Utilization Quantity Discrepancy - Any advice on how to resolve?
Has anyone been able to get discrepancies with utilization quantity** resolved? Seller Support has been giving me the run around for almost two months. My utilization quantity has probably always been inaccurate and too high, but I was never concerned about it until restock limits were drastically lowered this quarter.
According to FBA inventory reports, I currently have about 550 units in fulfillment centers and 0 units in shipment. However, my utilization quantity is over 1,200, which is in excess of my restock limit of 1,000. I opened a case regarding this issue two months ago. The Internal Team has twice reported back “There is no issue with the utilization.” In other words, approximately 700 units in my FBA inventory are not listed on any of the various fulfillment reports. I doubt that I have 700 extra units, but since the Internal Team insists this is the case, I’ve asked for documentation (which they will not provide).
I have tried just about every argument I can think of, backing up my case with evidence, analytical reasoning, logic, and grade-school level arithmetic. Yet, with each additional communication, they respond with an even more frustrating non-answer. For example, the most recent support associate seemed to suggest, in an identical message sent 3x in a row (See Below), that the discrepancies were due to units in reserve. This makes no sense given that utilization quantity does not include reserved items. Has anyone had success in getting their utilization corrected?
**For reference, Amazon defines utilization as follows: “Utilization includes your current inventory at Amazon and all incoming shipments, including your shipments in Working, In transit, and Receiving status. Inventory pending removals and any reserved inventory are not included in the utilization calculation.”
In the past week, Seller Support responded with the following nonsensical message three times in a row:
“After further investigation we have found that the quantity column in FBA Inventory report are pulled from different resources. Quantity column in FBA Inventory report: Total units available on hand for this product in an Amazon’s fulfillment center For example : An FNSku has 16 units in reserved - FC transfer status, those are included in capacity management system, but not included in Inventory Report. Which is will explain the differences.”
Seller_yJrgQZVX1vxTR
Skypilot2,
You have found the answer!! Before I created this forum post, I had messaged someone who had posted on the forum about the same problem last spring but hadn’t gotten any responses. Because he was unable to get any help from seller support, he discovered on his own that he needed to manually delete multiple quantities. He speculated that the warehouse workers were scanning the same books multiple times. I didn’t understand what he meant by “multiple quantities” until I read your latest post.
I sorted the FBA Manage Inventory list as you suggested and discovered that, like you, I had many units with 0 quantity available that had multiple quantities (up to 19) in fulfillment center transfer reserve status. The total “phantom units” in reserve totaled to just over 700. Oddly, none of these SKUs showed up on the Reserved Inventory report. I then went to the regular Manage Inventory page, searched for these specific SKUs and permanently deleted them. (Couldn’t find a way to do it from the FBA Manage Inventory page). After an hour or so, for the first time in two months, my utilization quantity fell below my restock limit, and I can now create FBA shipments. I guess FBA’s claim that “… any reserved inventory (is) not included in the utilization calculation” is not correct. I hope this works for you as well. Many thanks!
Seller_dkkEDSdrtmC5x
Hey Jubileebooks, I hope you had some luck in finding a solution to this issue, I’m currently going through pretty much the same problem. The utilization counts were never completely correct but it was never a problem, this particular quarter though the storage limits have been a bit more restrictive to the point of blocking in new shipments. But the math does not add up no matter how you slice it.
One thing you can check is if you have items that are in liquidations/removal procedures. They say those do not count against the utilization limit but in my experience, they do. Either way, in my case even if you did count everything in removal and FC transfer/reserved as well as the active items, there would still be a discrepancy of around 600 units.
I’ve contacted Seller Support a few times now and have been getting the same strange responses. At first they tried explaining to me how IPI scores/utilization quantities work in the first place. Then they kept telling me to consider the shipments into the calculation (which just like you, there are 0 incoming/being processed shipments). Ultimately they ruled there was no issue at all, before I sent them a careful count of what the accurate numbers should be. Now they are “looking into it with their internal teams”.
Sad to hear they have been giving you this run around for almost two months now, I suspect my own case probably won’t be solved any time soon either then. You’d think such a discrepancy would be impossible in the first place, as they are just automatically counting units, right?
Seller_dkkEDSdrtmC5x
Glad to have provided a little bit of insight into the issue!
It doesn’t seem to be charging any storage fees for any of those items on my end thankfully, but it really does contradict Amazon’s statement that reserved inventory doesn’t count against utilization. You’d also hope that their system would check the basic discrepancy since they know only one item was ever received on that SKU, so how could there ever be more than 1 item reserved? Even if someone scanned it multiple times, that would probably register as multiple items received, multiple available and you’d only face a problem if multiple items sell, right?
As for me, it appears I’m hit with a nastier version of the glitch, since it only affected listings that have been sold and deleted a long time ago. Any attempts to interact with these SKUs and the system rightfully tells me that SKU doesn’t exist and therefore can’t be edited/deleted. All of my “phantom units” also brought back "phantom SKU"s that don’t exist anywhere but the specific FBA Inventory tool, while also being unfortunately counted against my utilization.
Anyhow, I do encourage people to do this quick check, even if your inventory limits are good for now, to see if any space is being wasted in these phantom FC transfer units. https://sellercentral.amazon.com/inventoryplanning/manageinventoryhealth?sort_column=reserved&sort_direction=desc&sort_age_bucket=&sort_column_sub= should be a direct link to the tool, sorted from largest to smallest so others can check for odd amounts of Reserved items too.
Seller_yJrgQZVX1vxTR
Glad to hear you found something that worked! It is such a relief to have finally resolved this issue.
