What is Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment?
Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) is a third-party logistics (3PL) service that enables businesses to leverage Amazon’s fulfillment network and team of experts to pick, pack, ship, and deliver their orders from off-Amazon channels including brand websites, ecommerce marketplaces, and social media stores.
MCF key benefits:
MCF key benefits:
Provides fast, reliable fulfillment with hundreds of world-class facilities in cities and communities around the globe
Supports fulfillment across any off-Amazon ecommerce channel.
Offers developer tools to integrate and automate MCF.
Why should I build and offer an MCF connector integration?
Many merchants today – especially those that sell on multiple sales channels – are connected to MCF via third-party integrations, built by third-party developers like you. By building and offering an MCF connector integration, you can:
Grow your merchant base
MCF will complement your product offering, enabling your merchants to offer their customers the Amazon fulfillment experience for all their off-Amazon sales channels.
Expand your customer reach with Amazon merchants
If you are serving Amazon merchants or hoping to serve them in the future, an MCF connector integration can help you to offer holistic support for them on and off Amazon.
Get access to new MCF features and updates
Whenever we launch a new feature or product update, we make it available to third-party developers through our public-facing APIs. This makes it easier for you to implement these new features as a part of your MCF connector integrations.
Benefit from dedicated business collaboration and support.
In addition to all of the self-service information available to help you build integrations and get tech support, MCF works with a select group of developers to help propel your growth. You can view the list of the developers that we have been working with here.
Getting started
Integrating with MCF APIs
Why integrate with MCF?
Merchants who are planning to use MCF to fulfill orders from their off-Amazon channels can automate their fulfillment process by connecting their ecommerce or order management system (OMS) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) system with MCF using APIs. merchants can either connect directly with MCF or work with a third-party provider, which develops and manages the integration with MCF on the seller’s behalf.
Benefits of connecting with MCF via APIs
Automation of the order fulfillment process, which has an average “click-to-door speed” of 1.9 days – over 50% faster than other retailers.
(Source: NielsenIQ)
(Source: NielsenIQ)
Automatic order creation using available inventory.
Ability to surface delivery estimates to customers
Ability to build AI/ML models to generate inventory plans.
The option to subscribe to notifications and reports to automate business processes.
Pre-requisites to connect via APIs
Seller Central account in the given marketplace (or Multi-Channel Fulfilment account).
A developer profile.
A developer application with required roles to access MCF APIs.
Application/client credentials.
APIs and Common Use Cases
Amazon Multichannel Fulfillment (MCF) is compatible with a comprehensive suite of Selling Partner APIs (SP-API) that enable developers to programmatically manage the entire fulfillment lifecycle — from listing products and sending inventory to Amazon's fulfillment network, to creating outbound orders, tracking shipments, and processing returns. The table below organizes these APIs by domain — Product Listings, Inbound Inventory, Order Fulfillment, Inventory Tracking, Reporting, and Notifications — along with their key use cases and direct links to API guides. Use these APIs to integrate MCF capabilities into your ecommerce platform and automate operations such as creating orders with features specific to MCF (e.g., Block AMZL, Blank Box), retrieving fulfillment previews and delivery estimates, monitoring real-time inventory and order status changes, and generating detailed inventory and settlement reports.
Domain
Description
Key Use cases
API Guide
Product Listings
Create and manage product listings for the SKUs you want to offer through MCF
- Create or update a listing
- Retrieve details about a listing
- Submit a bulk catalog feed
- Retrieve details about a listing
- Submit a bulk catalog feed
Inbound Inventory
Send inventory to Amazon's fulfillment network
- Create an inbound shipment
- Update inbound plans
- Generate transportation and delivery window options
- Update inbound plans
- Generate transportation and delivery window options
Order Fulfillment
Create outbound fulfillment orders for Amazon to pick, pack and ship the order and also manage the orders in terms of tracking and returns.
- Create orders with MCF custom features like Block AMZL
- Get fulfillment previews and shipping speeds before creating orders
- Retrieve tracking information for a package
- Retrieve proof of delivery for delivered package
- Cancel an order
- Create a return for an order
- Get fulfillment previews and shipping speeds before creating orders
- Retrieve tracking information for a package
- Retrieve proof of delivery for delivered package
- Cancel an order
- Create a return for an order
Inventory Tracking
Retrieve inventory snapshots
- Retrieve a point in time snapshot of inventory states
- Retrieve a list of inventory items that are eligible for a specified feature
- Retrieve a list of inventory items that are eligible for a specified feature
Reporting
Get reports for various categories such as order fulfillment reports, settlement reports, Tax reports, Inventory reports, analytic reports, performance and feeback reports etc.
