Amazon's restocking volume plummets! How is the government making money?

A very abnormal situation suddenly appeared in the past two days. The shipping capacity of a large number of sellers dropped sharply! It dropped by hundreds every day, and some sellers even dropped to only able to ship dozens of products!

This inventory adjustment is very unusual. It is basically reduced once a day for several days in a row. It is very different from the previous one-time reduction strategy. The intensity of the slow cut is also no less, cutting hundreds of stocks every day. Some sellers even have negative inventory capacity. What on earth is Amazon doing? Are they really not allowed to ship any goods?

According to the logic of cutting storage capacity in the past, Amazon should reserve FBA capacity in advance for the peak season to reduce inventory pressure. This perspective is reasonable, but it is a bit early. Judging from the situation in the first half of the year, Amazon began to tighten shipping restrictions around May, lowered the number of shipments that third-party sellers can make, and raised the IPI storage performance threshold. The sellers' shipment quantity was reduced in multiple dimensions to ensure shipping capacity and storage space for Prime Day at the end of June.

This time, the storage capacity was restricted in early September for Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday at the end of November, which is almost twice as early as in the first half of the year. If we consider it from a normal perspective, it is very likely that the FBA warehouse has encountered some capacity problems and has to start limiting storage capacity and shipment quantity in advance.

But then again, Amazon's restriction on shipments is so unusual this time. Is there something fishy going on? We actually found it.

Many people should know about AGL, Amazon's official logistics program. After the outbreak of the epidemic, many sellers have begun to try AGL because it can use a variety of convenient functions, including being the first to put on the shelves, ensuring timeliness, and being able to check in the background, etc.

It is this AGL service that recently released a major feature - FBA satellite warehouse.

To put it simply, it is Amazon's official overseas warehouse. Sellers can use it as a transit station to send goods to the FBA warehouse. Sellers can store as many goods as they want in the satellite warehouse without being affected by FBA's replenishment restrictions.

However, the products cannot be sold directly in the satellite warehouse. You still need to create a shipping plan to send the goods from the satellite warehouse to the FBA warehouse. The advantage is that it is very fast. AGL will give priority to using the satellite warehouses around the FBA warehouses required by the seller to store the goods, ensuring that the transportation from the satellite warehouse to the FBA warehouse is completed within one week. During the transportation process, the products can also enjoy the function of starting with inventory first, and directly become available for sale, and customers can place orders normally.

After seeing this function, I instantly felt that this function is incredible... Although in principle this is just a simple overseas warehouse model, but with the advantages of Amazon's peripheral bonus, including the simplified process of overseas warehouses entering FBA, and the direct sale of goods in transit, the experience of using AGL's official overseas warehouse has completely opened up a gap with ordinary overseas warehouses. Even thinking about it in a broader sense, these third-party overseas warehouses under AGL are only missing a terminal distribution system from real FBA warehouses, and there is a chance that they will be directly purchased by Amazon and become FBA warehouses. Amazon can first test which third-party overseas warehouses have advantages during this period, and selectively develop them into FBA warehouses, so as to quickly and cheaply expand FBA transportation capacity.

Could it be that the sudden drop in replenishment quantity is also because AGL is promoting its official overseas warehouses, so it is a stress test to get all sellers to use AGL?

I can only say that it is possible, but the risk is too great , and Amazon may not be willing to do this. Now the antitrust team is keeping a close eye on Amazon, clamoring to split Amazon's self-operated business. At this critical juncture, Amazon is still using this method on its self-operated logistics and AGL. If the antitrust team finds out, I'm afraid that the mall and FBA logistics systems will have to be split and operated independently . So I tend to think that this inventory reduction is really to reserve warehouse capacity in advance for the peak season in November, and it just coincides with the launch of AGL's satellite warehouse service.

In any case, satellite warehouses are also a new way to solve sellers' replenishment problems. The closer it is to the peak season, the more diversified the means of maintaining inventory should be. Although the AGL process is more cumbersome, it still has certain value. Do you want to know about AGL's official logistics service?