Amazon MCF: transforming fulfillment

I led the design of Amazon's Multi-Channel Fulfillment platform (MCF): a solution built to simplify order management, improve logistics efficiency, and help businesses fulfill orders seamlessly across every sales channel.

01 What sellers were after

Drag-and-drop catalogs, real-time inventory, automated fulfillment. A growing seller is ready to take their product to the next level: selling more, and not just on one platform, but on every one of them.

But finding a fulfillment partner that can keep up is a real hurdle to that kind of growth. This is where Amazon's scale changes the math.

Amazon's advantage, by the numbers:

02 Where it broke down

MCF was powerful, but sellers, and their customers, were deeply frustrated. Even in the best moments, friction crept in: confusing language, no clear way to track an order, and tooling that assumed every seller looked the same. Enterprise sellers felt it most.

• Opaque tracking: customers were left guessing where their order was.
• One-size-fits-all flows: built for a single seller type, not enterprise volume.
• Unnecessary friction: simple tasks took more steps than they should have.
• Lost trust: the platform did not match how large sellers actually work.

Brian wasn't an outlier. I went through the support data and talked to more sellers on the same tier, and the numbers said what he said.

03 What we set out to do

We set out to create a user-friendly, feature-rich MCF experience: one that gives sellers real-time visibility, flexible order creation, and tooling that scales from a single order to enterprise volume.

The metrics gave us a target, but not a starting point. For that we went back to the research, and one finding kept resurfacing: sellers were not sitting at desks. They were on warehouse floors, at markets, in transit between the two. That single observation set the direction for everything that followed.

04 Real-time tracking dashboard

All the critical shipment information, tracking and status included, brought together in one place. What follows isn't a set of screenshots, it's the shipment detail page itself, rebuilt in working code: click through live status on a route map, item-level contents, and problems surfaced before they become surprises.

05 The orders hub

Before a shipment can be tracked, it has to be found. Every session starts on the customer orders page, and the original treated that job like a database dump: no way to triage, counts in three formats, orders with no identity beyond a number, language drifting between the nav and the page, and a dense seven-column table with no answer for the sellers who run their business from a phone.

The rebuild changes the page’s job: quiet when everything is on track, loud where a seller needs to act. And because the platform’s strength is mobile, the mobile-first commitment carries through, so triaging orders works just as well from a warehouse floor as from a desk. All five fixes are pinned on the live rebuild below. Hit walkthrough in the demo bar to step through them in place.

~/mcf-orders.html ● live demo ◉ walkthrough expand full size ↗

Customer orders

Fulfilled by Amazon across all your connected channels

New order

Last 30 days Columns Export

All 5,149 Open 398 Delivered 4,723 Canceled 17 Returned 11

Order

Created ↓

Ship speed

Status

Delivery

#402-7811· 12 min agoShopify · Maya Alvarez

12 min ago

Standard

Processing

Est. Oct 24On track

#508-3341· 3 hr agoWalmart · Priya Raman

3 hr ago

Standard

In transit

Est. Oct 25Delayed · was Oct 22

#264-9917· 5 hr agoEtsy · Jonah Reyes

5 hr ago

Standard

Processing

On holdMissing Amazon barcode

#733-1058· 8 hr agoShopify · Amara Diallo

8 hr ago

Priority

Out for delivery

Arrives todayOn track

#690-2276· YesterdayBigCommerce · Sam Porter

Yesterday

Expedited

Delivered

Delivered Oct 18

#128-6402· Oct 16eBay · Chris Bailey

Oct 16

Standard

Canceled

—Canceled by seller

#947-5519· Oct 15Walmart · Lena Fischer

Oct 15

Standard

Returned

—Refund issued Oct 18

1–7 of 5,149

/// Live rebuild in HTML/CSS/JS. Tabs, search, and bulk select work. Hit walkthrough above to see the five design notes pinned on the UI. Sample data, not connected to Amazon.

06 Flexible order creation

Order creation needed to flex from one order to bulk enterprise volume, without ever making the simple case feel complicated. Like the shipment tracker, this isn’t a screenshot — it’s the create-shipment flow rebuilt as a working LTL quote engine. The old screen was a form that asked for numbers and then showed a price it couldn’t justify; this one earns the price. Set the lane and dock accessorials, add commodities by handling unit, and every figure is computed live and traceable: weight and volume set the density, density sets the freight class (never typed), and class plus distance plus accessorials produce the rate — shown across three service levels so cost trades honestly against transit time.

07 Mobile first

So we committed to it: mobile is not a smaller screen, it is where many sellers run their business. Plenty manage everything from a phone, so I designed for mobile first and let the desktop follow. Every experience in the sections above was shaped by that decision.

No screenshots here either: the two demos above are running below at phone width, exactly as a seller sees them. Scroll inside each device — same code, no separate mobile build.

08 What I'd take forward

• Look beyond the assumptions. Designing for a true Amazon FBA branch, rather than a simple restock, taught me to question the brief and design for the problem underneath it.
• Mobile first, going forward. Prioritizing smartphone users can dramatically increase adoption, especially for sellers in fast-growing and developing markets.
• Continuous improvement. Shipping is the start, not the finish. Continuous feedback and iteration are what drive lasting success and higher satisfaction.