Our limits were increased overnight. Just in time to send in our final round of inventory.

The updates are every Sunday.

I suspect … Amazon might be reducing limits more in an effort to only have what they might be able to fulfill based on employee levels.

A wise choice is to have both FBA and FBM, even if you have to find a reliable 3P to ship your FBM.

“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…”

No Notice and No Communication is Amazon’s standard operating policy with Marketplace sellers.
Why?
Amazon doesn’t care if we think this exploitation is acceptable. If you or I leave, we can be replaced in an instant. Marketplace sellers are disposable in Amazon’s eyes. The large-volume Marketplace sellers on Amazon like to think that Amazon values them, but it’s an illusion.
Warehouse workers are exploited by Amazon, Marketplace sellers are exploited by Amazon, Amazon delivery drivers are exploited by Amazon. We work for a s*#thole company.

It should be noted that Amazon FBA has a “limited” space and not infinite inventory and each FBA facility probably has stats of how much they can ship out monthly and a projection of what they expect to output. Inventory will just be directed elsewhere as facilities reach capacity. So each square inch is a valuable commodity.

The number of 3P sellers has increased throughout the years and if you seen reports of how much it has jumped in the past year compared to the year before, you’ll understand space is Amazon’s commodity. With the increase in sellers there’s also a increase in demand for FBA. While a business may have enjoyed X amount of space the year before, that “real estate” is now more prime as more sellers attempt to submit goods to Amazon to house for them. Then from Amazon’s point of view, it’s a seller’s market. They have the space and staff, we have the product. They will limit the space for slow moving products and set aside space for high turn around products. Amazon makes a fee off every transaction but has set picking/processing fees and if they can increase the number of orders shipped out each hour, they’ll push out products or limit space for products that don’t measure up.

If you were provided a large space in August and you did not use it, Amazon system recorded that you were unable to hit whatever threshold you needed for them to allocated any more space so they started reducing to what they believe was adequate for your products speed. One of the things a seller might do that also hurts them is sending in product once a month rather than weekly so that there is a steady flow of goods going into Amazon as goods go out. If you’re not selling cases a week, you can’t expect Amazon to reserve spaces for multiple cases a month.

Storage Limit Manager

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The thing is, as a matter of policy, restricting restock levels is not unreasonable. There are obviously velocity and capacity crunches in Q4, and this is one way to bring those under control.

I suspect there are two reasons for the apparently capricious and fickle restock limits:

• Publishing a metric or rubric would eventually backfire, as sellers find loopholes and end up swamping the system regardless. Obviously I want them to publish it, so I can plan accordingly and manage Q4 cash flow.
• Publicly acknowledging capacity and logistics weaknesses doesn’t do their stockholders any favors.

I feel like there’s a middle ground:

• Employ some sort of lead-time model, where you’re told “In X days we’ll be restricting you by this much”. Obviously, if X=90, then everyone has time to swamp the FCs with inventory before that date. But how about 7-14 days? Enough time to adjust ordering, at least?

In the meantime, my on-site storage space is overflowing with inventory waiting its turn, probably until January. Thankfully we’ve been at this long enough that I can weather the throttling.

The WSJ this AM had an article on increased customer dissatisfaction with Amazon. To paraphrase, increased late deliveries and crappy products.

Also had another article on customer returns policies and the issues they cause which included Amazon but dealt with the wider issue.

Overall retail returns are way up.

Expect more action that affects sellers/