Plenty of Australian sellers now run Amazon with stock sitting in two places: a working buffer at a third-party warehouse, and only as much inside Amazon as the fulfilment centres will take.
It is not a workaround. It is a response to how FBA actually behaves, and it changes what you need from a 3PL.
Why sellers stop sending everything to Amazon
Three pressures push in the same direction.
Storage limits move. Your inbound allowance is not fixed. It responds to sales velocity and to how much space Amazon has, and it can tighten with little warning. A container that cleared customs against last month's limit can arrive against this month's.
Q4 is when it bites. Storage costs rise, inbound allowances tighten, and the queue for receiving gets longer at exactly the point where being out of stock costs the most. Sellers who plan for this in October are already late.
Long-term storage fees. Units held beyond a year attract additional charges, so anything slow-moving is better held somewhere it is billed by the pallet.
There is also a quieter one: running thin on stock inside Amazon affects how your listing performs, so sellers try to stay topped up rather than sending everything at once and hoping.
What changed in September 2025
This is the part that catches people out, and it decides how the transport leg works.
Amazon Australia stopped accepting self-delivered small parcel shipments from 1 September 2025. In Amazon's own words, all small parcel shipments must now go through third-party carriers, Amazon SEND, or the Partnered Carrier programme, and self-delivered shipments arriving at a fulfilment centre are rejected.
The practical effect: nobody drives cartons to the FC any more, not you and not your 3PL. Every carton moves on a booked carrier service with a shipment plan behind it.
That is worth understanding before you compare providers, because it changes what "delivery into the FC" actually means on a quote. It is a carrier charge per carton, plus whatever the warehouse charges to pick, label and hand it over. A provider quoting you a flat per-delivery fee is quoting you their handling, not the freight.
Who does which leg
In the buffer model the work splits roughly like this:
Your supplier or forwarder brings the container in and delivers to the warehouse. Customs clearance and duty sit with you or your broker.
The warehouse receives it, breaks down pallets, counts against what was supposed to arrive, and tells you if it does not match. Then it holds the stock, and on your instruction picks cartons, applies shipment labels and hands them to the carrier.
You create the shipment plan in Seller Central, which is what generates the labels and the carrier booking in the first place. This stays with the seller in most arrangements, because the plan is tied to your account and your inbound allowance.
Ask any provider you are comparing which of those legs they take on, and specifically whether they create shipment plans or work from ones you supply. Both are normal. Assuming the wrong one is where the first month goes wrong.
Where small drops get expensive
Feeding FBA in small batches is the whole point of the buffer, and it is also where the cost sits.
Australian carriers charge on whichever is greater: actual weight, or cubic weight at 250 kilograms per cubic metre. A carton measuring 59 by 53 by 32 centimetres is 0.1 cubic metres, which is 25 kilograms of cubic weight. If it actually weighs 15, you are billed on 25.
Most retail cartons cube out like this. It means your freight cost is set by carton size rather than product weight, and it means dropping five cartons a week costs meaningfully more than dropping twenty a month. That is a real trade-off against holding less inside Amazon, not a reason to avoid the model, but it should be a decision rather than a surprise.
Two questions worth asking a provider directly:
- Is a minimum charged per drop or per week? Six drops a month against a weekly minimum is a very different number from six against a per-drop one.
- Is storage billed on pallets received or pallets occupied? A consignment that feeds out over three months should cost less in month three than month one, and only one of those two answers gives you that.
What the buffer itself costs
The warehouse side breaks into familiar lines, at published Australian market ranges:
- Receiving, roughly A$14 to A$50 per inbound pallet, charged once when the consignment lands
- Storage, roughly A$3 to A$7 per pallet per week, which is about A$13 to A$30 per pallet per month
- Handling, per carton picked and labelled for each drop
- Freight, the carrier charge per carton, on cubic weight
For a consignment feeding out over two to three months, storage and freight dominate, and the two of them pull against each other. Holding stock longer costs storage. Sending it in smaller, more frequent drops costs freight. Where you land depends on your inbound allowance and how fast the product sells, which is why a rate card built on your real drop pattern is worth more than a cheaper one built on an assumed one.
Those figures are published market ranges compiled from Australian provider guides and pricing pages, not Parcelo's rates. Our pricing page explains how each line is built, and the calculator will run your own volumes against them. If the buffer itself is what you need, ecommerce storage is the part of this we handle.
If you are running FBA in Australia and Q4 is on your mind, the time to work out where your stock sits is before the container leaves, not after Amazon caps your inbound.