When the freight costs more than the planter: rebuilding oversize fulfillment

Twelve of the brand's thirty-one products are large, light and awkward — raised beds, tall planters, trellis systems. Amazon prices fulfillment by dimension as much as by weight, so those twelve were being charged like heavy freight while selling at garden-center prices. After fees, several of the best-selling products were contributing almost nothing, and two were losing money on every unit.

Storage made it worse. Bulky seasonal stock sat in fulfillment centers through the winter accumulating long-term storage charges on cubic feet, so the brand was paying rent on inventory that could not sell until spring. The team knew the oversize items were unprofitable and had no way to separate them from the small ones, because everything went into the same fulfillment pipeline by default.

We stopped fulfilling two very different products the same way.

• A catalog split by cubic dimension — small and mid-size items stayed in FBA, where its economics genuinely win.
• Seller-fulfilled freight for the twelve oversize SKUs, shipped from the brand's own warehouse through a carrier contract negotiated on actual pallet volumes.
• Prime retained where it matters by qualifying the oversize SKUs for seller-fulfilled Prime on a regional footprint, so the badge survived the move.
• Winter stock pulled out of Amazon's network entirely and held at the brand's own warehouse, which charges no cubic-foot rent.

Contribution margin went from 6% to 22% and the cost of fulfilling an oversize order fell 45%.

The move also freed the brand to grow: with the big items no longer capped by fee economics, advertising could be pointed at them profitably, and revenue rose 27% without a corresponding rise in spend. Pulling seasonal stock out of Amazon's network before winter removed almost all of the long-term storage charges — $7.4k a quarter down to $0.4k — which on this catalog is roughly a month's contribution from the whole oversize line.