Our top 10 SKUs sold 3000 units during the holidays last year. We’ve had double digit YoY growth for the past 5 years, but this year we will likely see a decline, as our max inventory level across all SKUs is currently 1500.
And no, we are not doing SFP. Customers will see out of stock messages across our most popular SKUs.
Thanks, Amazon.
Has your sell-through been steady out of season? If you sell-through in recent months has been low that will lower your max units stored at Amazon. I suggest finding a 3rd party to store your goods in the USA. Then as you have availability at Amazon, ship inventory in. The dates are great suggestions. However, their warehouses don’t stop receiving inventory that day. They are just letting you know they are only confident inventory that gets to them by those dates will be available for holiday sales.
Increasing your inventory storage limits:
If you stay in stock in October, you will see your inventory go up in November, and then December, etc. However, once your sell-through slows down again, you will see your max units in storage decrease.
I know - it stinks that you have to add another point on your supply chain. However, Amazon isn’t going to change its policies.
This is what we did. It works. Our storage limits have remained high / increased in recent months. Currently, they’re at 6000 units. It was 3,000 units in June.
I still don’t see how in your process you will lose employees when you turn over from FBA to FBM, even if it’s a temporary 2-3 year shift. Secondly, you need to decide what’s more important: Living in New York City or your business. Having an online business in NYC is the same as opening up a popsicle shop in Iceland.
I agree, what is happening with FBA is terrible for many sellers. At the same time there are thousands of sellers that sacrificed so many things to work around these Covid issues, invested loads into more storage solutions and warehouses, many have relocated completely. When you hear on the contrary about someone working from an apartment in the most expensive city in the United States and complain about a another private companies’ warehouse space is a bit absurd.
There has to be a better way to state this. Amazon appears to be trying to say:
Ship your inventory by mid October to ensure it is received by November 15th and available for sale on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Ship your inventory by early November to ensure it is received by December 11th and available during 13 days before Christmas.
I feel for you and we are having our own struggles with the limits (Also in NYC btw), but what you have mentioned above has nothing to do with you or your performance. This is what Amazon does months before big shopping periods like Prime Day or the Holidays. They restrict everyone in basically the same way. (Since Covid)
The limits are more than likely to be relaxed again once the ball drops.
The limits will never go away and be like they used to be unfortunately. Amazon is reinventing itself and behaving more like a retailer and less like a warehouse. This was featured in several news articles recently.
Haha guys, this is all not untrue, but there are countless reasons why you want to run this kind of business in the city. Unfortunately, I can’t divulge these secrets. I don’t want you guys moving in here…
Like I said, I’m in agreement with inventory limits being in place.
When I started doing this about 11 years ago, I sent in everything, glorified as “long tail”. Over ten thousand items, many of them not really sellable. This is not sustainable. It’s good that Amazon makes it clear that you can’t abuse their fulfillment centers as warehouses, to stockpile hundreds of thousands of unsellable iphone cases.
What we are observing here is algorithms going bonkers, with no attachment to what’s really going on. Nobody has the slightest clue. So my sought after used books are not “holiday items”? People buy used books as gifts all the time. But let’s make more room for fake trees and Playstations.
We are dealing with Robots here. Nobody knows what’s going on, and you can’t reason with them.
Zero, I repeat, ZERO chance of that happening. Other than those Night at the Museum movies NYC has nothing appealing to me as a human being.
I understand why you would want to be in New York City, it has the most libraries and inventory of physical books of any US city, with the most publishers and presses of any other city in the world—that said, what’s cheaper, a 45 min commute once a day; or, NYC real estate with City, State, and Federal Taxes and the inability to reasonably scale? Any NYC business needs really good margins, you can’t survive long-term selling physical books in NYC.
NYC could have ALL the libraries, publishers, Starbucks, Serendipity’s and books in the United States, still couldn’t get me to go there.
No offense, I’m sure its lovely.
I was simply mentioning my understanding for wanting to be where you inventory comes from—in the same way maybe you need a specialized skilled workforce that might be saturated in the cities. Logistics is an expensive part of any product. But for physical paper books, (opinion warning) something that will die within the next few decades, I just don’t see any justification for it.
I mean I just dont understand why anybody would live here, does not look appealing. 
Like many sellers, we have seasonal sales. If Amazon’s “AI” can’t figure out this annual pattern and adjust restock limits accordingly toward the end of the year, that says a lot about Amazon’s systems and the people running them.
…they know exactly what theyre doing. They are giving warehouse space to the most profitable sellers - thats it - thats all - no conspiracy - no evil - just profits.