Amazon FBA Stranded Inventory – This is not a situation where something becomes lost. Instead, it occurs when Amazon is holding the inventory but something caused your placement on the listing to be removed, preventing your item(s) from being sold. Sometimes it’s a situation where the listing itself was closed. Or maybe your pricing triggered an alert and Amazon shut down your listing to prevent you from selling it outside of the minimum or maximum that you set. There are several other reasons an item might become stranded.
When your inventory becomes stranded at the Amazon FBA Fulfillment Center, it does not show up on the product page. This means that buyers can’t find it, and you can’t sell it. In addition, you are responsible for paying storage fees while it is being stored in the warehouse, so stranded inventory not only makes you no money, it actually costs you money.
Here are some simple steps that you can take to Reactivate your Amazon FBA Stranded Inventory Listing.
Log in to Amazon Seller Central, hover your cursor over the Inventory tab and click Manage Inventory.
Several links will appear near the top of the page, including a link where you can Fix Stranded Inventory (if you have any to fix).
You will now be able to see the ASINs with Stranded Inventory and the reason they are stranded. There may be a pricing issue, or the item may be listed as FBM instead of FBA. These are easy to correct. Sometimes, Amazon has a restriction in place for the item and there will be nothing you can do except to create a removal order. Review the reason for the ASIN being stranded, and use the edit button to make changes.
After 15 minutes, check to see if the edits were accepted. You can click the Refresh link to see if any new information is available.
There is a new feature that allows you to automatically relist any ASIN that is stranded due to the following conditions:
- Listing Closed
- Item Discontinued
- Listing Closed and Inventory Error
- Merchant Fulfilled*
Sometimes Amazon closes a listing due to an issue, and all of the sellers on this listing now have stranded inventory. If you don’t notice this, your inventory will remain stranded, even after Amazon resolves the issue with the listing. With this new automatic relisting feature, your inventory will be relisted after a set number of days. If the issue has been corrected, your items will be available for sale again.
*Inventory that you send in to FBA is sometimes inadvertently listed as FBM. When this happens, the inventory becomes stranded. Amazon’s new automation tool relists this stranded inventory as FBA. It will not change your normal FBM listings to FBA – only the items that become stranded in your FBA inventory.
These settings can be adjusted to automatically take place anywhere from 1-30 days.
Need help with suppressed listings? See our Suppressed Listings – Why does Amazon hide pages from buyers? post.
About the Author
Greg Purdy is the founder and co-owner of Seller Essentials, the resource website for all things Ecommerce. He lives in Maryland with his wife and children.
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