Many FBA centers are out of stock! Does Amazon still have a chance?

Due to the epidemic and protests, warehouses are now facing serious staff shortages and low processing capacity, and major express delivery companies and multiple Amazon warehouses have experienced warehouse overflows. Many sellers are complaining that their shipments have been signed for by the warehouse but have not been put on the shelves for a long time, and some have even been delayed for almost a month.

After collecting feedback from sellers, we found that the slow warehousing and listing problems are mostly occurring in the following warehouses: SMF3, ONT8, FTW1, IND9, MDW2, MEM1, CLT2, LAX9 and SDF8.

Many sellers reported delays in the warehouses listed above, and a small number of sellers who sent goods to these warehouses only took two or three days to put their goods on the shelves. This speed has nothing to do with the type and quantity of goods entering the warehouse. I guess this situation depends on luck. If you catch the time period when the warehouse has idle capacity, you can put your goods on the shelves quickly, otherwise it will take ten days or half a month.

Generally speaking, the more popular warehouses in the West Coast of the United States are more likely to be overstocked. More than half of the warehouses on the list above are in the West Coast of the United States. You can choose a less popular warehouse in the East Coast of the United States to replenish your stock according to your own situation to avoid the peak of overstocking.

Amazon now strictly enforces the "social distance policy" in its warehouses, using cameras and wristbands to monitor whether workers comply with the regulations. The camera algorithm can automatically identify whether each person is too close during exercise, and the wristband can vibrate to remind workers when they are too close.

This strict distance control also limits the number of workers who can work in the warehouse. If every worker strictly abides by social distance, it will be difficult for the warehouse to accommodate too many workers working at the same time. This is also the reason why the low processing capacity of FBA warehouses eventually leads to warehouse explosions.

So in the final analysis, the root cause of the liquidation is still the epidemic. After the full resumption of work in the United States, it is equivalent to completely abandoning the most effective epidemic prevention measure of "isolation", and it is basically impossible to see a downward turning point in a short period of time.

Although there will always be a shortage of staff and the number of workers in each warehouse must be limited, Amazon has another ambitious solution - just open a few more warehouses.

According to foreign media reports, Amazon has been actively looking for locations to open new FBA warehouses in recent months. Currently, two large FBA warehouses have been finalized and are under construction, located in Beloit and

The Beloit warehouse is expected to be completed by the end of next month.

These large warehouses can provide thousands of jobs for the local area. Now that the unemployment rate in the United States has reached a sky-high level, no state government will reject Amazon's investment projects. Most of these warehouses are still under planning and construction. It is expected that many new warehouses will be put into use before Black Friday at the end of the year. The newly built warehouses can well alleviate the current warehouse explosion situation.

Although several warehouses will be delivered and put into use next month, August is also the time when European and Japanese Primeday products will stop entering the warehouses. There is no specific information about the US Primeday yet, but if nothing unexpected happens, it will definitely be held together with Europe and Japan, so a large amount of Primeday inventory will be sent to the US FBA operation center next month. Even if new warehouses are put into use, it is not necessarily guaranteed that the warehousing will not be delayed.

I still recommend that if you have plans to restock recently, you should do it as soon as possible. You can also try Amazon's official logistics service, which allows the goods to be put on the shelves for sale directly after they are sent out (displaying the delivery time after arriving at the warehouse). Although the official logistics procedures are cumbersome, the function of putting the goods on the shelves in advance is still worth a try.