Background
Amazon.co.uk is the leading online retailer of products that inform, educate, entertain and inspire. Amazon.co.uk has its origins in an independent online store, Bookpages, which was established in 1996 and acquired by Amazon.com in early 1998. Amazon.co.uk is famous for selling books but also sells millions of other products such as electrical equipment, homeware, audio/visual products, toys and so on. The company partly operates by recruiting independent sellers to sell new and used items on its website. SW Group Logistics, having had a great deal of experience in the toy industry by virtue of its long relationship with several national and international toy brands, identified this business opportunity and set up a company, SW Commodities, to sell toys on-line via Amazon.

The Process
This initiative required SW to identify and source toys which it thought would sell well in the UK market. It did this via attendance at International Toy Fairs and establishing relationships with key toy manufacturers such as John Crane, Berchet, Crayola and so on. Over 150 lines, some of which were high value items, were stored in SWs warehouse, in a caged off area surveilled by CCTV. SW established itself as an independent Amazon supplier, setting up its products on the Amazon website. Orders came to SW via e-mail. These were then picked/packed and weighed to determine the most cost effective method of delivery I.e. Royal Mail (recorded delivery) or parcel carriers. Throughout the year, SW would send out between 15 to 25 orders per day and in the run up to Christmas these volumes would rise to 50-60 orders per day. (SW also operates a pick/pack operation for several other leading toy manufacturers and volumes can rise up to 250 parcels per day.) SW also developed and executed a process for returns management in conjunction with Amazon.

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