Fulfillment by Amazon suspends non-essential inbound shipments | Hacker News Reader

Fulfillment by Amazon suspends non-essential inbound shipments

businessinsider.com

200 pointsmyth_drannon65 comments

TL;DNR: Through April 5th, they're preventing marketplace vendors from shipping new inventory to Amazon's fulfillment centers that aren't household staples, medical supplies, or otherwise high-demand products. Marketplace vendors that do their own warehousing and customer shipments are unaffected. This may affect the available selection, inventory, and shipment options seen at Amazon, but no restrictions were placed on customer purchases.

The following notice was sent to my Amazon Marketplace account:

Hello from Fulfillment by Amazon,

We are closely monitoring the developments of COVID-19 and its impact on our customers, selling partners, and employees.

We are seeing increased online shopping, and as a result some products such as household staples and medical supplies are out of stock. With this in mind, we are temporarily prioritizing household staples, medical supplies, and other high-demand products coming into our fulfillment centers so that we can more quickly receive, restock, and deliver these products to customers.

For products other than these, we have temporarily disabled shipment creation. We are taking a similar approach with retail vendors.

This will be in effect today through April 5, 2020, and we will let you know once we resume regular operations. Shipments created before today will be received at fulfillment centers.

You can learn more about this on this Help page. Please note that Selling Partner Support does not have further guidance.

We understand this is a change to your business, and we did not take this decision lightly. We are working around the clock to increase capacity and yesterday announced that we are opening 100,000 new full- and part-time positions in our fulfillment centers across the US.

We appreciate your understanding as we prioritize the above products for our customers.

Thank you for your patience, and for participating in FBA.

The Fulfillment by Amazon team

The title may be slightly confusing. They aren't suspending shipments to customers, they are suspending shipments to Amazon from vendors (Fulfillment by Amazon vendors, who ship to Amazon and then Amazon handles everything from there).

The suspension covers non-essential supplies as mentioned in the title.

Surprised, but not surprised, that Business Insider would run an ambiguous, panicky headline in a time like this. Imagine if web journalism wasn't funded by clicks and precision of headline/reporting was the metric that mattered.

Imagine if people were willing to pay for journalism that prioritized accuracy over sensationalism.

Which one disappeared first? An audience willing to pay for quality journalism or quality journalism? I suspect quality journalism declined first, and it declined to the point where it made customers skeptical of journalism in general. That then shrunk the audience, and it circled back around again in a continuing cycle.

High-quality and low-quality journalism have always existed, regardless of business model.

The difference is, when told to put their money where their mouths are, people on the internet like to pretend that high-quality journalism doesn't still exist so they can keep their wallets closed.

So far, the only journalism I've found worth paying for is Monocle. Had subscriptions to The Economist and The Information for awhile before canceling them.

What would be nice is a pay per article approach. I find Monocle quality enough for an annual subscription, and sometimes The Economist is worth getting for a weekly here and there.

Also, another thing keeping me from having many subscriptions to different rags is how much information is free online (even things like the HN comments section have a wealth of information).

To summarize your post:

"I should pay to support quality journalism, but since there's stuff free online, I won't, and it will die."

The fact that it's a positive feedback cycle doesn't mean you're not partially responsible for making it worse by not paying for news, even if it didn't necessarily start with you. Sometimes you have to pay for it even if it isn't perfect, if you want any hope of making it better.

I am consistently impressed by the rationales people develop for not being willing to pay for the product they say they want.

Yeah, sure, the fact that many journalists are consistently choosing to publish blatant lies, propaganda and click-bait garbage are all the fault of their readers, the Internet or maybe "capitalism". But not the journalists themselves.

Only on HN (or, I suppose, The_Donald) -- comment claiming that "many journalists are consistently choosing to publish blatant lies, propaganda and click-bait garbage" (about headline that is 100% accurate) sits high. My comment disagreeing is flagged.

Sad!

to some extent it's probably a vicious cycle: previously paying eyeballs get drawn away to sensationalism (innately more interesting) over time, journalism funding goes down, less resources to put out journalism, more efforts at sensationalism to get a cut of the eyeballs, to where we are now.

OTOH FT/economist haven't shut down as far as i'm aware. not sure they're bastions of accuracy (or journalism) but pay to play may work for high quality content.

Their headline, which was probably too long for HN, is entirely accurate.

It would be useful if people stopped blaming the media without verifying first.

Sure, their headline is accurate, but the way it is written creates ambiguity by relegating the factual turn to the end. Headlines are often skimmed and propagated. Unless every viewer reads the headline in full and every aggregator replicates it exactly, the headline may be misleading.

