Introduction
From January 2026, Amazon will no longer offer FBA prep and labeling services in the US. At first glance, that might not seem seismic since roughly 20-25% of sellers were using Amazon’s prep services anyway. Most already had their workflows in place, either in-house or through the fast-growing ecosystem of FBA prep centers and 3PLs. The announcement, however, accentuates the role that specialized 3PLs and FBA prep centers now increasingly play in the Amazon ecosystem. Sellers will lean on them even more to handle labeling and packaging, and to ensure compliance, accuracy, and speed at scale.
For 3PLs and FBA prep centers, this is yet another trigger moment, and an opportunity. The work you’re doing has never been more important, but it also means you can’t continue operating with scattered spreadsheets, manual trackers, and patchwork tools. Sellers will expect more reliability, more visibility, and faster turnaround, and meeting those expectations will require the right systems to support the work.
How the End of FBA Prep Impacts Core Operations
With Amazon discontinuing its in-house prep, the responsibility shifts entirely to sellers and the 3PL partners they work with. FBA Prep is a structured process where accuracy, compliance, and cost optimization all intersect. For FBA prep centers and 3PLs, it means owning every aspect of the workflow and executing it at scale across multiple sellers.
Labeling
Every unit and carton needs to carry the right FNSKU and barcode. A mislabel can trigger delays at receiving, additional fees, or even shipments being refused outright.
Prep and Packaging
Amazon’s instructions vary by ASIN type. Fragile glassware requires bubble wrap and corner guards, apparel needs polybags, liquids must be sealed properly. Getting this right consistently is critical, because mistakes often show up only when the shipment has already reached the fulfillment center.
Bundling and Kitting
Multi-packs and sets need to be assembled and tracked as distinct SKUs ensuring packaging meets Amazon’s standards while aligning with how the seller wants the brand presented.
Compliance
This is one of the trickiest parts of FBA prep. It spans brand registry rules, hazmat checks to determine eligibility, expiry date capture for food and supplements, and even small details like country-of-origin markings or suffocation warnings. Missing any of these can create costly disruptions.
Placement and Packing Options
Amazon requires inbound shipments to specify packing groups, placement service options, and fulfillment center splits upfront. These choices directly affect cost and speed, and choosing poorly can mean higher fees or slower inventory movement.
Transportation
The last step is shipping the prepped goods. Selecting the right carrier whether partnered or non-partnered and mode of transport whether SPD or LTL requires balancing cost, reliability, and Amazon’s strict delivery expectations.
Individually, each of these tasks can be managed. But when a FBA prep center is handling them for hundreds of sellers, each with a large number of SKUs and different requirements, the complexity multiplies quickly. That’s the reality of FBA prep which is a chain of interdependent steps that all need to work together smoothly if inventory is going to hit Amazon’s dock on time and in full compliance.
The Growing Demand for Specialized FBA Prep Partners
Amazon FBA prep is a specialized handling and fulfillment skill. A handful of very large sellers have built that muscle internally, setting up their own fulfillment operations with dedicated FBA processes. But the majority of Amazon sellers don’t want to spend their energy on labeling cartons, tracking expiry dates, or dealing with hazmat compliance. Instead, they rely on specialized FBA prep centers or 3PLs that have the capability baked into their workflows.
That reliance is only going to deepen with Amazon stepping back. For sellers, outsourcing FBA prep work will enable them to stay focused on product development, marketing, and sales, while their partners take care of the intricate and often unforgiving requirements from Amazon. The number of FBA prep centers has grown rapidly over the years. There are now estimated to be more than 300 in the U.S. alone, and over 500 globally. The scale of this network underscores how central FBA prep has become in the Amazon ecosystem, and how much sellers depend on it.
Even among established e-commerce 3PLs, the ability to handle Amazon FBA prep well is not a given. Many large e-commerce first 3PLs excel at DTC fulfillment for Shopify or other platforms, but stumble when it comes to the precision Amazon requires around ASIN-level prep, placement, and compliance. That gap is why FBA prep centers and 3PLs with strong FBA capabilities are increasingly sought after, and in some cases even acquired by others looking to strengthen their Amazon fulfillment play.
How FBA Prep Centers Operate Today
The way FBA prep centers and 3PLs manage Amazon workflows varies widely depending on their size and maturity. At the smaller end, many still rely almost entirely on spreadsheets. They track inbound and outbound shipments line by line, cross-reference ASINs against Amazon’s requirements, and toggle between multiple Seller Central accounts to keep things aligned. This model can work when you’re handling fewer than ten sellers and moving under a hundred units a month. Beyond that, it quickly becomes unsustainable.
A step above are operators who’ve stitched together internal workflows with no-code tools like Airtable, Zapier, and Google Sheets, sometimes even tying into Seller Central via APIs. This setup can support thirty or forty sellers with some degree of automation. But staff still spend hours switching between accounts to make placement decisions, generate labels, or update shipment data. Visibility for sellers is limited, and communication often defaults to scattered emails. It’s not uncommon for a prep center to discover an inbound delivery only when it arrives at the dock.
At the larger end, some 3PLs lean on traditional warehouse management systems (WMS) or inventory management systems (IMS). These tools are solid for core storage and order fulfillment, but they weren’t built for Amazon’s inbound requirements. At best, operators can force-fit parts of FBA prep into their WMS, but they still end up logging into Seller Central to finalize instructions, select placement options, or validate compliance. Even the best-known WMS platforms don’t cover these workflows end-to-end.
