How do Amazon Fulfillment Network (AFN) orders work with the order connection?

Important: For AFN orders you will need a separate order connection in Channable. If you do not have a separate order connection for AFN orders, we will not retrieve AFN orders from Amazon and will therefore also not send them to your webshop backend.

What is AFN?

When you advertise on Amazon and receive an order from a consumer, there are two ways in which the order can be fulfilled:

1

MFN

This stands for Merchant Fulfillment Network. With this option the retailer — you — ships the order to the consumer.

2

AFN

This stands for Amazon Fulfillment Network. Here, you store some of your items (or part of the items' stock) at Amazon and whenever a product is ordered, Amazon handles the delivery.

AFN/MFN order handling

When a consumer orders a product on Amazon, the order will be created in your Amazon seller account. Channable then acts as a middleman, retrieves the order from Amazon, and sends the order to your webshop platform (Magento, Lightspeed, WooCommerce, etc.). In addition, the quantity that is ordered is subtracted from the stock in your system to make sure that the stock of your items is up to date. For MFN orders, this approach works seamlessly.

For AFN orders there is no need for the stock to be subtracted as the retailer is not the one doing the shipping. When Channable gets the orders from your Amazon seller account, the order shows if the fulfillment is AFN or MFN: in the AFN orders we append -AFN to the channel id, whereas MFN orders do not have such an appendix. Moreover, an MFN order will have a different status than an AFN order: MFN orders will have the status "open" whereas AFN orders will have the status "shipped".