FBA overflow facility causes stock to be unavailable for ship
Issue: Stock in FBA overflow facility - therefore not available for shipping. We are trying to prevent this from happening again this year. Any ideas?
We know our sell through and know that in the two weeks prior to x-mas our products sell very briskly. Last year, we were hit hard by Amazon holding our best selling item in an 'overflow' facility (per case#Case# 11563267731) and not shipping it. It was labeled in early December as will arrive after x-mas, despite Amazon having thousands in the FBA overflow facility. We had to skip the enter remainder of the x-mas selling period and sell it in the following year.
Last year we had ramped up advertising in the first week of December (spent a lot of money) in order to push the product to sell out in the busy x-mas weeks. Come the end of the week, despite having over a thousand in stock at the 'overflow' facility - Amazon labeled our product as not available prior to x-mas and/or out of stock.
This caused the following:
1. Lost sales for a product technically in stock product during the selling season
2. Storage fees for the entire year - since we were basically barred from selling the item during the x-mas selling season
3. Useless previous week spending in Advertising.
The whole affair cost us near $100K at least.
Amazon's simply response was: "Unfortunately, prime 2 day shipping is not guaranteed per the business agreement.
The thing is, had we known that Amazon would label thousands of in-stock product as unavailable until after x-mas we would not have previously advertised it, shipped etc and save tens of thousands in Ads and Storage. We can take the last sales, but really - we get penalized for pre-advertising and storage for both high season and the entire year.
Has this happened to anyone else? Any ideas on how to prevent this?
FBA overflow facility causes stock to be unavailable for ship
Issue: Stock in FBA overflow facility - therefore not available for shipping. We are trying to prevent this from happening again this year. Any ideas?
We know our sell through and know that in the two weeks prior to x-mas our products sell very briskly. Last year, we were hit hard by Amazon holding our best selling item in an 'overflow' facility (per case#Case# 11563267731) and not shipping it. It was labeled in early December as will arrive after x-mas, despite Amazon having thousands in the FBA overflow facility. We had to skip the enter remainder of the x-mas selling period and sell it in the following year.
Last year we had ramped up advertising in the first week of December (spent a lot of money) in order to push the product to sell out in the busy x-mas weeks. Come the end of the week, despite having over a thousand in stock at the 'overflow' facility - Amazon labeled our product as not available prior to x-mas and/or out of stock.
This caused the following:
1. Lost sales for a product technically in stock product during the selling season
2. Storage fees for the entire year - since we were basically barred from selling the item during the x-mas selling season
3. Useless previous week spending in Advertising.
The whole affair cost us near $100K at least.
Amazon's simply response was: "Unfortunately, prime 2 day shipping is not guaranteed per the business agreement.
The thing is, had we known that Amazon would label thousands of in-stock product as unavailable until after x-mas we would not have previously advertised it, shipped etc and save tens of thousands in Ads and Storage. We can take the last sales, but really - we get penalized for pre-advertising and storage for both high season and the entire year.
Has this happened to anyone else? Any ideas on how to prevent this?
10 replies
Dominic_Amazon
Hi @Seller_QwKkFcwd4hb61,
Dominic from Amazon here, happy to try to help! Understand your situation from last year and why you are hoping to avoid this again. As previously announced, we recommended that you plan ahead to ensure that your shipments arrive by October 26, 2023, so that they can be received and ready to fulfill by Black Friday.
Curious if you targeted that date to send in inventory?
Best,
Dominic
Seller_xqQN9iSG2aGJn
You are counting on Amazon too much during the busiest part of the year.
The only logical suggestion to guarantee the avoidance of headaches is to sell it FBM or SFP.
We have an internal cut off of 10/31 to ship into Amazon (For FBA) with any expectation that the items will be available for sale in December.
Seller_aUbEyzlSSnsDJ
We are sorry to hear amazon let you down. It seems as though amazon wants to go full throttle in growth. Greed. If they would pause from time to time and look at how well their programs are doing, instead of waiting for sellers to fall victim of the very programs meant to help them.
We know we could make more money doing FBA. The Forum convinced us to build our own storage Building. Amazon is not a trusted partner. More like a partner competitor relationship not good for us.
