hack of a solution. I'm not sure the process should be a transfer, it should be an order and my reason for saying this is, I want to tell my warehouse staff, what to dispatch, when and where to. Simplicity, (1) Create Order (which allocates stock) (2) Print Dymo/Zebra labels from the order (3) Despatch Order.
The best process I have come up with so far would be to create the order in Seller Central as per normal and have Linnworks Download that order as it would with any other. By doing it this way the FBA Address would be downloaded along with the XSKU's for the labels. When the order is downloaded LW's could simply tell Amazon the Tracking number, same as with any other order.
I see MULTI-BOX consignments to be an issue, (but then it is already), splitting orders and courier labels for multi consignment sucks at the minute. Lost energy reporting this kind of stuff to Linnworks. (1 of 1), (2 of 2) even with label reprints it still doesn't get to (1 of 2).. another thread and excuse received for another day.
Utterly frustrated.
Julietta Kornysheva
Hello!
If talking about transferring stock items between non-fulfilment locations, then you can use Warehouse Transfer functionality.
However, it is not possible to forward stock to FBA from Linnworks, thus automatic stock deduction is not possible since warehouse transfer does not support FBA. FBA does not provide such a feed for us to use.
When transferring stock levels from Default location to FBA you should manually change all the levels in the default location. This can be done with Data import tool. Stock levels in FBA location will be updated automatically as soon as FBA receives and confirms all the stock you sent.
You can print a usual Pick or Pack list for the transferred orders from particular location.
Kind regards,
Julietta
Technical Support
Stuart Cameron
Thanks for your Input Julietta, but while you may think this is a good a solution in practically it is not. These are counted as sales in the Linnworks Dashboard, it makes to effort to upload or download an shipping order and it is slow with lots of room for error. It is a clunky solution that doesn't address customer requirements.
Julietta Kornysheva
Hello,
The thing is that currently by system design stock levels in FBA locations should be maintained by the FBA warehouse workerks. This is due to the fact Amazon FBA have no API reference which would allow such a transfer.
As per the problem that Linnworks is treating these shipments to the FBA as sales, which they are not - there is a possibility to make as custom sales report.
A bespoke version of 'sold granular' report from 'Dashboards - Query Data' where these orders are being excluded from the calculation.
If you would like to request such custom report - kindly raise a ticket for our scripting department.
Have a nice day!
david merrett
At present we are creating a new order, populating the order with the items, setting the sale value as zero and then either generating a courier label through open orders and processing, or booking a pallet and then processing once it is collected.
This has the advantage of:
1. Accurately keeping a nice audit trail of what was processed, who processed it and when it was sent, with tracking details
2. Ensuring that keying in errors are not present as opposed to manually adjusting stock levels
3. Allowing us to easily print courier labels for the shipments from the open orders screen for small shipments
In reality for us, given the price to book a time specific pallet delivery to FBA it doesn't actually work out much cheaper per unit to use a pallet compared to using 30Kg boxes by courier a lot of the time.
This also has 2 related fundamental problems:
1. If we use open orders to send 50 widgets from default to FBA, this counts those 50 widgets as a sale when we send them to FBA, then when FBA sells them it counts them again (ie we get 100 sales in our query data screen where actually only 50 are real, the other 50 were just the transfer from default to FBA). This is a huge problem as we use linnworks sales data to generate our reorder levels
2. As we set the value of the order as zero when it is sent to FBA, this is messing up our average sale price data for our stock as it's counting the order to FBA as a sale, and a sale with no value at that. Again we rely on this data to give us an indication of our revenue / profits for each week / month.
So moving towards a better solution, would it not be worthwhile adding a button to the new order screen called something like "FBA transfer" which allows us to create an order for FBA, deducts the order from default (or wherever it is being sent from) but ignores the order for the purposes of gathering sales quantities and values?
From a technical perspective this should be quite simple, it would give a full audit trail, linked to the user who created the order and then to the one who processed it and also would allow the FBA transfer to be tracked but would not contaminate the sales data as is currently the case.
Any reason why this is not a good idea?
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