The Fulfilment by Amazon page walks you through a four-step Guided setup. Each step marks itself done as you complete it, so you can leave and come back without losing your place. This article covers each step and explains the settings that are easy to get wrong.
If you have not yet read what Fulfilment by Amazon does, start there. It is worth understanding the feature before you grant it permissions.
The app asks Shopify for the additional permissions this feature needs: reading your orders, creating fulfilments, managing locations, and writing inventory. Shopify shows its standard consent screen listing exactly what is requested, and you approve or decline.
These permissions are requested here, at this moment, and only for this feature. The base app does not hold them, and you do not grant them at install.
This step does two things in Shopify on your behalf. It registers a fulfilment service, which is Shopify's mechanism for letting an outside party fulfil orders, and it creates a location named exactly "Fulfilled by Amazon (MCF)".
That location is the heart of the feature. It is how a product opts in to Amazon fulfilment: stock a product there and its orders go to Amazon. Nothing else opts a product in. See Choosing what Amazon fulfils.
Leave the location name as it is. The app matches on it.
This is the settings step, and the one that repays a careful read.
A multi-select. Choose which of your connected Amazon marketplaces are allowed to fulfil Shopify orders. Each order is routed to the best marketplace for the customer's destination, preferring the same country and then the same region, and the app checks with Amazon that the order can be fulfilled before it sends it. Select every marketplace you genuinely hold FBA stock in and are happy to ship from.
Two choices. Amazon-branded (standard) means the parcel arrives in Amazon packaging, with Amazon tape and Amazon branding. It is the default and it always works. Non-branded / blank box (if eligible) means plain, unbranded packaging, which is usually what you want when the customer bought from your own storefront and has no idea Amazon is involved.
Blank box needs eligibility on your Amazon account
The blank box option is not simply a toggle in this app. Amazon has to have granted blank box eligibility on your seller account. If your account is not eligible, selecting it here will not make Amazon ship plain boxes. Check your eligibility in Seller Central before you rely on unbranded packaging.
How Amazon should ship each order. Four options.
Match the order's shipping method looks at what the customer paid for at your Shopify checkout and asks Amazon for a comparable speed. This is the sensible default for most stores, because it keeps the promise you made at checkout.
Always Standard, Always Expedited and Always Priority override that and ship everything at the speed you name, whatever the customer selected. Faster speeds cost more per order from Amazon, so Always Priority on a store selling low value items can quietly erode your margin.
Default ON, and we recommend leaving it on.
When it is on, the app pushes Amazon's FBA fulfillable quantity into the "Fulfilled by Amazon (MCF)" location. The stock number Shopify shows for an MCF product is then the number Amazon can actually ship right now.
The point is oversell protection. If Amazon has 3 units left and Shopify thinks it has 40, you will sell 40, and 37 customers will be disappointed. With this on, Shopify's own inventory rules stop the sale when Amazon runs out.
This is specific to MCF and the MCF location. It is not the same thing as Inventory Sync, a separate paid feature governing your Amazon listings.
Default OFF. When it is off and Amazon cannot fulfil an order, the order is left alone for you to handle in your normal workflow, and it is flagged so you can see what happened.
When you switch it on, you choose which of your own Shopify locations the app may reassign to. From then on, if Amazon cannot fulfil an order, the app moves that order's fulfilment to one of those locations instead and the order shows as Reassigned to you. It is then yours to pick, pack and ship, like any other order.
Turn it on if you keep backup stock of your own and would rather ship late than not at all. Leave it off if your MCF products are only ever held at Amazon, since reassigning an order to a location that has none of the item helps nobody.
The switch that makes it live. From this point, new orders for products stocked at the "Fulfilled by Amazon (MCF)" location are routed to Amazon. Orders placed before you turned it on are not retrospectively pulled in.
Go live with one product
Stock a single, low risk product at the MCF location and place a real test order. Watch it move through Sent to Amazon and Processing to Shipped with tracking. It is far cheaper to learn the flow on one order than on a hundred.
"Permissions were declined. They're needed to manage Amazon fulfilment and tracking." You declined on Shopify's consent screen, or closed it. The feature cannot work without these permissions. Run step 1 again and approve.
Not all permissions granted. Shopify granted some of what was asked for but not all, which usually follows a partial or interrupted approval. Settings lists the granted scopes under the Automation tab and warns when any are missing. You may also see "Missing: {scopes}. Reopen the app to re-authorize." Reopen the app from your Shopify admin and complete step 1.
"No connected Amazon marketplaces found. Connect an Amazon account first." No Amazon account is connected, or the connected account has no authorised marketplaces. Go to Settings > Amazon account, connect or reconnect, then come back. See Amazon accounts and regions.