On January 1, 2026, Amazon stopped offering FBA prep and item labeling services in the US. Every unit now arrives ready or doesn’t arrive at all. Here’s what’s actually different, what you have to do about it, and what it costs.
What Amazon ended on January 1, 2026
Amazon announced the change on July 28, 2025. After a five-month transition window, the cutoff hit on January 1, 2026. From that day forward, Amazon no longer offers any FBA prep or item labeling services in the United States.
Specifically, here is what Amazon stopped doing on your behalf:
- Applying FNSKU barcode labels.
- Poly-bagging units.
- Bubble-wrapping fragile items.
- Attaching safety labels, including suffocation warnings.
- Bundling multiple units into one sellable set.
- Any form of compliance prep for hazmat, sharp objects, or fragile categories.
This applies to every inbound channel: direct FBA shipments, Amazon Warehousing & Distribution (AWD), Amazon Global Logistics (AGL), Amazon SEND, and the Supply Chain Portal. There is no path through Amazon’s own logistics network that includes prep anymore.
Shipments created before January 1, 2026 still received Amazon’s prep, even if they physically arrived later. The cutoff was about when a shipment was created in Seller Central, not when it landed at the warehouse. That grace period is over now.
FBA prep requirements now
The requirements themselves did not change. What changed is who has to meet them. Before January 1, you could pay Amazon to fix a non-compliant unit; now, a non-compliant unit gets rejected, returned, or charged a fee.
FNSKU labels
Each unit needs a machine-readable FNSKU label in the right position, usually the lower-right corner of the front face. The label must cover any existing manufacturer barcode. Resellers in particular still need FNSKUs even after the March 2026 commingling rule update.
Poly-bagging and protective packaging
Apparel, textiles, and soft goods need poly-bags with the standard suffocation warning printed on bags 5×5 inches and larger. Fragile items need bubble wrap. Liquid containers over 4 oz need leak-proof seals.
Bundles and sets
Multi-unit bundles must arrive bundled. Amazon will not assemble them. The outer packaging needs a “Sold as a set” or “Do not separate” label so the warehouse staff knows not to break it apart.
Category-specific prep
Hazmat, baby products with small parts, glass, expiration-dated goods, and a handful of other categories have their own rules. The exact list lives in Seller Central under Packaging and Prep Requirements. The penalty for getting any of these wrong is now higher than before, because there is no Amazon-side correction available.
Who handles your FBA prep after the shutdown
Three paths are open. None of them are inherently better than the others — the right one depends on your volume, your team, your warehouse space, and how much risk you want to carry.
1. In-house prep
You do it yourself. Best for sellers with consistent volume, dedicated warehouse space, and at least one person who can be trained on Amazon’s compliance details. Cheapest per unit at scale, but it has real fixed costs: storage, equipment, labor, time spent on compliance updates when Amazon changes a rule.
2. Supplier prep
Your manufacturer or supplier preps before they ship to Amazon. This is the cheapest option on paper. The catch is quality control. If your supplier is in Asia and a prep mistake only surfaces when a container lands at an Amazon fulfillment center, the cost of fixing it is much higher than what you saved.
3. Third-party prep service (3PL or specialized prep center)
You ship inventory to a prep partner in the US. They receive, prep, label, and forward to Amazon. Pricing is per unit, typically $0.30 to $0.80 depending on complexity, with separate fees for receiving, storage, and shipping.
This is the most common path for sellers in the 100–10,000 units-per-month range. You give up some control and a margin of cost, but you gain compliance expertise and you don’t need to build the operation yourself.
The new inbound defect fee
Starting January 15, 2026, Amazon introduced a new fee that catches what its prep service used to fix. The inbound defect fee is $0.60 per unit that arrives at a fulfillment center with a prep or labeling problem.
What counts as a defect:
- Missing or unreadable FNSKU label.
- Missing required poly-bag, bubble wrap, or safety label.
- Bundle that should have been bundled but arrived as loose units.
- Hazmat unit without proper hazmat prep.
- Expired or near-expired goods without the required expiration label.
The fee is per unit, not per shipment. A pallet of 500 mislabeled units costs $300 in defect fees on top of the regular FBA fees. For a small business with thin margins, that wipes out the profit on the whole shipment.
