Amazon
FBA versus FBM: which one your tracking sheet is for
The distinction matters more to your operations than to your customers. An FBA seller and an FBM seller are running genuinely different businesses that happen to share a marketplace.
What changes when Amazon ships it
Under FBA, dispatch timing, tracking validity and delivery performance are Amazon is responsibility, and the corresponding metrics largely stop being your problem. You have inventory problems instead: stranded stock, long-term storage fees, and the reconciliation of what you sent against what they received.
A tracking spreadsheet built around dispatch deadlines has very little to do under FBA. What you need instead is an inventory view.
What changes when you ship it
Under FBM, everything in this article matters. The ship-by date is yours, the tracking number is yours to provide and to get right, and the Valid Tracking Rate is measured against what you upload.
For a dropshipper this is the only available model, because you never hold the stock. That means you inherit the full set of seller-performance obligations with none of the control that normally comes with them.
The dropshipping-specific squeeze
An ordinary FBM seller has the parcel in the building. They control when it goes out and they know the tracking number is real because they generated it.
A dropshipper controls neither. The dispatch timing belongs to a supplier and the tracking number arrives from a third party in a format you have to interpret. Every metric is measured against you and the levers are held by someone else.
The whole discipline of dropshipping operations is compensating for having responsibility without control.
What compensating looks like
- Knowing each supplier is real dispatch time, measured rather than claimed
- Buffer in your handling time that reflects the slowest realistic case, not the best
- Verifying that uploaded tracking numbers actually scan
- Catching a supplier is silence early enough to act rather than to apologise
None of that is glamorous and all of it is the job.
Mixed models get complicated
Sellers who run both need to be careful that one workflow does not contaminate the other. FBA orders appearing in an FBM dispatch queue create phantom work; FBM orders missing from it create missed deadlines.
Split on the fulfilment channel field at the point the order enters your system, and keep them in separate views. Merging them into one list to be tidy is a false economy - the two demand different actions.
Choosing deliberately
If you are choosing, the operational question is simple: do you want inventory risk or performance risk? FBA converts your problem into capital tied up in stock. FBM converts it into daily execution against deadlines you do not fully control.
Dropshippers do not get the choice, which is worth remembering when comparing your metrics to sellers who do.