FBA inventory stuck? Here are the reasons and solutions

Products stored in Amazon's logistics center, if they are not available for sale (not active offer), are considered "Stranded Inventory". And Amazon will continue to charge you for inventory storage fees every month.

If you don’t regularly check for stranded inventory issues, you could be incurring a variety of costly fees, including monthly inventory storage fees, FBA long-term storage fees, and overage fees.

Stranded inventory can also negatively impact your IPI (Inventory Performance Index). IPI is a system Amazon uses to ensure that sellers have optimized inventory. Stranded inventory takes up space in Amazon FBA, which is something Amazon doesn’t want to see.

According to the notice issued by Amazon, from August 16 this year to the end of the year, if your IPI score is lower than 500, your storage space will be restricted.

Sellers can check whether there is any stranded inventory in the backend's Manage Inventory section.

If there is stranded inventory, Fixed stranded inventory will appear at the top:

After clicking into the page, you can see the stranded inventory and the reasons for the stranded inventory.

The above picture shows that the reason for the inventory retention is the listing error, and the solution proposed by Amazon is to remove the inventory. What if you don’t want to remove the inventory?

Amazon also provides another solution, contact seller support. The process of contacting seller support is as follows:

1. Click Help in the background, and then select Get Support under Need more help:

2. Select Selling on Amazon > Fulfillment by Amazon > Investigate Other FBA Issues > Stranded Inventory or FBA No Listing Error in What service can we help you with?.

3. Finally, enter the ASIN or FNSKU, click next, and Amazon will tell you how to solve it.

4. If the problem still cannot be solved, you can click Need more help with this issue? Contact Us to contact the seller support team in the United States. It is recommended that sellers check their inventory once a week.

Amazon will send a notification to remind you that the inventory is stranded, and the seller should take action within 30 days of receiving the notification.

Previously, after the inventory was stranded for 30 days, Amazon would mark it as "unsellable" and remind the seller to remove the inventory. However, starting from June 30, 2020, if the seller does not take action within 30 days, Amazon will automatically remove the inventory that has been stranded for 30 days.

To stop Amazon from automatically removing inventory, sellers need to click into Fix stranded inventory and then click the Edit automatic-action settings button:

After clicking in, there are two options:

·   Automatic fixes – Amazon will automatically relist your inventory.

·   Automatic removal – Amazon will automatically remove the inventory.

There are four reasons why Amazon will automatically relist your inventory:

The listing is closed;

Product discontinuation;

· Listing closed, inventory error;

FBA listings are changed to FBM.

For inventory backlogs caused by the above four reasons, even if the seller does not take any action within 30 days, Amazon will automatically re-list the listing.

In the second option, Amazon’s default setting is to automatically remove the inventory:

Sellers can change the settings and choose to send the products back. If they do not change the settings, they may suffer heavy losses.

Sellers can take the following steps to prevent stranded inventory: