Amazon’s Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) program can streamline your eCommerce logistics, but not without hidden costs and bottlenecks. One of the biggest pain points for sellers is inbound placement fees and long check-in delays. If you’ve ever paid $2 per unit in “placement fees,” shipped to five different FCs for one ASIN, or watched sellable inventory sit for three weeks in a parking lot, you know how painful FBA inbounds can be.

At MyFBAPrep, we’ve engineered a logistics solution that eliminates these fees while cutting average Amazon check-in times to 24 hours.

Here’s how we do it, and how your business can benefit.

What Are Amazon Inbound Placement Fees?

When sellers send inventory to Amazon, the platform often splits shipments across multiple fulfillment centers. This is designed to optimize inventory availability and reduce shipping time to customers, but it creates added costs and complexity for sellers. These extra charges, known as inbound placement fees, can significantly eat into margins, especially for high-volume or multi-SKU sellers.

You can technically avoid these fees by manually splitting your shipments yourself. But without the right infrastructure, this adds operational headaches and potential errors. That’s where a 3PL like MyFBAPrep comes in.

The Problem: Broken Inbounds, Broken Margins

Placement fees aren’t the only issue. Once your goods arrive at an Amazon fulfillment center, there’s often a significant lag before they’re actually checked in and available for sale. During peak times, that check-in process can stretch from several days to even weeks. With their popularity, it’s no surprise that Amazon’s FBA inbound system can get overloaded.

These delays can:

• Cause stockouts and missed sales windows
• Impact Buy Box eligibility and caused suppressed listings
• Reduce your overall sales velocity and cash flow
• Disrupt advertising and promotions

All of this translates into lost revenue and frustrated customers. When you have delays on your FBA inbounds, you’re spending more, selling less, and waiting longer.

Amazon Inbound Risks and Costs

From mandatory split shipments to quietly padded placement fees, Amazon’s FBA inbound system is designed to force sellers to absorb costs while Amazon keeps the margin.

Standard Amazon Inbound	What It’s Really Costing You
Split shipments	3–5 destinations per PO = inflated freight + operational chaos
Placement fees	$0.30–$3.00 per unit—ongoing tax on your scale
Check-in delays	2–4 weeks or more—Amazon slows you down but doesn’t pay the price
Dock congestion	Missed appointments, redelivery fees, delayed sell-through
No control	You’re at the mercy of Amazon’s algorithms

What’s Causing the Bottlenecks?

• Placement fees: Amazon splits your inventory across 3–5 FCs (fulfillment centers), inflating freight costs and adding 3–7 days of transit time.
• Dock congestion: Your carrier arrives but waits 10+ hours to unload or gets turned away entirely.
• Inventory check-in delays: Even after delivery, it can take 2–4 weeks (or longer during Q4) for inventory to appear as sellable.
• Decimated trucking lanes: Especially into major DCs like ONT8, FTW1, CLT2, and SMF3, carrier capacity is tapped out or overpriced.
  

At MyFBAPrep, we built a system that gives you control, speed, and profit margin back. Now, our partners are skipping placement fees, skipping split shipments, and checking in FBA inventory within 24–48 hours.

Tip: We’re offering a free first shipment to prove it. Contact us and ask about it!

How MyFBAPrep Solves the Problem

At MyFBAPrep, we’ve developed a nationwide warehouse network and fulfillment infrastructure purpose-built for high-volume Amazon sellers. Our approach to eliminating placement fees and reducing check-in times includes:

• Pre-sorting inventory at strategically located nodes to match Amazon’s FC demand
• Splitting and labeling shipments according to Amazon’s requirements
• Shipping directly to the appropriate Amazon fulfillment centers, bypassing centralized receiving hubs

By doing the heavy lifting before inventory reaches Amazon, we eliminate the need for Amazon to re-distribute items across its own network, which removes placement fees and speeds up receiving.

• Free first trial shipment
• Zero placement fees
• Same-day or next-day check-in times
• Full freight routing + dock appointment control

You ship once. We handle the rest.

How MyFBAPrep Manages Fast Inbounds

This isn’t a seasonal workaround or a clever trick.

It’s infrastructure—built to scale and designed to perform.

1. We eliminate split shipments.

You send your inventory to one MyFBAPrep hub. We consolidate, route, and inject directly into Amazon’s highest-priority FCs.

2. We control the trucking lanes into Amazon.

We’re one of Amazon’s largest inbound freight partners, operating full truckload injections daily into major fulfillment centers across the U.S.

3. We get live unloads at the docks.

Thanks to priority appointment access, our trucks skip the line. That means your inventory checks in within 24 hours—not 24 days.

4. We eliminate cash flow dead zones.

When your product goes sellable in 2 days, not 3 weeks, everything compounds:

• Faster ad ROI
• Better BSR
• Quicker cash recirculation
• More inventory turns

Real Results: ROI in 48 Hours

Even in lanes where our freight may cost slightly more, brands are switching to us because our customers regularly see:

• FBA check-in times of 24–48 hours (vs. 5–7+ days)
• Savings up to $3 per unit on placement fees
• Efficiency shipping to one location, not five
• Smoother launches and replenishments
• Higher sell-through rates, improving BSR and cash conversion

We believe FBA prep should accelerate your growth, not add friction. That’s why we’ve built an operation that gives sellers more control, less complexity, and a better customer experience.

This Isn’t a Q4 Play. It’s a Permanent Edge.

Most sellers treat Q4 like a crisis. We treat it like proof that our system works year-round, at scale.

This isn’t a temporary fix or one-time promo. It’s a repeatable, durable advantage for brands that want to take control of their Amazon ops.

If you’re:

• An enterprise brand selling on Amazon
• Working with an agency or prep provider
• Tired of paying Amazon’s placement fees
• Losing sales from check-in delays

…reach out to us to start your free trial shipment now.