Amazon MCF Setup Guide

Amazon's Multi-Channel Fulfillment service allows merchants to use their Amazon FBA inventory to fulfill orders from other marketplaces like Shopify and Walmart. Pipe17 uses the new Amazon Selling Partner APIs to provide a robust, reliable integration for fulfilling your orders.

In this article

• Recommendations
• Basic setup
• European Marketplace Setup
• Additional settings

Recommendations

• You should already be signed up to a Pipe17 plan or trial so that you can add a new sales channel to your account. If you're not certain, reach out to our sales team to ensure you are ready to begin setup.
• It is helpful to log in to the correct Amazon Seller Central account in advance of beginning the Pipe17 setup, especially if you have access to multiple accounts.
• Have the marketplace IDs of the locations you want in Pipe17. By default only the Amazon US location is created, other marketplace IDs can be found in Amazon's documentation here.

Basic setup

To set up the Amazon MCF integration, follow these steps:

1. Add the Amazon MCF integration in your Pipe17 portal.
   a) If you are new to Pipe17, log in to your new Pipe17 account and add the Amazon MCF integration from the "Fulfillment Partner" page of the setup wizard.
   b) Otherwise, log into Pipe17, navigate to the Integrations page in your Pipe17 portal and click "Add integration". Find the Amazon MCF integration here.
   

   Do not confuse the MCF integration with the Seller Central integration. The Seller Central integration is for pulling Amazon orders into Pipe17, not fulfilling them. For fulfilling your Shopify orders, you need to add the Amazon MCF connector.

2. If you have access to multiple Seller Central accounts, make sure you are logged into the correct one. Click the "Connect" button, and if prompted, log into the Amazon Seller Central account you want to connect.
3. A Seller Central window will open in your browser, prompting you to Authorize Pipe17. Click "Confirm" to give Pipe17 the requested Amazon Seller Central Account permissions.
   
4. In Pipe17, click on the "Settings" tab of the Amazon MCF Integration and turn on the following settings:
   
   • Pull Locations from Amazon
   • Pull Fulfillment Information From Amazon
   • Pull Inventory Information From Amazon
5. By default, Pipe17 only creates locations for Amazon US. If you want locations beyond those for the US, enter marketplaces IDs into the "Marketplaces" text entry box, separated by commas and without spaces. You can find a list of IDs here.
   
6. Open your selling channel application and create a test order to flow into Pipe17. Pick a product for which you have inventory at Amazon, and make sure to enter a valid shipping address.
   

   If you have existing fulfillment integrations to other 3PLs, ensure the order is not sent to them, otherwise you are at risk of double fulfilling an order.

7. In Pipe17, navigate to the Inventory > Locations page. You should have some new locations created by the MCF integration, such as Amazon.com (MCF).
   
8. Open the integration settings again and enable the setting "Push Shipping Requests to Amazon". This will allow Pipe17 to send your orders to Amazon MCF.
9. In the field for "Process only shipping requests for orders with specific order IDs", paste the ID of the test order you created in step 6. This will ensure that only that order is sent to Amazon. Save your changes.
   
10. Navigate to Orders in Pipe17. You should see the order you created in step 5. Use the "New Shipping Request" button to send it to one of the Amazon MCF locations (make sure you pick one that has inventory for the items in the order). When you save the shipping request, the order page should now have a shipping request at the bottom of the page with a status of "Ready for Fulfillment". 
11. While you wait for Amazon to acknowledge the order, navigate to Organizations > Order Routing and configure your Order Routing rules with the Destinations and Locations that you want Pipe17 to use. See the Order Routing guide for more details.
12. Open Amazon Seller Central and wait for the order to appear. If it does not appear within a few minutes, check whether the shipping request in Pipe17 says "Failed" and/or whether there are any exceptions on the order.
13. Once the order does appear, cancel it right away if you do not want it to ship. However, it may be good to allow it to ship so that you can validate that we will send the fulfillment information (like the tracking number) back to your selling platform when it does ship.
14. Remove the text from the field for "Process only shipping requests for orders with specific order IDs" (step 9) so that all orders routed to MCF will be sent to them.
15. You are now fulfilling orders via Amazon!

European Marketplace Setup

The Amazon authentication process is different for connections to marketplaces outside of the Americas. And it's required that you install a separate copy of the MCF integration for each marketplace outside of the Americas. Here's the recommended steps.

Additional settings

The Amazon MCF integration has other optional settings you may want to use:

• Create blank box inventory location: will create a location that shows the subset of US inventory that can be shipped in a blank box. If you turn on this setting, you'll need to merge/map your selling channel locations to the resulting blank box location to avoid over reporting your available inventory. See our guide on Location Merging to enable this capability.
• SKU Mapping: within the Shipping Request section you can instruct our integration to map (change) the SKUs from A to B when sending an order to Amazon MCF. We will expect to receive that SKU for each line item that gets fulfilled. So in the example below, an order line item with SKU B7 is sent to MCF as CANB7 and the fulfillment for CANB7 is assumed to be a fulfillment for B7.
• Filter Orders: You can also filter the orders we create at MCF by entering IDs into the Process only shipping requests text box. Separate each order with a comma.
• Block Amazon Logistics: If you do not want your deliveries to use Amazon Logistics (e.g. an Amazon logo'd truck), turn this on. This may result in higher shipping charges from Amazon.
• Push shipping requests in held state will cause all MCF fulfillment orders to be held for manual release in Seller Central.

The Standard/Expedited/Priority/Other shipping method-related settings are covered in our MCF Shipping Method Mapping guide.

(1) Cancel Pipe17 shipping requests will cancel Pipe17 shipping requests and put an exception on the order when MCF changes their order status to Cancelled, Invalid, or Unfulfillable.

(2) Process only inventory items with specific SKUs will cause Pipe17 to limit the inventory data it pulls from Amazon MCF to only be the updates for those products.

(3) Incrementals will enable real-time inventory sync with Amazon, and it should be enabled only if you have fewer than 500 products in your catalog. If you enable it for a larger product catalog, you will see issue with inventory sync delays. 

(4) Force inventory resync tells Pipe17 to pull the last inventory data from MCF. Normally we only get inventory from MCF once every evening (unless the Incrementals setting is enabled)