On the Amazon Accelerate Stage: How Movatik Turned Their FBA Supply Chain Into a Competitive Advantage
This September, Lou Casados, ZonPrep's Head of Sales, took the Partner Connect stage at Amazon Accelerate to share how sellers can turn their FBA supply chain into a competitive advantage. He was joined by Federico D'Ambrosio, COO of Movatik and a ZonPrep customer, exactly one year after the two first met at the same event.
Here's the recording, and the highlights below it.
The anniversary
Lou opened with a show of hands: who deals with the Amazon supply chain, and who thinks there's zero room left to improve it. No hands stayed up for the second question, which set up the reason he'd brought Federico back on stage.
A year earlier, Federico and his team stopped by the ZonPrep booth at Amazon Accelerate 2025. Movatik, an online Amazon retailer carrying more than 5,000 SKUs, was mid-transition from small-parcel shipping to LTL and still working out what their warehouse process should look like. Federico's colleague Peter had found ZonPrep through a LinkedIn post, and the booth happened to be the first one they visited that year.
ZonPrep ran an opportunity analysis on the spot: a six-month snapshot of Movatik's own shipment data, annualized. It surfaced two numbers worth fixing: 16 days average dock-to-receipt at Amazon, and more than $130,000 a year in inbound placement fees.
Why the "cheap" freight wasn't cheap
Federico walked through the trap Movatik was in. An Amazon national warehouse in Homestead sat close to their building, and a full truckload there ran roughly $20 a pallet: about as cheap as freight gets. Splitting inventory optimally across the country, by comparison, looked expensive. So Movatik paid the placement fee instead, about 30 cents a unit, and treated the truck as free.
"I was optimizing for the cost of the pallet." — Federico D'Ambrosio, Movatik
Lou's read: that's the decision nine sellers out of ten make, and it looks right on a shipment-by-shipment spreadsheet. What it hides is the operational tax. Product technically shows as sellable once it checks in at a national cross-dock like Homestead, but it isn't Prime eligible until it reaches the local fulfillment center. Optimizing for the visible fee, instead of the actual path into FBA, is what cost Movatik the 16 days.
Six levers, on stage
Lou and Federico walked the room through the same six levers that show up across ZonPrep's client base, with Movatik's own numbers as the proof.
1. Consistent replenishment. Movatik used to ship inventory out the same day it arrived, just to keep it moving, an expensive habit. Now they stage it: inventory builds up to close to 30 pallets before it goes out as one bigger, cheaper-per-unit shipment.
2. Rate lanes. Locked-in rates only win when freight prices are stable, and they aren't right now. Movatik spot-quotes 24 to 36 hours before they need a truck instead.
"It usually when we're close to the 30 pallets, someone in our team emails ZonPrep: 'Hey guys, can you send me a truck tomorrow at 9am.' And the truck is there. We don't have to chase carriers. We don't have to negotiate rates." — Federico D'Ambrosio, Movatik
3. Consolidation. Movatik's shipments now go in as floor-loaded full truckloads with live unload appointments booked 21 days out.
"The speed on which inventory is received by Amazon, it's for sale, it's Prime eligible. We sell it, we pay our vendors faster, and we do this whole thing again with more inventory. This is the key reason we grew 35% this year." — Federico D'Ambrosio, Movatik
4. Timing. Inventory arrives at Movatik's warehouse every day of the week. The team clears out what it can by Friday and uses the weekend to get the truck moving, so it's first in queue Monday morning and ships to FBA that same week.
5. The split shipment strategy. This is the lever that changed how Movatik buys, not just how they ship. Amazon opens its split options at five boxes per SKU; Movatik was running closer to two and a half. They put a floor of five units per SKU on every purchase, staggered standard and oversized inventory so trucks never mix the two, and used Amazon's pack-later option to avoid having to build identical boxes up front. The 20% of SKUs driving 80% of the revenue now ship fully optimized, every time.
6. POD documentation. Proof of delivery used to mean digging through a folder for a physical bill of lading. Today, Federico's team logs into the ZonPrep portal, downloads the POD, and moves on with the claim.
The results
Lou put all six levers on one slide: dock-to-receipt down from 16 days to 7, placement fees down from $130,000-plus to a rounding error of about $5,800, and 35% year-over-year growth.
He was quick to point out what that growth isn't: Federico isn't the one sending five fully optimized truckloads into Amazon every day himself.
"If I had to ship five fully optimized shipments to Amazon, we're talking at a minimum 150 pallets on the floor anytime. We just don't have that space. So what we do is move 30 pallets at a time. On the good week, 60. We just have to fill one truckload with all the different shipments that we're doing, and it we just keep inventory moving." — Federico D'Ambrosio, Movatik
Lou pushed on the number that looks small on a slide: the per-pallet rate only moved about $5.
"That, as I said at the beginning, I was optimizing just to save a few dollars on the pallet. That's not what we're trying to do here. You're building for all the benefits that you don't see on the rate card. It's the speed and the accuracy that's what will make you grow. You're not optimizing your business to save money. You're optimizing to create value." — Federico D'Ambrosio, Movatik
Build in-house, or partner?
Lou closed with the question he says he gets most often: what should a seller build in-house versus hand to a partner? His answer: if you have the volume to send full truckloads into Amazon weekly, the team to manage it, and someone to chase PODs and handle carton labeling, build it. If that's not you, look for a partner and focus on what you're actually good at.
"Growth doesn't come from trying to do everything yourself. We're all entrepreneurs here. We might be good at marketing or finding the supplier, but you're never going to be the best at every single part. The unlock for us was recognizing when the right partner would benefit our operation. Don't optimize just to save money. You have to optimize to create value for your business." — Federico D'Ambrosio, Movatik
Lou closed out the session with a toast to Movatik's 35% growth, and an invite to booth 102 for anyone who wanted to talk through their own numbers, ask Federico how Movatik runs its operation, or take a shot at winning a free truck.
Want the same opportunity analysis Movatik got at the booth? Request your Amazon FBA opportunity analysis, or read the full Movatik case study for the rest of the story.