Amazon automatically throws away sellers' inventory! The new policy in April has been criticized

Amazon recently released a new policy. As the official is currently preparing for the mid-year event Prime Day in advance, all the sellers’ redundant inventory will be automatically discarded!

Amazon has given a clear definition of how to define redundant inventory. One is the goods that have been stored in the operation center for more than 365 days and are subject to long-term storage fees; the second is ASIN products that have not been sold for six consecutive months or more and have been stored in the operation center for more than 180 days.

After April 15 , Amazon will automatically register all sellers to join the "Automatic Inventory Removal" program. For the two categories of products mentioned above, Amazon will directly remove them. If the seller has a return address, the inventory will be returned to the return address. If not, Amazon will abandon or donate it.

Moreover, after the new policy takes effect on April 15, it will be reviewed monthly and all eligible inventory will be automatically disposed of to ensure that redundant inventory is cleared in a timely manner to make room for the following Member Day inventory.

If you really want to say, there is nothing wrong with Amazon's motivation for doing this. Prime Day is more important than anything else. If all the inventory that has paid long-term storage fees will be automatically removed, there must be a lot of inventory that is slow to sell but still selling normally. It would be too simplistic and crude to remove it directly.

In the past, Amazon would often perform automatic removals, but only for some unsellable inventory, such as products returned by consumers but damaged and unsellable. Amazon would clear them out periodically, but this is the first time that it has performed such automatic removals for normal, slow-moving inventory.

Don’t think that Amazon’s proactive help in clearing out unsaleable inventory will save sellers trouble. Amazon’s automatic clearing out of unsaleable inventory is a big problem.

In fact, these unsalable stocks that pay long-term storage fees are actually not disposed of by sellers due to cost or operational planning considerations. Otherwise, with the high long-term storage fees, sellers would have disposed of them long ago, and would not have waited for Amazon to deal with them. As long as they are left, they are the stocks that sellers would rather pay long-term storage fees to keep. The value of the goods may be relatively large, or there may be room for recovery. In short, Amazon's one-size-fits-all automatic removal of all unsalable stocks is definitely a nuisance to many sellers.

And nominally, although Amazon has also provided a method to turn off automatic removal this time, which is the same as the method to turn off automatic removal of uncollectible inventory (the path is as follows: [Settings] → [Amazon Logistics] → [Automatic Removal of Saleable Inventory Settings] → [Edit] → [Disable], and then click [Update]), but in fact, when sellers want to turn off the automatic removal function, they will find that the [Disable] item is gray and cannot be selected.

I don’t know if it’s because of a backend bug or if Amazon did it on purpose, but it seems like no one can escape this new policy of automatically removing salable inventory. If you have unsalable inventory that you want to keep (paying long-term storage fees, or no orders have been placed for 6 consecutive months), you must pay attention to your backend order status in a timely manner, and cancel the removal order after the automatic removal function creates the removal order to prevent the unsalable inventory from being abandoned.