Excess Inventory
Does anyone here actively pull excess inventory from Amazon?
As of this morning, our excess inventory is showing 1,386 units across 64 SKUs. This has jumped massively overnight and some of it doesn’t really make sense. For example, one sku has 13 items sold in the last month but the excess inventory is showing 100% of the in stock units as excess.
I’m wondering whether it’s worth making the most of the fee waiver that ends tonight to pull all the excess stock out of FBA (the actual excess stock, not what Amazon is estimating), but I’m worried that this will further reduce my restock limits.
Just curious as to what all of you do with regards to stock turnover/excess stock.
27 replies
Seller_N7YdwdEFMGmuR
i created a load of removal orders to try and give us some extra space to restock popular items, our limits then dropped by almost 50%. So basically, DO NOT REMOVE ANY STOCK
Seller_esvgLzKXw2YAl
Unless it is impacting on your IPI score, your stock levels or you are paying excess inventory charges, it’s usually better to sell of cheaply.
But to be honest, you really shouldn’t have such high amounts of excess inventory. Amazon (and particularly FBA) is designed for faster moving goods.
Seller_24Bec1n3QCVmi
Devised a bit of a plan haha. Last night, I went through our ‘excess stock’ and placed removal orders for the units that were truly ‘excess’, so about 600 units (about 5% of our total inventory). As soon as the system had picked up the removal orders, I created a shipping plan for 600 units of our best sellers, so will get those manufactured Monday/Tuesday and sent in to Amazon on Tuesday.
That seems to have prevented my restock limit from dropping.
Seller_N7YdwdEFMGmuR
been doing some number crunching and genuinely have no clue how amazon are calculating these limits. Below is a list of all of our current FBA items, with current stock levels, sales for last 90 days, and subsequent over/understock levels for each item. Based on the 90 days sales figures for each item i calculate our stock limit should be 1986, this would give us enough room to stock amazon with 3 months of stock. The limit given to us by amazon is 1074. AM i missing something here? Has anyone else done the same exercise? Our popular items will run out of stock very soon, and because of our stupid allowance we are unable to restock them, which i’m guessing will mean our limits will drop even further
| Title | Current FBA Stock | past 90 days sales | overstocked by |
|---|---|---|---|
| misc sku 1 | 57 | 222 | -165 |
| misc sku 2 | 7 | 129 | -122 |
| misc sku 3 | 16 | 126 | -110 |
| misc sku 4 | 16 | 120 | -104 |
| misc sku 5 | 7 | 97 | -90 |
| misc sku 6 | 93 | 183 | -90 |
| misc sku 7 | 11 | 86 | -75 |
| misc sku 8 | 46 | 74 | -28 |
| misc sku 9 | 30 | 53 | -23 |
| misc sku 10 | 13 | 35 | -22 |
| misc sku 11 | 11 | 33 | -22 |
| misc sku 12 | 25 | 47 | -22 |
| misc sku 13 | 0 | 20 | -20 |
| misc sku 14 | 50 | 69 | -19 |
| misc sku 15 | 9 | 28 | -19 |
| misc sku 16 | 23 | 39 | -16 |
| misc sku 17 | 30 | 45 | -15 |
| misc sku 18 | 16 | 28 | -12 |
| misc sku 19 | 19 | 31 | -12 |
| misc sku 20 | 41 | 45 | -4 |
| misc sku 21 | 5 | 6 | -1 |
| misc sku 22 | 9 | 9 | 0 |
| misc sku 23 | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| misc sku 24 | 20 | 20 | 0 |
| misc sku 25 | 27 | 27 | 0 |
| misc sku 26 | 48 | 47 | 1 |
| misc sku 27 | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| misc sku 28 | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| misc sku 29 | 4 | 2 | 2 |
| misc sku 30 | 18 | 16 | 2 |
| misc sku 31 | 11 | 8 | 3 |
| misc sku 32 | 11 | 7 | 4 |
| misc sku 33 | 5 | 1 | 4 |
| misc sku 34 | 7 | 2 | 5 |
| misc sku 35 | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| misc sku 36 | 23 | 16 | 7 |
| misc sku 37 | 38 | 31 | 7 |
| misc sku 38 | 15 | 7 | 8 |
| misc sku 39 | 14 | 6 | 8 |
| misc sku 40 | 9 | 1 | 8 |
| misc sku 41 | 14 | 6 | 8 |
| misc sku 42 | 24 | 15 | 9 |
| misc sku 43 | 11 | 2 | 9 |
