Operator glossary
Direct Fulfillment (vendor dropship)
Vendor Central's dropship mode: Amazon sells it, you ship it from your own warehouse — 1P economics without Amazon holding the inventory.
Under Direct Fulfillment, Amazon lists and retails the product but orders route to your warehouse for fulfillment to the end customer, under strict SLA (fast handling windows, Amazon-provided labels, inventory feeds keeping availability honest). It keeps slow-turning, oversized, or long-tail items retail-available without Amazon warehousing them.
It is also the standard parking lot for CRaP-flagged items whose warehouse economics broke. The operational bar is real — missed handling SLAs and inventory-feed inaccuracy carry defect consequences — so treat it as running a mini-3PL to Amazon's clock.
The numbers
- Amazon retails, vendor ships to the end customer; availability driven by your inventory feeds.
- Strict handling SLAs with Amazon-generated labels; common home for oversized, long-tail, and CRaP-recovered items.
Related terms