The Limitations of Current Approaches
Each of these models works up to a point. Spreadsheets break as soon as scale increases. They lack version control, create errors, and collapse under the weight of multiple sellers. No-code stacks offer temporary relief, but they introduce friction. Constant account switching, patchy visibility, and fragmented communication slow things down and create opportunities for mistakes. Sellers don’t get real-time insight into their inventory, and prep centers often react to shipments instead of planning for them.
WMS and IMS platforms solve a different problem. They handle warehouse operations well, but Amazon FBA prep requires a very different set of workflows: ASIN-level rules, labeling, compliance checks, placement decisions, and transportation choices. Trying to force those into a generic WMS only creates inefficiencies and still leaves operators tethered to Seller Central.
The result is the same across the board: these approaches may carry a FBA prep center to a certain scale, but they fall short of what’s required to manage thousands of ASINs and Sellers reliably, with full compliance, and without wasted effort.
Why FBA Prep Software is Essential
Amazon FBA prep involves running a detailed, rule-driven inbound process at scale, across thousands of sellers at Scale. Prep centers and 3PLs need to manage labeling, compliance checks, eligibility validation, and the selection of placement and transportation options, all from within a single platform. Most importantly, they need to do it without logging into individual Seller Central accounts or juggling half a dozen disconnected tools.
The current alternatives simply don’t hold up under pressure. Spreadsheets collapse as soon as volume goes beyond a handful of sellers. No-code stacks add some automation, but they still require constant context switching and patchwork integrations. Even large-scale WMS and IMS platforms that do a great job at storage and order fulfillment, aren’t designed for Amazon’s FBA workflows.
And then there’s communication. When shipments are coordinated through emails, WhatsApp threads, or phone calls, too much is left to chance. Sellers don’t have clean visibility into what’s happening with their inventory inside the warehouse. Prep centers often find out about an incoming inventory only after it has arrived. That lack of coordination translates into inefficiency, lost time, and frustrated clients.
This is why specialized prep software has become essential and a competitive advantage for 3PLs. Software purpose-built for FBA prep gives operators the ability to scale, to deliver consistency across multiple sellers, and to meet Amazon’s compliance standards without drowning in manual work.
What Prep Center Software Should Actually Do
At its core, FBA prep center software should let operators run the entire Amazon inbound process for multiple sellers from one place, without needing to jump in and out of Seller Central. That means managing the workflow end-to-end with accuracy, compliance, and scale in mind.
The essentials include:
- Onboard multiple clients easily and connect their Seller Central accounts without friction.
- Receive inbound inventory with all the right details upfront, including expiry dates, lot numbers, and compliance flags.
- Create FBA shipments directly from the system, without logging into Seller Central.
- Run ASIN-level eligibility checks to catch hazmat restrictions, storage limits, or category-specific requirements early.
- Generate compliant labels: FNSKU, carton, pallet in alignment with Amazon’s specifications.
- Apply ASIN-level prep rules automatically, so fragile, liquid, apparel, or regulated items are always handled correctly.
- Manage kitting and bundling workflows seamlessly, with tracking for sets and multipacks.
- Choose Amazon-suggested packing groups and placement options directly in the system, optimizing for cost and speed.
- Select transportation options intelligently, balancing cost and delivery commitments.
- Offer rate shopping when sellers don’t want to use Amazon’s partnered carriers, whether that means connecting their own carrier accounts, tapping into aggregator accounts, or leveraging partner rates.
- Handle Amazon removal orders, not just inbound shipments, to give sellers a full-cycle service.
- Support other channels like Shopify, eBay, or Walmart, so multi-channel sellers can run everything from one platform instead of juggling separate tools.
In short, FBA prep software should replace the patchwork of spreadsheets, emails, and manual decisions with a single system that’s built specifically for Amazon inbound workflows while also being flexible enough to support multi-channel fulfillment.
Hopstack Ignite
We built Hopstack Ignite out of firsthand experience supporting over 3,000 sellers and more than 100 3PLs, who together have shipped 20+ million units into Amazon FBA across the U.S. and Canada. The workflows inside Ignite are shaped by real-world problems solved at scale across multiple geographies and seller profiles.
Ignite is a multi-channel e-commerce fulfillment platform, which means you can manage Amazon FBA alongside Shopify, and soon Walmart, eBay, and TikTok, all within the same system. This will enable the 3PLs and FBA Prep centers to onboard clients faster, give them visibility across every channel, and manage their inbound and outbound workflows without needing separate tools.
Ignite also brings flexibility in choosing cost and speed of shipping. Beyond Amazon’s partnered carriers, Ignite supports multi-carrier rate shopping by tapping into Hopstack’s shipping partner network to access preferred rates. In short, Ignite is purpose-built for the modern FBA prep center and 3PL: multi-channel, compliant, and scalable, with the operational depth of a fulfillment platform but the simplicity needed to keep day-to-day execution clean and fast.
👉 Start your free 30-day trial of Hopstack Ignite
Final Thoughts
Amazon discontinuing its FBA prep services in 2026 is a clear signal of where the responsibility now lies. Sellers will increasingly look outward for 3PL partners who can manage the complexity of FBA prep while they stay focused on product and growth. The question for you as a 3PL operator is whether you can handle FBA Prep at scale, across multiple sellers and channels, with the accuracy and compliance Amazon demands. The operators who adapt quickly, streamline their workflows, and invest in the right systems will be the ones to win seller trust and capture the rising demand.
