Amazon-specific

FBA vs FBM

Definition

Two ways to fulfill Amazon orders. With Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), you send inventory to Amazon's fulfillment centers and Amazon picks, packs, ships, and handles customer service and returns for per-unit fees. With Fulfilled by Merchant (FBM), you store inventory and ship orders yourself or through your own 3PL. Seller Fulfilled Prime is an FBM program that adds the Prime badge to self-fulfilled offers.

Defined in FBA vs FBM in 2026: Fees, Prime, the Buy Box and a Worked Cost Comparison.

Where FBA vs FBM comes up

The guides that put this term to work, rather than just defining it.

Related terms

Featured Offer: The offer Amazon shows with Add to Cart and Buy Now buttons in the Offer Display near the top of a product detail page. Amazon selects it by evaluating all offers for the product, may rotate between the best offers when none is clearly ahead, and shows other offers in the "Other sellers on Amazon" box and the all-offers page. Sellers have long called it the Buy Box; Amazon's help pages call it the Featured Offer.
Share in SQP: At each funnel stage, your share is your brand or ASIN count divided by the query's total count for that stage. Ten purchases out of 100 marketplace purchases on that query is a 10% purchase share.
1P vs 3P on Amazon: 1P (Vendor Central) means Amazon Retail buys from you and resells to the shopper. 3P (Seller Central) means you sell directly to the shopper on Amazon's marketplace and pay Amazon fees for the privilege.
Browse node: A single category or sub-category position in Amazon's browse tree — the hierarchical structure shoppers navigate through department and category pages. Each ASIN is assigned to one or more browse nodes, which determines where it surfaces when a shopper browses (as opposed to searches) and which category-level filters and comparison sets apply to it.
Rufus test: A practical check, named before Amazon renamed the assistant, where a seller asks Alexa for Shopping the exact questions a shopper would about their listing, to see whether the assistant can answer accurately from the current product data.
Corroboration layer: The body of buyer-generated content — reviews and answered Q&A — that an AI assistant uses to verify, qualify, or contradict the claims a seller makes in listing copy. Strong corroboration produces confident recommendations; weak or contradicting corroboration produces hedged answers or exclusion.

All 164 terms

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