What do the different fulfillment, shipping and delivery options mean at Amazon? Prime delivery, sold by, shipped from, FBA, if you shop on Amazon (and who doesn’t these days?) you will be confronted by a dizzying array of shipping, fulfilled by and delivery options. Here’s what they mean to you, the consumer.
Amazon Prime vs. Non-Prime Delivery
Prime Delivery
Let’s start with the easiest one, the one with which most people are familiar: Prime Delivery. Amazon Prime is an Amazon membership that costs $119 a year, or $12.99 a month. Amazon Prime includes various services (Prime Music, Prime Video, etc.), but the main and original Amazon Prime service, included with membership, is free shipping and delivery. Even there, however, there are several types of free shipping and delivery: free one day delivery, free same day delivery (when you are within proximity of an Amazon warehouse and the item is being sold by or is fulfilled by Amazon), free 2-hour delivery for groceries, and Key by Amazon in-garage delivery (the Amazon Key service was originally rolled out in 2017 as a service by which Amazon would have access to your house through your front door; we’re glad to see they have now rolled that back to “just” access to your garage! You can read everything you wanted to know about Amazon Prime, and more, on Amazon’s page all about Amazon Prime Delivery.
If you’re wondering whether Amazon Prime is worth the cost, Business Insider did an excellent and thorough write-up of whether Prime is worth it just for the free shipping (spoiler: they concluded that it is).
Now, all that said, just because you are a Prime member, and an item is offered for Prime delivery, doesn’t mean you are going to get your order in 2 days, or even 3 or 4 days. So be sure to check the delivery info on an item before you order it if it’s important for you to have it sooner rather than later! (This is different than if your order never actually shows up! Go here for what to do if your Amazon order is never delivered at all.
The Internet Patrol is completely free, and reader-supported. Your tips via CashApp, Venmo, or Paypal are appreciated! Receipts will come from ISIPP.
CashApp us
Venmo us
Paypal us
Non-Prime Delivery
Amazon Prime offers you not just free shipping but free 2-day shipping (and sometimes even free overnight or even free same day shipping, as noted above). You can get free shipping with Amazon without being a member of Amazon Prime, but it is not guaranteed to arrive in two days.
If you are not a member of Prime, then in order to get free shipping on an Amazon order your order must be over $25. And, again, two-day delivery is not guaranteed.
If your order is less than $25, and you are not a Prime member, then you will be charged shipping, and how much you will be charged depends on how much the item weighs, the distance between the location from which the order will be shipped and the destination, the speed of delivery which you select, the phase of the moon, and whether Mercury is in Uranus. (Ok, those last two aren’t really factored in…maybe.) Generally you can expect to pay anywhere from $3.99 to as much as $20 or more, depending on the delivery options that you choose.
Decoding Amazon Order Fulfillment
The different types of shipping-from and fulfilled-by combinations are really where the confusion rubber hits the road, so to speak. If you’ve ever ordered something on Amazon, and then wondered where the heck it was, and why it wasn’t in your hot little hands already, only to have it show up the following week, the most likely reason is that you didn’t realize that that it wasn’t an item that was actually being sold by Amazon, and maybe not even shipped by Amazon from an Amazon warehouse.
Sold by Amazon
Sold by Amazon means that Amazon purchased the product from the manufacturer or wholesaler, and that Amazon is then selling it to you. This is what would happen if you walked into a retail store (remember those?), took a credit card or cash dollars (remember those?) out of your wallet, and purchased the product at the cash register (remember those?)
As we mentioned above, it’s important to bear in mind that even though something is both sold by and shipped by Amazon, and even though that item gets free shipping as a Prime item, that still doesn’t mean it’s going to ship immediately and show up a few days later.
Ships from Amazon sold by Someone Else, Shipped by Amazon sold by Someone Else, Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) sold by Someone Else
“Ships from Amazon”, “Shipped by Amazon”, and “Fulfilled by Amazon” (also known as “FBA” for “Fulfilled by Amazon) all mean the same thing, which of course contributes to the confusion.
What this means is that the actual vendor or merchant has product that they sell through Amazon, and they send their products to Amazon for storage at an Amazon warehouse, and then when you order it Amazon sends it on to you. The money that you pay to Amazon for that product gets passed back to the originating vendor after Amazon takes their cut of the transaction.
Sold by 3rd Party, Ships from 3rd Party
This is most often the situation where you will be wondering where your order is, and that is most often because you are so used to getting your stuff from Amazon within a couple of days that it just doesn’t occur to you that it could take a week or more. So always be sure to check the delivery time on an item because it may be longer (substantially longer, even) than two days.
Similarly, while some 3rd-party sellers who are doing their own order fulfillment (and thus their own shipping) offer free shipping, in order to compete with Amazon Prime, not all of them do, so it’s important to check before you order so that you don’t get any nasty surprises, such as finding out that your item actually cost you $20 more because of a $20 shipping charge.
The Lesson Here
The key takeaway here is that it’s important to always check both the delivery speed, and the shipping charge, for every item that you order from or through Amazon, because that’s the only way to make sure that your expectations on each are in keeping with the reality.
We hope that this has been helpful in illuminating what all of the various shipped by, shipped from, and sold by Amazon listings mean!
The Internet Patrol is completely free, and reader-supported. Your tips via CashApp, Venmo, or Paypal are appreciated! Receipts will come from ISIPP.
CashApp us
Venmo us
Paypal us