- Get detailed inventory ledger report to analyze your inventory movements to and from Amazon fulfilment centers
- Get report on all the listings that are active and non-active and analyze their buyability and trigger restocking
- Get report on all the listings that are active and non-active and analyze their buyability and trigger restocking
Notifications
Get real time notifications for events and automate your business
- Get a notification when the order/package status changes
- Get a notification when an order is returned
- Get a notification when inventory levels change for an item
- Get a notification when an order is returned
- Get a notification when inventory levels change for an item
Recommended implementation
Recommended implementation highlights key MCF features and capabilities that developers can leverage to enhance their fulfillment workflows. These enhancements include: Virtual Bundling, Blank Box shipping, Block AMZL, Hold Orders, Photo on Delivery, Early Tracking, Signature on Delivery, and more. For each feature, the table provides a brief description and outlines proposed changes. Several of these features already have corresponding SP-API documentation and code examples, which are linked directly for quick reference. Use this section as a roadmap to understand which MCF features are available for integration, how they map to specific API operations, and where to find implementation guidance and best practices.
Feature
Description
API Reference
Countries
Fulfillment Preview
Helps you perform a fulfillability check (or a dry run) before creating an actual MCF order. It also helps in getting estimated fees for the fulfillment categorized by shipping speeds. One notable capability is getting a delivery date estimate for the order so that the merchant can confidently display a delivery estimate to the shopper.
All
Virtual Bundling
Bundle multiple SKUs together as one combination SKU and sell to shoppers on the website. For orders with bundled items, merchants/developers can break them into single SKU line items while placing MCF orders.
All (separate SKUs)
Serial Number Setup
Serial number is a unique barcode number generated by following a regex pattern. The serial number setup allows the seller to keep track of the exact product when shipped to the end shopper. MCF can scan and record the serial numbers both going out and being returned. This also helps to validate the right product when returned by the shopper to MCF or the seller.
All
Blank Box
Blank Box allows sellers to ship MCF orders in packaging with no Amazon logos or labels on it. This is ideal for merchants who want to maintain their own brand identity when fulfilling orders from off Amazon channels like Shopify or other ecommerce platforms. The feature can be enabled as a default in Seller Central or specified per order via the API.
All
Block AMZL
Block AMZL allows sellers to opt out of Amazon Logistics (AMZL) as a carrier and instead have their MCF orders shipped using an alternative carrier service. This is useful for merchants whose sales channels or customers who prefer delivery experiences that are not Amazon branded.
All
Hold Orders
MCF allows merchants to create a fulfillment order in a Hold state, which reserves inventory for up to 14 days without initiating the shipment process. This is especially useful for scenarios like payment verification, fraud and abuse checks, or promise validation before shipping an order.MCF allows merchants to create a fulfillment order in a Hold state, which reserves inventory for up to 14 days without initiating the shipment process. This is especially useful for scenarios like payment verification, fraud and abuse checks, or promise validation before shipping an order.
All
Photo on Delivery
Photo on Delivery is an MCF feature where the delivery driver captures a photo of the package at the point of delivery as proof that the order was successfully delivered to the customer's address. This gives merchants and their end customers visual confirmation of delivery, helping to reduce disputes around missing or undelivered packages. Merchants can retrieve this proof of delivery programmatically via API.
All
Supply Chain Portal Listings
Lets non-FBA sellers create their product listings in Amazon for fulfillment. It reduces many Amazon selling requirements like brand approvals, ASIN matching, and product ID codes etc. making it easier for merchants to create product catalogs for fulfillment on e-commerce channels.
All
For Supply Chain portal listings, it is important to note that the marketplace ID will be different from the standard marketplace ID for that region. For example, Amazon-selling marketplace_id for US is ATVPDKIKX0DER, while the non-Amazon-selling marketplace_id for US is A2ZV50J4W1RKNI.
Code Samples
We offer API Code Recipes which are hand-written, use-case-driven sample code snippets that show developers how to combine multiple SDK calls into real-world workflows. Code Recipes help developers determine the sequence of API operations for their use cases, understand the complete workflow, and copy the relevant parts into their codebase. This can reduce their development effort and time to integrate. These Code Recipes are available in two programing languages of (insert the below link) and Python (insert the below link).