Combine the $0.60 defect fee with the 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge added April 17, 2026, and the 2026 baseline FBA fee increase of $0.08 per unit. The cost of getting prep wrong has gone up significantly compared to 2025, when Amazon would just charge a small per-unit fee to fix it.
How much FBA prep actually costs in 2026
Costs split into three categories: what the prep itself costs, what shipping to Amazon costs, and what mistakes cost.
Prep itself
Industry pricing for third-party FBA prep ranges from $0.30 to $0.85 per unit for standard FNSKU labeling. Bundles and kits cost $1.00 to $3.00 depending on complexity. Bubble wrap and poly-bagging add $0.30 to $0.75 per unit depending on size.
Volume discounts kick in around 1,000 units per month for most prep centers, and more aggressive discounts come at 5,000+. Below 100 units a month, you usually pay a flat receiving fee that makes per-unit prep look more expensive than it is.
Shipping to Amazon
This is a pass-through cost at carrier rates. UPS, FedEx, USPS, or LTL for pallets. Good prep centers don’t mark up shipping — they pass through the actual carrier rate. If a quote includes “shipping fees” without breaking out the carrier rate, that’s a margin you’re paying for.
The cost of mistakes
Beyond the $0.60 defect fee, mistakes have second-order costs: shipments held for re-prep, stockouts during the delay, lost Buy Box, lost organic rank during the gap. For a fast-moving SKU, a one-week stockout from a prep error can cost more than a year of prep fees.
What to look for in an FBA prep partner
The market has hundreds of prep providers now, and the floor has gotten much higher since January. Five things actually matter when you’re evaluating one:
Transparent pricing
Per-unit cost should be on the website. If you have to fill out a form to get a quote on basic FNSKU labeling, the provider is probably anchoring to volume. That’s fine for enterprise clients, but for a seller doing 500 to 3,000 units a month, transparent pricing is the cleaner relationship.
24 to 48 hour turnaround
From the moment inventory is received to the moment it leaves for Amazon, 24–48 hours is the industry standard. Anything slower than 72 hours is a problem during peak season. Anything claiming to be faster than 24 hours is either using automation at scale or under-promising on quality.
Photo documentation
Photos of every inbound shipment, every prepped unit batch, every outbound carton. Time-stamped. Available on request. This is your evidence if Amazon claims a unit was prepped incorrectly, if a supplier denies they shipped damaged goods, or if a carrier loses a pallet.
Both Amazon and Walmart
If you sell on Walmart WFS or plan to, a prep partner that handles both saves you from managing two separate workflows. The WFS process has different rules (Pedricktown NJ fulfillment center, different label specs), but a good prep center treats it as a first-class service, not an afterthought.
Real people answering the phone
When something breaks — and at some point something will break — you want to talk to a person who knows your account, not a chatbot or a help desk that opens a ticket and routes it. The prep providers that scale into massive operations lose this. The smaller ones keep it.
What this means for East Coast sellers
The shutdown hit different parts of the country differently. East Coast sellers have a specific advantage and a specific exposure.
The advantage: Florida and Georgia prep centers are within one or two days of every major East Coast Amazon fulfillment center. That includes Pedricktown NJ for Walmart WFS, the busiest WFS facility in the country. Sellers who import through Port of Miami or Port Everglades can route inventory through a Florida prep center with one short truck leg and no cross-country freight.
The exposure: many East Coast sellers spent 2025 routing through Amazon’s own logistics network, including AWD and SEND. Both of those programs lost their prep services on January 1. If you were relying on AWD to handle your prep before warehouses received your inventory, your supply chain changed overnight without a fallback. The fix is the same as for anyone else — pick a third-party prep partner — but the urgency was higher on the East Coast because the AWD-dependent share was larger.
If you’re an East Coast or Florida-based seller, your sweet spot is a prep center within driving distance: close enough to visit, near the ports if you import, and connected to both Amazon FBA and Walmart WFS without treating either one as the side gig.
Looking for a prep partner in Florida?
South Way Prep handles Amazon FBA and Walmart WFS prep from a 4,200 sq ft warehouse in Pompano Beach. Transparent per-unit pricing, 24–48 hour turnaround, real humans on the phone.