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Comment by ivank | Hacker News Reader

How risky is it to ship straight from the factory to Amazon? It seems like a supplier could switch to shipping duds/rejects, Amazon would sell them for you, and you'd get a pile of 1-star reviews on your listing. Do FBA businesses do anything to deal with supplier risks?

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What's to stop the factory to cut you out and just sell on Amazon?

That's why many folks use freight forwarders who break out, wrap, label, and send the items to Amazon.

For a quality supplier, it's not in their interest to sell you rubbish. If you make money and are successful, then so are they. Get to know them really well but make sure you get lots of samples. In saying that, some just don't sell quality products, it's up to to filter them. You can also hire people to do Quality Assurance testing at the factory on your orders.

As Vibrelli says, I use an extra step where the freight forwarder quality check every item before sending them to Amazon.

How does that work? Do they open 1 in 10, 1 in 100, etc.? Are products sealed at the factory? Or does the freight forwarder seal them for you?

They open and repack everything. Amazon requires a specific Amazon barcode, you can either pay them to do it for you for 20c an item or pay someone else to do it. I found I could get the item quality checked and barcoded for the same price as Amazon would do it.

Great answer, thanks! So quality check is 100%? And what is the defect rate? What happens when a defective product is found?

I'm curious how this would play out in Chinese manufacturing operations.

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