What is Merchant Fulfilled Network (MFN) on Amazon and how does it work?

First impressions matter. As customers browse through Amazon global marketplaces, you want to make sure your offers stand out. Ensure your listings have high quality images to make your business seem professional. Keep up to speed and adjust based on customer's experience with your products and offer free shipping to delight customers and avoid your product being abandoned at checkout.

The Voice of the Customer dashboard is a hub where you can use feedback from customers to optimize your products and listings. From this dashboard, you can review the Customer Experience (CX) Health of your offers, read customer comments, identify product and listing issues, and act to resolve problems. CX Health is a metric that helps you understand how each of your offers is performing relative to similar offers, based on your recent orders and customer feedback about your products. You can access the dashboard under the Performance section in the Seller Central menu or click here.

Offering fast delivery promises can increase your chance to become the featured offer on Amazon’s product detail pages and may increase customer interest. You can manage your total delivery time by adjusting the handling time and transit time of your new and existing products. This allows you to display an accurate delivery time that matches your capabilities and those of your carrier(s). You can set your handling time in two ways:
1) Set an account level default handling time;
2) Set product level handling times for specific products.

Most accounts have a default 2-day handling time, but you can adjust it to 1-day to reduce your delivery promise in Shipping Settings.

Amazon uses the handling time and estimated shipping time that you set to provide customers with the estimated total delivery time. When sellers set longer transit times for standard delivery, customers see longer delivery promises and are less likely to purchase. Displaying fast and accurate delivery promises helps ensure a good customer experience and may improve sales. You can use the following tools to set shorter and more accurate delivery times:

i) Shipping Settings Automation (SSA):
SSA uses your carriers of choice to automatically calculate the transit time from the ZIP code of your warehouse(s) to the customer’s ZIP code. With this transit time management tool, your delivery promise to customers will likely be closer to the carrier’s actual transit time, compared to manual estimations. You can enable SSA for any Shipping template using the SSA toggle button in the Shipping Settings. Learn more about Shipping Settings automation here.

ii) Enable weekends and holidays as operating days:
If you process and ship orders during weekend days or holidays, you can switch them on to display faster promises on your self-fulfilled offers. When you enable Saturdays, Sundays, or both, as operating days, these are considered in your expected ship date and in the delivery promise displayed to customers. You can update the operating days in the Shipping Settings.

Getting customers to buy your product is just the first half of the job, delighting them with a seamless delivery experience is just as important. Amazon can help you choose the right delivery partners to ship your products to customers. Once the package is out of the door, providing customers with a tracking code will allow them to track and stay updated with delivery timelines. Tracking numbers allow customers to find out where their orders are and when they can expect to receive them. Providing a valid tracking ID for your orders can help you reduce buyer contacts and lost shipments. Adding tracking information on your self-fulfilled orders can also help improve your valid tracking rate.

Building a business or a brand that customers can trust is important for long-term success. Sometimes customers can a wrong choice or pick a wrong size. Helping them with easy refund process can be a reason for them to try your product. Here’s are a few tools you can use to optimize post-order returns and refunds:

• Enroll in prepaid returns to reduce your manual processing time. By enrolling, Amazon will automatically authorize all domestic returns that fall within Amazon’s returns policy, and will provide customers with prepaid return shipping labels on your behalf. You can request exemptions from prepaid returns for certain products in your inventory and then handle return requests for those products by manual authorization instead. Sellers can self-serve enroll in the Prepaid Returns Label program through the Manage Seller Fulfilled Returns tool. Sellers who are not part of the Prepaid Return Label program will see messaging that states, “Get access to faster returns by taking advantage of the Prepaid Returns Label program. Learn more.” To register, click here.

• Return less Refunds is an optional feature that can help you save costs and reduce customer contacts. By enrolling, you can automatically issue customers a full refund without the requirement of returning the item they purchased. This will happen only when the criteria that you define is met. We recommend this feature for cases in which it makes economic sense to refund a customer without taking back the product. For example, if the cost of return shipping exceeds the item value or if the item is hard to resell after return. Get started by clicking on the button below, going to the Returnless Refunds tab, and clicking on “Add a New Rule”, or filling out and uploading the “Return Attribute Overrides” template to enroll specific products in your inventory. Go to Returns Settings to add a new rule.