Amazon Fulfilment 101: Operational Best Practices - Episode 253

INTERVIEW WITH THALES FERREIRA

DESCRIPTION

In today’s podcast, Kiri is joined by Thales Ferreira, Project Manager at Bobsled. They cover Thales’s previous experience with working with managing sourcing products abroad and all the logistics hurdles of bringing them to the US to sell on Amazon.

Make sure you tune in to find out more!

Thales Ferreira spent most of his career focusing on project management, and international and domestic logistics (7 years ago) in the pet category (since 2008). He made the transition to Amazon account management 5 years ago.

“Not understanding the Amazon network - you’re dealing with people are not familiar with your product. You are trusting Amazon employees do make the decision for you. It’s a matter of how you deal with your returns.”

— Thales Ferreira

KEY TAKEAWAYS

In his previous company, Thales managed projects sourcing products abroad, working through the logistics hurdles of bringing them into the US (dealing with transport and customs), and coordinating the domestic distribution to client warehouses.

After shifting his focus to Amazon, he saw that there was a lot involved in making sure that they could make use of Amazon’s network to distribute the products.

Thales learned a lot of the ins and outs of Amazon logistics by study, trial and error, and being personally involved in every step of the chain in both FBA and FBM.

The most common mistakes he noticed -

Not understanding the Amazon Fulfillment Network,
most people do not realize that Amazon receives a lot of products daily, most of the process is automated, and people do not stop the process to fix errors. They put it on a separate parallel track to direct it to a human that will do their best to fix issues, but they usually are not familiar with the product, and may not be able to solve it quickly.
Identifier code issues,
Labeling mistakes,
Going out of stock,
and more.

Kiri and Thales cover the cost of making these mistakes, both financial and the hit on account health on Amazon.