Supply Chain Connect

Coordinating inbound shipments to Amazon’s fulfillment centers has always been one of the more frustrating parts of selling on FBA. You create a shipping plan, Amazon assigns destination warehouses (often splitting your shipment across multiple facilities), and you’re left trying to coordinate carrier pickups, delivery appointments, and tracking updates through a patchwork of tools. Supply Chain Connect is Amazon’s answer to that coordination problem.

What Supply Chain Connect Does

Supply Chain Connect is a feature within Amazon Seller Central that gives sellers and their logistics partners visibility into the inbound transportation process. It connects the shipping plan you create in Seller Central with the actual carrier movements, allowing Amazon to track your shipments from pickup through delivery and check-in at the fulfillment center.

The tool provides shipment tracking data, appointment scheduling for delivery at Amazon facilities, estimated arrival times, and status updates as your freight moves through the network. Think of it as a dashboard that sits between your shipping plan and the receiving dock at Amazon’s warehouse.

How It Fits Into the Inbound Flow

Before Supply Chain Connect, the inbound process looked like this: create a shipping plan, print labels, hand boxes to a carrier, and then wait. You’d check the “Shipping Queue” in Seller Central for status updates, but the information was often delayed by days. If a shipment got stuck in “Checked In” status for two weeks without units appearing in your available inventory, you’d have no visibility into why.

With Supply Chain Connect, the flow becomes more transparent. When you create an inbound shipping plan and opt into Amazon’s partnered carrier program (or provide your own carrier’s PRO number or tracking ID), the system tracks movement milestones: pickup confirmation, in-transit updates, arrival at the facility, and receiving progress. For partnered carrier shipments (where Amazon arranges the trucking through their discounted rates with carriers like UPS or various LTL providers), the integration is tighter because Amazon controls both ends of the data flow.

Appointment Scheduling

For truckload and LTL shipments going to Amazon fulfillment centers, delivery appointments are mandatory. You can’t just show up at the dock. Supply Chain Connect is where these appointments get requested and confirmed. The system shows available delivery windows, and you or your carrier select a slot. Missing an appointment, arriving outside the window, or showing up with freight that doesn’t match the shipping plan results in rejections or rescheduling, both of which cost money in carrier detention fees and delayed inventory availability.

During peak season (roughly August through December), appointment slots at popular fulfillment centers fill up fast. Sellers who plan inbound shipments early and book appointments weeks in advance avoid the crunch. Sellers who wait until October to ship Q4 inventory often find appointment availability pushed out by seven to fourteen days, which can mean missing the sales window entirely.

Limitations

Supply Chain Connect improves visibility, but it doesn’t solve every inbound problem. The tool can’t prevent Amazon from splitting your shipping plan across four different fulfillment centers (that’s controlled by Amazon’s inventory placement algorithm and your Inventory Placement Service settings). It doesn’t speed up receiving, either. Amazon’s fulfillment centers prioritize receiving based on their own operational needs, and a backlog at the facility can still leave your inventory in “Receiving” status for one to three weeks.

The tracking data is also only as good as what the carrier provides. If you’re using a non-partnered carrier that doesn’t share EDI data with Amazon’s systems, the tracking milestones may not update in real time. You’ll see the shipment marked as “Delivered” only after the fulfillment center scans it in, which could be days after the truck actually arrived.

Working With a 3PL

Most 3PL prep centers manage Supply Chain Connect on behalf of their clients. They create the shipping plans, book the carrier appointments, provide the tracking data to Amazon’s system, and monitor the receiving status across dozens or hundreds of concurrent inbound shipments. For sellers sending inventory from a prep center, this means the logistics coordination happens without you logging into Seller Central to manage every shipment milestone. Your 3PL flags exceptions (rejected deliveries, delayed receiving, mismatched unit counts) and resolves them before they become inventory availability problems.