Journalists aim for clarity in communication, an ethos that is infringed on increasingly more as web-only publications live or die off clicks.

I agree that we shouldn't "blame the media", but we can blame Business Insider for playing with ambiguity in this headline's structure.

So not only are we not expecting people to read the articles, we have to also expect them not to read to the end of the headline?

If the average reader doesn't even have the reading comprehension and attention span to read to the end of the headline, I don't think any amount of baby fooding of information is going to make any difference.

How would you word it? Other than medical supplies to its warehouses suspending all shipments Amazon is amid coronavirus crisis?

This is absurdly demanding. The headline is clear. The article is clear. But because someone can draw the wrong conclusion you blame the media? Give me a break.

And I'll take All The Downvotes -- this current trend of blaming media for everything is absolute horseshit. Yesterday I watched everyone claim the media caused the run on masks and hand sanitizer...by reporting on the shortage after the fact. And the run on grocery stores...by reporting on the runs after the fact.

People love blaming the messenger. People love believing that correlation=causation.

The media reports that the DJIA dropped = clearly the media made it drop (and not the enormous number of indicators pointing to bad times ahead).

And it would be harmless -- if incredibly stupid -- but in this spirit of blaming the media for everything there exists a vacuum in which actual liars and exploiters fill the void. See: The Trump administration. MAGA. Absolute vile human beings like Limbaugh. This is what "Hurr the media isn't saying what I want in exactly the way I want" creates.

It seems like that will fairly quickly lead to suspended shipments to customers if Amazon doesn't have the inventory.

Changed above. Thanks!

The Reuters version of this news is on page 2 right now with a clearer HN title: "Amazon stops receiving non-essential products from sellers amid COVID19 outbreak" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22605116

Kind of hard to know what exactly is an “essential” item.

Last week the condensate pump for my furnace stopped working. A condensing furnace produces about a gallon of water an hour while it’s running.

I rigged up a storage bin to catch the water and would dump it out manually a few times a day. The size of the bin is limited because the furnace drain is only a few inches off the ground.

Keeping my house heated basically depends on that condensate pump. I ordered one on March 12 and it was delivered March 14.

There’s probably a very long tail of strange things which are actually relatively crucial components that people depend on being able to order (rather than having spare parts on hand).

The dangers of overcentralization of shopping. The country in which I presently live went into lockdown a couple of weeks ago, but I have still been able to order all kinds of stuff and have it delivered to my home: some furniture, some books, vinyl records, a new vacuum cleaner. That is because none of the disparate online shops here to which one turns are overburdened. Amazon’s decision to be the one-stop-shop for everyone and sell food as well, now makes it unable to provide the rest of its inventory.

Well, on the other hand, it seems like because Amazon is so centralized, they had a lot of capacity which they can now re-purpose. Previously they were shipping both non-essential stuff (books, vinyl records, etc) and essential (food, medicines), and now all those resources can go into essential things.

If the vinyl record shops had a completely separate fulfillment system, there would be no easy way to repurpose it to ship essential items, so we would be in a worse position.

They can also do this without worrying about profit in the short term. The essentials may have lower margins but higher benefit to society. Amazon can take that financial hit over the next couple months and not go bankrupt

Or they may have higher margins. Hand sanitizer isn't exactly expensive.

In an unencumbered free market system where shipping systems were not dominated by any one particular shopping vendor (not Amazon, not vinyl record companies, nobody), what would naturally happen would be a sharp increase in shipping costs in accordance with demand (incentivizing shipping companies to increase supply), followed quickly by a corresponding decrease in demand for shipping items the market deems non-essential (e.g. I'm less inclined to order vinyl records online if shipping costs go up, but if I can't get hand sanitizer anywhere _but_ online I'll probably still order it).

> In an unencumbered free market system

This is not a real thing. Stop bringing it up as if it’s a meaningful concept.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Are you saying an unencumbered free market system is impossible, or just that it's not what our current system is right now?

If the latter, I agree; that was sort of the whole point of my comment. Amazon controls a large portion of the shipping market, therefore what we have here is closer to a monopsony than an unencumbered free market.

If the former, I mostly disagree. Obviously a perfectly idealized free market system is impossible in the real world: all idealized systems are. There's no such thing as a frictionless surface or a perfect sphere either. That doesn't mean however that we couldn't be a lot closer to that ideal than where we are now, or that idealized systems aren't useful tools for modeling the behavior of similar, non-idealized systems in the real world.

While an unencumbered free market can exist it's not a stable equilibrium. Without strong external forces keeping it in that state a free market will quickly centralize power and enact artificial market barriers.

