On February 15 and August 15 every year, Amazon assesses a long-term storage (LTS) fee to all items with more than a single unit in stock that have been in the warehouse for more than 6 months. To avoid this, you need to identify your inventory that is subject to these fees and select one of the following options to avoid the fees:
Reduce your price to liquidate the inventory before the deadline.
Have the inventory returned to you at a cost of .50/unit.
Have Amazon destroy your inventory.
There are two methods to check which of your items will be subject to the LTS fees.
First Option: Go to your Recommended Removals report by doing the following:
In Seller Central, hover over “Reports” at the top of the screen.
Select “Fulfillment” from the drop-down menu.
On the far left toward the bottom, select “Recommended Removals.”
At this point you can either quickly place a removal order for all of your inventory that will be assessed a LTS fee, or you can go through the list and check each item individually to see what strategy would work best. I recommend using this report when you know you want to have all of your inventory sent back to you.
This next report is better if you need to make individual decisions about each ASIN.
Second Option: Go to your Inventory Health report by doing the following:
Follow steps 1 and 2 above.
Select “Inventory Health” from the Inventory section on the left.
Select the “Download” tab and select “Download.”
Once your file is downloaded, open it (it will be a .txt file)
Copy the entire text and paste it into an Excel spreadsheet.
Go to the far right column and sort from largest to smallest.
Now you will see, in descending order, the products that you will be charged for and how much. This will help you as you make your decisions about what to drop prices on, what to have returned to you, what to have destroyed, OR what to leave in the warehouses. This last option is for items that will incur very small fees due to their size. If Amazon is only going to charge you .05/unit, it’s probably best to just leave it there.
If you are looking for more great tips, tools, and resources to help you run your Amazon business more profitably and more efficiently, make sure you check out our Amazon Sellers Section.
