What is Amazon FBA Box Content?
Amazon box content is the requirement to add inventory manifests (or lists) of product skus and quantities to each box in an inbound shipment that has multiple boxes. The box content requirement can be avoided if you send in one box per shipment to the Amazon FBA warehouse.
Why did Amazon make this requirement?
Sometime in 2016 Amazon introduced new box content rules for inbound shipments for any FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) seller. This was a huge win for Amazon and a big change for sellers and 3rd party software makers.
Box content manifests allow Amazon to spend less money on labor sorting through seller’s boxes in shipments looking for individual product skus.
With the required box content manifests, Amazon can quickly identify which skus are in each box and route the sellers products to their holding areas in a warehouse.
This allows the sellers products to become available for sale faster.
Here is a quick video to explain box content from Amazon:
Do I need to worry about box content?
Yes and no.
📦 1 box / 1 🚛 shipment method
If you only send in one box per shipment and keep that box to 50lbs then Amazon doesn’t need box content manifests because all of your inbound product skus are contained in one box.
Therefore it’s easy for Amazon to sort your skus once received to the warehouse.
📦📦 Multiple boxes / 1 🚛 shipment method
In order to save on shipping charges and process numerous items per sitting, you may want to send in multiple boxes in your shipment.
Because your items are spread out amongst all the boxes, Amazon needs to know what boxes contain what product skus.
This is where box content requirements come into play.
How can I satisfy the box content rules for my large shipments?
Luckily there are numerous ways to get your box content requirements done. Both paid and free.
Free resources
Seller Central is always the free option for sellers in completing box content.
Within Seller Central they give you two options to provide your box content information:
Webform or Upload File
If you choose to use their webform then you don’t have to upload anything and will just need to manually type in quantity amounts for each sku for each box.
If you choose to upload a file then you will be prompted to download an Excel sheet to fill out and designate each product sku into a box in the sheet.
AccelerList
Inside of AccelerList’s listing application we offer you a free way to complete your box content requirements. Our box content manager is the most comprehensive and complete system on the market today to finish your box content requirements for your Amazon FBA shipments.
FBABoxContent.com
This is another site I spun up and is free for AccelerList customers to use. It’s a dead simple way to perform box content on large shipments and you can see it in action on the homepage.
Paid Resources
There are several paid resources out there to help with your box content process as well. These paid options are typically not needed unless you are a rather large seller and processing thousands of items each day.