From the rules: Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. And: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive

Exactly.

>In an unencumbered free market system where shipping systems were not dominated by any one particular shopping vendor

isn't it a natural feature of unencumbered free market to become with time dominated by a one or a very few large players? It is basically a symmetry breaking process.

So we should charge people more for hand sanitizer, thereby meaning the poor get less of it?

Increased cost disincentivizes hoarding and incentivizes everyone to conserve, meaning there's more to go around.

If there are people who literally can't afford to buy hand sanitizer then that's a problem which needs to be dealt with separately, through non-market means. Artificially keeping cost low for everyone without increasing supply isn't the solution; all that does is create a situation where hand santisier is sold out everywhere and no one can get any. It also reduces the incentive for companies that manufacture hand sanitizer to increase their supply, and reduces the amount of capital they have available to increase production in the first place.

"Literally can't afford" is a very murky line though. What if they can afford it but only if they forgo some other necessity? Does that solve the problem perhaps?

My office, which sent everybody home, also got hand sanitizer for every conference room. The same conference rooms that nobody is using. It's a colossal waste. And I work for a FAANG. It would have been good if they had had to pay an inflated price for hand sanitizer and has therefore reconsidered and not contributed to the shortage.

"The dangers of overcentralization of shopping"

Another perspective: An advantage of supply chain efficiency to get life sustaining goods to people during a global health crisis.

Amazon is an extremely distributed company.

Just because it's one company doesn't mean it's centralized.

That's because all your normal shippings are way worse than Amazon's experience.

Otherwise, the situation is physically impossible.

Yeah, the same is happening with internet infrastructure and basically any other service. Because of the centralized nature of these things, everyone is now overloading the few at the top.

Maybe this will equalize when people start using alternatives because the big ones can't keep up?

Bear in mind that "essential" in these contexts is a very fluid definition, and is likely to be highly dependent on the popularity and connectedness of the sellers/partners.

For example, Elon Musk managed to convince Alameda County that manufacturing luxury vehicles is an "essential" service subject to exemption from their industrial shutdown order.

On the topic of hiring 100k workers, how is amazon planning to safely manage such a large increase in a physically-present workforce when all the current suggestions are to prevent large gatherings and isolate?

Packaging doesn't strike me as a particularly person-to-person type of thing where you need to touch other people.

I'd imagine gloves, masks, and safety glasses are probably fine.

Touching something someone else just touched after wiping their cough spray off their lips is definitely a risk booster.

24 hrs on cardboard, up to 72 hrs on plastic/stainless steel (smooth surfaces).

in a lab setting. Being able to infect a cell line in a lab is rather different from being able to infect a person. German public broadcaster NDR has a good podcast with an actual virologist, the transcript (in German, deepl.com should do the trick) is at https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/14-Coronavirus-Update-Vo...

Caveat: that's our best understanding at this time; that study hasn't been reproduced as far as I've seen.

I would take these as minimums, still wipe down outside material with bleach/windex/soap water.

Exactly, yes. Although, does the amount of ammonia in window cleaner actually do anything useful?

It is the degreaser that makes the outside of the virus fall apart.

Who says that these need to be human workers? Robots can help fulfill Amazon orders, and they are not vulnerable to the same viruses as humans.

The article states amazon is trying to hire 100k new employees right now for its warehouses.

Anyone knows if this applies wordwide? Specifically Europe/Spain

Great question. The seller FAQ (marketplace account required) clarifies that this applies to the US and EU marketplaces.

dang, this title should be updated. It's inaccurate to the point of fearmongering (probably not OP's fault, since the article has probably changed the title to a more accurate one, but I'd say this falls under "...unless it is misleading or linkbait" and should have been submitted differently)

Amazon's crisis is an opportunity for other online retailers.

I know I've started searching around on other online retailers like ebay, wallmart, home depot, and boutique retailers for products that were no longer in stock on Amazon.

The announcement from the original source:

https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/help.html?...

Pretty big news and says a lot about the state of the situation if even Amazon can't keep up (yes, with stocking, not shipping, but still).

Clickbait be clickbait.

Can’t we stop this bs panic inducing clickbait in times like this?

Edit: looks like they’ve updated the title

Paywalled. Can't read it.

http://archive.ph/CCOvG

Edit: Amazon is suspending all incoming shipments of non-essentials to their fulfillment centers. You can still order non-essentials that are currently "in stock" and at their fulfillment centers.

This message will get mangled out in the public. Hopefully it won't trigger a run on Amazon and make things worse for the fulfillment centers.

Another source:

https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/3/17/21183310/amazon-coronav...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com