| misc sku 44 | 18 | 8 | 10 |
| misc sku 45 | 22 | 12 | 10 |
| misc sku 46 | 24 | 14 | 10 |
| misc sku 47 | 30 | 19 | 11 |
| misc sku 48 | 27 | 16 | 11 |
| misc sku 49 | 26 | 8 | 18 |
| misc sku 50 | 51 | 32 | 19 |
| misc sku 51 | 30 | 10 | 20 |
| misc sku 52 | 35 | 13 | 22 |
| misc sku 53 | 32 | 9 | 23 |
| misc sku 54 | 72 | 44 | 28 |
| misc sku 55 | 48 | 18 | 30 |
| misc sku 56 | 36 | 5 | 31 |
| misc sku 57 | 37 | 4 | 33 |
| misc sku 58 | 44 | 9 | 35 |
| misc sku 59 | 38 | 2 | 36 |
| misc sku 60 | 58 | 19 | 39 |
| misc sku 61 | 49 | 2 | 47 |
| 1522 | 1986 | -464 | |
| understocked skus total | -991 | ||
| over stock skus total | 527 |
Seller_tAP9fcJH83gFW
Well, we have exactly the same problem with these sudden limits having been introduced.
We can not ship any of the fast moving items that are out of stock, so left with a lot of slow moving stock.
I expect Amazon wants us to lower the price to shift them so they can earn their commissions, rather than remove them.
We have now started to move a lot of our best products over to Merchant fulfilled
Amazon seems to go out of their way to make it impossible to work with them!
Seller_tAP9fcJH83gFW
What I do not get is what are you supposed to do to remedy this situation… sit back and hope that something sells…at some time in the future…so that the limits are removed?
This is obviously designed by a bureaucrat with no anchor in reality!
Seller_Rvzyc4bmDZJWT
Truth NO, but i can see what Amazon doing… they using this as a lever to make us remove it. But here the thing? You and your family go into a restaurant… you all spend 20 minutes reading the menu and the waiter come to take your orders… what would you so if 30% of what you looked at was not available? walk out… Maybe?.. well if you sell clothing or anything that comes in sizes? i think it right to stock the full range. just like the chief in the restaurant he has to take a guess on what going sell or not, he has no idea who coming in this evening or what they likely to eat. when he orders form the wholesalers his meat… is he likely to order 1 chicken breast and 1 fish… but Amazon want me to send them 1 pair of blue sock medium, 1 pair of black socks large… but i cant because i have 50 pairs of pink socks small that i sell only 10 per month… place has gone MAD… dont know who everyone else feels but i rather pay the stocking charges to ensure my customers have a full range to choose from. Can you imagine the future, Amazon only want you to sell your top 8 most popular items… (sorry for being long winded)
Seller_6sxtIS0RbZ5k7
That’s obviously exactly what they do want (maybe a few more than 8), for FBA at least.
Seller_t9adtOOPygHg7
We removed 17000 units of stock to have =only 1 month of stock at Amazon to allow for faster moving lines to have the ability for restocking. Our limit then dropped massively so we are still over stocked by 6000 units. The inventory planning section however wants us to send nearly 8000 units back (head in hands). I called and was told this was a bug and that it all would be fixed today and that we could cancel the removal orders over the next 3 days. No such luck… all 17000 units on their way to us in drips and an lovely Amazon email saying they cannot increase our inventory limits!!! My advice is keep stock there as for us we will soon be out of stock and will not be able to restock. Clearly a development issue with Amazon again suffering from the right hand not knowing what the left is doing.
In order to have an Amazon business you should try to be profitable on 10 months of the year… The other 2 months will be dealing with issues as these.
Seller_pPdCjDZ0E7Bfi
Has everybodys restock limits been cut?
Or is it just if you created an FOC removal order?
We had 11,000 pc limit, removed about 1,500 woke up this morning and now the limit is 3500 ! ???
Loads of inventory we cant send in now, is this because we created the FOC removal order, or because of another change to the restock limits?
