Inbound shipments can be created in Amazon Seller Central, or they can be created in Inventory Planner and synced to Amazon Seller Central via a purchase or transfer order.
Pulling inbound shipments from Amazon Seller Central
By default, if you create inbound shipments in Amazon Seller Central (or sync them to Amazon via a third party) they will automatically be synced to Inventory Planner as purchase orders.
You can configure whether inbound shipments are synced into Inventory Planner as purchase orders or transfer orders for a connection (a region) or per individual warehouse (a marketplace). Learn more about configuring inbound shipment types here.
Inbound shipments must be in the status “shipped” to sync into Inventory Planner.
Inventory Planner checks for new inbound shipments every day during the nightly sync.
Pushing inbound shipments to Amazon Seller Central
When saving a purchase order or transfer order in Inventory Planner, if the destination warehouse is an FBA warehouse, you’ll have the option to use Inventory Planner to create a shipment plan (Send to Amazon workflow) in your Seller Central account.
After saving your purchase or transfer order, you’ll see the “Save to Amazon” option to push the purchase or transfer order to Amazon:
On clicking “Save to Amazon”, you’ll be presented with a popup containing the following options:
The options are:
Default prep owner
Specify who prepares the goods from the following options:Seller
Amazon
No prep is required
Note that the prep owner differs from the “prep category”, which should be set in Amazon Seller Central. If an item hasn’t had its prep category set up in Amazon, the prep owner will automatically be set to “No prep is required” when this order saves to Amazon, where you can change it if necessary.
Default labeling owner
Specify who creates the label for the shipment plan from the following options:Seller
Amazon
No label is required
Learn more in the following section.
Vendor address/ship from address
The address the shipment is being sent from, either a vendor address (for purchase orders) or a ship from address (for transfer orders). This field is necessary for Amazon to create the shipment plan.Vendor addresses are synced from Amazon whenever Inventory Planner receives a shipment update.
Ship from addresses are synced from the “source warehouse”.
Amazon requires phone numbers. You can store phone numbers in Amazon Seller Central, but if the phone number field isn’t populated, you can add it in this modal to allow the order to sync via the API.
Prep owner and labeling owner item overrides
These are optional overrides to use if any items have different setups to the order defaults.Expiry dates
If your product is perishable, you’ll need to set an expiry date within Inventory Planner. Enter the expiry date after clicking “Save to Amazon”, located next to the prep and label owner sections. If your product is not perishable, you can leave the expiry date blank.
Note that the prep owner and labeling owner will be used for all items, unless overridden at the bottom of the modal.
Clicking “Save” creates the shipment plan. Creating a shipment plan means the order can no longer be edited in Inventory Planner – all further actions in the Send to Amazon flow must be taken in Amazon Seller Central.
If the order results in a split shipment, the additional shipments will sync to Inventory Planner as purchase orders or transfer orders as usual.
Note: When sending purchase or transfer orders to Amazon, Inventory Planner appends “from IP” to the reference so you can easily identify their source.
Labels
When you create an inbound shipment, Amazon requires you to tell it who’s responsible for producing labels for the products in the shipment.
Seller: The seller labels the items in the inbound shipment when labels are required.
Amazon only: Amazon attempts to label the items in the inbound shipment when labels are required.
No label is required: If no owner is required for labeling, select this option.
Using Inventory Planner’s label printing functionality, you can print product or case labels for products being shipped to an FBA warehouse. Learn more about Inventory Planner’s label printing functionality here.