Amazon announced, during their Accelerate conference, Amazon Warehousing and Distribution (AWD), a new service to help its sellers store inventory and ease distribution to tackle supply chain issues. Sellers can use the pay-as-you-go service to store and distribute their inventory within Amazon’s fulfillment network.
According to the company’s announcement, “With this simple pay-as-you-go service, sellers are free from the time-consuming, cumbersome process of moving inventory from upstream facilities to Amazon fulfillment centers. AWD makes the promise of supply chain as a service a reality and is specifically designed to solve inventory management challenges and deliver operational efficiencies.”
“This is big for innovation and product entrepreneurs,” says Jimmy Barber, VP of Growth and Innovation at OneStone, “Amazon can take your product from China and fulfill to any doorstep across the US. You never even see your own product once and it’s all in Amazon’s control. This is big.”
Sellers using AWD can also consolidate their global inventory, which they can then view and manage on Seller Central, simplifying their operations with one pool of inventory. In 2023, sellers will be able to use AWD to send their inventory to any location, including to wholesale customers or brick-and-mortar stores.
Amazon has recently pulled back on its warehouse footprint across the US as it aggressively expanded to meet pandemic-driven demand for online shopping. Amazon has closed or canceled 44 faciities and delayed the opening of 25 sites according to MWPVL International. Jimmy adds, “My hunch is given their FC capacity increase in the past 2 years, and recent remarks that they have too much capacity, Amazon launching their own 3PL service is a perfect fit to offload some warehouse space and round out the fold of the full supply chain.”