If you sell on Amazon and want to tap into Prime, you have two options: Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) and let the marketplace ship from an Amazon warehouse, or Seller Fulfilled Prime (SFP) and ship to Prime customers from your own warehouse or your fulfillment partner's. Find out the pros and cons of SFP and how to use Amazon's fulfillment option efficiently in this article.
For online shoppers in Germany, Amazon is the most popular destination when searching for products on the internet. One reason: the giant's Prime option. Around 200 million people worldwide use the paid Prime membership for benefits like fast shipping and access to films, series, and music.
But the Prime program offers benefits to you as an online retailer too. Products listed under the Prime label generally have higher sales odds than non-Prime products, since Amazon ranks Prime listings above those without fast shipping. These listings also tend to get a trust boost from buyers.
If you sell your products on Amazon and want to tap into the Prime program, you have two options:
Find out the pros and cons of SFP and how to use Amazon's fulfillment option efficiently in this article.
Amazon offers sellers several fulfillment options — either you hand shipping to Amazon (FBA) and join the Prime program, or you handle shipping yourself and skip the Prime logo (Fulfillment by Merchant, FBM).
For some time now, there's been a third option: Seller Fulfilled Prime — often called Prime by Seller — lets you list items on Amazon with the Prime logo while still handling shipping yourself.
With this shipping program, online retailers don't need to store items at Amazon — they use their own fulfillment, from their own warehouse or their fulfillment provider's. SFP is the ideal compromise for online retailers who:
To use Prime by Seller, five steps are needed:
Below, you'll find what advantages the SFP program offers, what could speak against shipping yourself with the Prime option, and how to qualify to participate.
The biggest advantage of Seller Fulfilled Prime: your products get Prime status and therefore more visibility in search results. Retailers who want to optimize their listings further and analyze competitor positioning can also draw on data from an Amazon Scraping Guide to better understand pricing, rankings, and product trends. This information helps retailers make more informed decisions about pricing strategy, product positioning, and inventory planning to stay competitive.
Amazon makes around 70 percent of its revenue in Germany with Prime members. With SFP, you cut yourself a slice of that, while your fulfillment stays largely independent of Amazon.
More benefits the SFP program brings you:
The list of advantages with Seller Fulfilled Prime is long. There are also some points that hold retailers back from using the Amazon service. The following facts are worth knowing before you commit to Prime by Seller:
If the SFP advantages sound tempting and you can live with the downsides, you'll need to look at the guidelines Amazon has set up. To get Prime certification, retailers have to ship items punctually and reliably. Specifically, the following criteria must be met:
These guidelines must be met consistently and can change at any time. In June 2023, for example, Amazon adjusted the required delivery speeds.
There are no longer fixed delivery speeds. Instead, the shipping speed threshold is calculated hourly at the store level. Only the 90 percent of Prime-eligible offers with the fastest actual delivery speed get the Prime logo.
Amazon monitors compliance with SFP rules pretty strictly. To meet them reliably, your fulfillment processes need to run smoothly. Automated and digital workflows help here.
With Zenfulfillment you tap the SFP advantages using your existing resources, even as your order volume grows, and give your customers one more reason to choose you with the Prime option.
As an experienced fulfillment provider, Zenfulfillment takes the heavy lifting required for fast shipping off your plate. You invest your energy in customer satisfaction, develop your products further, build a unique post-purchase experience, and open new sales channels — while everything runs reliably in the background with Zenfulfillment.
Another advantage: through special fulfillment rules in the Zenfulfillment OS, you can specify that every Prime order gets a special flyer — say, with a voucher code for the next purchase directly in your own online shop. Automated processes make sure it lands in the package in the warehouse, and your customer is more likely to come back to your shop than to Amazon next time. That's how you open new sales channels.
So that goalkeepers have everything in hand, sportswear maker T1TAN sells goalkeeper gloves and accessories in its own Amazon shop. For fulfillment, the company relies on Zenfulfillment — with impressive results:
If Amazon is or will be a key sales channel for you, the Prime program is a non-negotiable revenue lever. With Seller Fulfilled Prime, you sell items under the Prime label on the world's biggest marketplace and use your existing warehouse processes to do it.
Unlike Amazon FBA, you can take greater influence over the customer experience and ship items in your own boxes. The trade-off: you hand customer service to Amazon.
If you'd rather communicate with customers yourself and Prime isn't a priority for now, Amazon Fulfillment by Merchant might be the right fit. In either case, efficient and reliable fulfillment matters — and Zenfulfillment supports you on both paths.
With Prime by Seller, Amazon gives online retailers the option to sell their products under the coveted Prime logo and win over Prime members with fast and free shipping. Unlike Fulfillment by Amazon, where the platform handles fulfillment, with Seller Fulfilled Prime warehousing and shipping run through the online retailer. You get all the Prime advantages without giving up your warehouse and shipping control to Amazon.
SFP is worth it for E-Commerce companies that already have fulfillment processes in place and follow a multichannel strategy that includes Amazon as a sales channel. Since Amazon is a major marketplace and Prime members account for a large share of revenue growth at the platform, the revenue opportunity for sellers in the Prime program is significant.
Just like with SFP, Fulfillment by Merchant (FBM) means online retailers handle fulfillment themselves. The difference: with SFP, sellers can offer products with the Prime label, while FBM doesn't include automatic Prime advantages. The flip side: SFP requirements are stricter than FBM's, which gives more flexibility on fulfillment.
.png)
