North American Remote Fulfillment (NARF) - Sign Up if You Haven't Already!

This year, Amazon started a program called NARF (North American Remote Fulfillment).  NARF allows you to sell your items on Amazon Canada and Mexico via your FBA inventory without having to send any inventory to Amazon and Canada.

Advantages

I'm a little late to this party but in case anyone isn't on it, as far as I can tell it is very worthwhile to participate in NARF.

1. Once you are set up, there is no extra work to continue selling.  Amazon takes whatever listings you have that are eligible and automatically adds your inventory to Amazon.ca and Amazon.com.mx
2. Amazon automatically calculates how much money you would make via selling on Amazon.com and sets your prices including the current conversion rates on the other marketplaces so that you earn the same amount for each sale.  Distributions go into your amazon.com banking option.  Nothing changes!
3. As you change your price on Amazon.com, your price will automatically change on other marketplaces as well.
4. Customers pay import fees and buyers take ownership of the item while still in the US so you don't need to deal with any extra international bureaucracy and taxes.
5. Seller Fulfilled listings are automatically removed so you don't end up paying shipping to Mexico and Canada
6. You might sell items that just aren't selling on Amazon.com (happened on a few items for me).

I've even had to raise my price on some items on Amazon.com that weren't selling on Amazon.com but were selling very well on other marketplaces.

Disadvantages

There are some disadvantages to the program but not too many that I have noticed:

1. Inventory Lab - If you use Inventory Lab, like I do, IL only supports sales o Amazon.com and therefore you have to add in your profit separately for NARF sales.  Hopefully this becomes a big problem because that would mean my sales are significant :)   
1. I already deal with this for eBay and Walmart and the time investment is minimal.  I download all my sales at the end of the year, put it into excel and add a column for my COGS (and shipping costs for eBay and Walmart) and sum up all my profit and add manually to IL.  Accounting for FBA is very difficult because of all the fees associated with shipping in and keeping your inventory at a fulfillment center.  If you are just accounting for sales it is a much simpler process.
2. Your inventory often stays in your account for longer.  Amazon offers free shipping to prime customers in Mexico of 5-9 days and in Canada for 7-12 days, so your items sometimes stay in your inventory (presumably while paying storage) for longer so it takes longer to get paid
3.  I have yet to experience the return rate or lost item rate so I can't comment on that.  Returns come back to America so that is not an issue.
4. You need to get ungated separately on each platform.  Just because you are ungated for a brand on Amazon.com does not mean you will be ungated for a brand on Mexico or Canada.  In fact, for some brands I was ungated on Mexico but not Canada.  🤷

How it is going so far

I am posting my sales here on both marketplaces based off units.  You can see that I am not going to get rich doing this but the investment is so minimal that it was definitely worth the small effort for me.

You can see that I am selling many more units on Mexico than on Canada.  This could be because the population of mexico is significantly larger than Canada, but just as important, I am gated for a large toy company in Canada but not Mexico and during December that was probably just as important, if not more so.

I am working on getting ungated on Amazon.ca as well to increase my sales there

You can see more details on the NARF Program here 

How to Sign Up

To Start you need a North American Unified account, enable FBA export and you need to apply to sell on Amazon Canada and Amazon Mexico. Make sure your application goes through fully.  I was delayed about 10 days or so (really important December days) because I thought I was signed up for Canada but my application needed to be verified. 

You also need to be signed up for FBA in those locations.  Try to make a shipment and it will tell you that you need to apply for FBA.  You don't actually have to go through with creating the shipment but need to apply for FBA.

Then you need to enable NARF which is found under the "Inventory" dropdown menu.  You will see Remote Fulfillment with FBA

Once there, follow the prompts to enable the program (you may have to click "program settings" in upper right), international listings will be generated and you can usually start selling same day or the next!

If things go really well, you can consider to start sending actual inventory to FBA fulfillment centers in Canada or Mexico, which I'm sure is part of Amazon's goal.

How has NARF been going for you?  Is there any downsides I am missing?  Would love to hear your thoughts!