We have an invalid LTSF inventory inbound shipment block due to FBA losing and relocating an old SKU.
There was never any unit legitimately subject to a long-term-storage-fee.
FBA frequently misplaces inventory, and then randomly finds it later. Most lost/found are within months, but some take a year. When they do so for an old SKU, that SKU incorrectly back-fills the year of time that FBA lost it, as if it was in the warehouse and available for sale, and mistakenly acts as though that SKU would be subject to an LTSF. In fact it was only in the warehouse for a few weeks at the beginning before being lost, and then a few weeks at the end before being found and auto-removed. The total time that unit was in the warehouse and available for sale was a few weeks, so the LTSF is nonsense.
Further, because we can no longer sell the unit at that point we have to allow it to be removed. And just to clarify, this series of compounding FBA mistakes only occurs for ASINs with multiple SKUs where the old SKUs are no longer sellable due to best-if-used-by dates. (I suspect it's this key detail that has confused whatever malconfigured software that creates the LTSF blocks. The malconfigured software needs to be fixed to exempt SKUs which had their inventory lost for long periods due to FBA errors. Or, it could exempt the ASIN for which other FBA SKUs are continuing to be sold at a rate far exceeding the LTSF rate.)
And finally, FBA then compounds their above mistakes by further making the additional error of blocking inbound inventory for the entire ASIN (not just the SKU they lost/found) due to the removal which "prevented" an LTSF.
This has happened 10 or so times over the last year and it seems to be getting worse. I've probably spent 30 hours on chats and phone calls with Support trying to get them to fix these various blocks. In the past we've only been able to get them to raise the blocks limits, but their limit increases are based off of trailing sales for the ASIN, and if the ASIN couldn't get inventory in stock (due to FBA's previous mistakes as per above), the blocks are going to keep getting more restrictive as FBA's mistakes compound themselves.
Has anyone else encountered this issue, and had success getting the incorrect blocks removed entirely?
One final aside, Amazon Support seems to think 6 weeks of trailing inventory sales is normally going to be sufficient. Perhaps that was true 5 years ago, when FC inbound checkin was much faster, but not now. It now takes 6-8 weeks for an inbound shipment to become distributed across the FCs and Available with Prime Shipping. So if you only have 6 weeks in stock (including inventory in transit on trucks to the FC, since that's included in the LTSF block), you'll pretty much never have fully available inventory.
