FBA, Easy Ship or Self Ship? Choosing Your Amazon India Fulfilment

I have seen the same seller be right about this twice, with two different answers, eighteen months apart.

When he started, Self Ship made complete sense. He had eight orders a day and a courier office two streets away. Two years later, doing a few hundred a day with three staff, FBA on his top sellers freed up his entire afternoon.

Neither decision was wrong. That is the honest framing here: all three options genuinely work, and the best one is the one that fits where your business is right now.

The three options in one line each

Self Ship. You store, you pack, you arrange your own courier. Maximum control, maximum work.

Easy Ship. You store and pack, Amazon collects from your location and handles delivery. Middle ground.

FBA (Fulfilment by Amazon). You send stock to an Amazon fulfilment centre in advance. Amazon stores, picks, packs and ships every order. Minimum daily work, maximum upfront commitment.

Self Ship: complete control

This one shines when you are starting out or selling something unusual.

What is genuinely great

• You choose your courier, so you can negotiate your own rates
• No Amazon fulfilment fees on top
• Full control over packaging and presentation
• Works for oversized, fragile or restricted items that other channels struggle with
• Zero upfront stock commitment

The trade-offs

• You handle every courier relationship, manifest and dispute
• Delivery speed depends entirely on your courier
• Delivery promise is usually less competitive, which affects conversion
• It is genuinely a daily time commitment

Self Ship suits sellers with low volume, an existing courier relationship, or products that do not fit standard channels.

Easy Ship: the practical middle

For a lot of Indian sellers this is the sweet spot, and it is where most people spend the longest.

What is genuinely great

• Amazon's delivery network without sending stock away
• Pickup comes to you, so no daily trips to a courier office
• Stock stays in your godown, so no storage fees and no inbound shipment planning
• Better delivery promise than most self-arranged courier setups
• You can start tomorrow, with no stock forecast required

The trade-offs

• You still pack every order, every day
• Weight handling fees apply, based on chargeable weight and zone
• You must be ready at pickup time, which shapes your daily schedule

Your daily job here is picking, packing and printing labels. That is exactly where the Amazon Label Cropper helps: it crops Easy Ship labels to true 4 x 6 inch for thermal rolls, or four per A4 sheet, and drops the invoice pages you do not want to print.

FBA: buying back your afternoons

FBA is hard to beat when your volume is steady and your products turn over reliably.

What is genuinely great

• Amazon picks, packs and ships. Your daily dispatch work drops to zero for those SKUs.
• Prime eligibility and the delivery speed that comes with it, which genuinely affects conversion
• Customer service and returns handled by Amazon for those orders
• Your time moves from packing to sourcing and listing, which is where growth actually comes from

The trade-offs

• Storage fees accumulate, and they increase for stock that sits too long
• You must forecast demand and send stock in advance
• Stock at a fulfilment centre is not available to sell on other channels
• Inbound shipments need correct labelling and packing to be accepted
• Slow movers can quietly cost you money while sitting there

This is the key insight about FBA: it rewards stock that turns. A bestseller in FBA is excellent. A seasonal item that sits for five months is an expensive mistake.

Side by side

The question that actually decides it

Forget the feature lists for a moment. Ask yourself this:

How many hours a week do you spend packing, and what would you do with those hours instead?

If the answer is "I would source two new products and shoot their photos", FBA on your top sellers may pay for itself in growth rather than in cost savings.

If the answer is "I would not do anything differently", stay on Easy Ship and keep the fees.

That is a genuinely different calculation from comparing fee percentages, and in my experience it is the one that predicts who is happy with their choice a year later.

Run the numbers before you switch

Whatever you are leaning towards, model it per SKU rather than for your whole business.

1. Work out your chargeable weight for the SKU. The Volumetric Weight Calculator shows whether you are billed on actual or volumetric weight, which changes fulfilment costs on every option.
2. Get the current fee figures from Seller Central for your category and the fulfilment option you are considering. These are published and they do get revised.
3. Put both scenarios into the Seller Profit Calculator, changing only the fulfilment costs.
4. Compare expected profit after returns, not best-case profit.

One factor that is easy to forget: FBA returns are handled differently from self-managed returns, which affects both your return rate and your cost per return. Model that separately rather than assuming it carries over.

The hybrid that most growing sellers land on

Here is what I see working most often, and it is worth considering before you commit either way.

Top three to five bestsellers in FBA. These turn quickly, so storage cost stays low and you get Prime speed on the products that drive most of your revenue.

Everything else on Easy Ship. The long tail, seasonal items and new products you are still testing stay in your own godown where they cost nothing to hold.

You get most of the time saving without putting slow stock into a fee-bearing warehouse. It also means you keep a working packing operation, which matters if you ever need to pull stock back.

My honest recommendation

If you are starting out, use Easy Ship. It gives you Amazon's delivery network without a stock commitment, and it lets you learn what actually sells before you forecast anything.

Once a product has sold steadily for three months and you can predict its demand within reason, that is the moment to test it in FBA. Send a small quantity first, not a quarter's worth.

And keep Self Ship in your pocket for anything oversized, fragile or unusual. It is not a lesser option, it is the right tool for products the standard channels are not built for.

You genuinely cannot go wrong with any of these. Just match the option to the product and to how much of your day you want back.