Cant make any shipments because they are at capacity all the time… Its become a game where I try every morning to see if space has opened up. Even their new Amazing West Coast Palletized warehouses… how are those already full they just opened?
Any tricks would be appreciated
I don’t use AWD myself, but I did see a post on the NSFE saying that they had talked with AWD reps at Accelerate who supposedly confirmed that AWD is completely full. It sounds like people trying to get lots of inventory here before tariffs went into affect or got higher combined with people sending in inventory for Q4 have just completely maxed them out.
The trick is to not use AWD. Just buy capacity at FBA. If you have a decently successful business on Amazon, you will get all your money back via performance credits. We even got all our money back for Sept (by the 12th), and we bought 5 months of space and filled it all up for Q4.
Yes, you will pay more for freight and storage fees, but it’s no different than years past. What you will have is inventory at FBA to sell….
Our Amazon SAS manager went out of her way to tell me that someone on the inside told her that we were doing the right thing by avoiding AWD this year.
We are hoping to go AWD next year but it seems they aren’t even close to making this work right so we’ll see. Just really glad that there’s still an option to buy space, now that limits are so tight, and even gladder that we get all of our $ back for that space - even obscene amounts of space…
This year we thought would be like the last 2 with tight limits and notes to stock up by end of sept for all of Q4. Obviously that caused issues for Amazon last year so they didn’t come out with that directive this year. We need to plan 3 months in advance for production line time at my partner’s facility so we didn’t have the luxury of waiting to see if they were doing the same this year. In terms of cash flow it sucks but we didn’t know.
As it stands now, we get 250 feet. We need 475 feet to operate normally (never dropping below 70 days). It’s funny that this is what Amazon wants, but they don’t give you the space to do it so you have to buy it. LTL check ins and spread around takes a min of 6 weeks, which oddly enough, is almost 70 days. LOL
Amazon is such a ■■■■■■■ mess.
Sharing this as an example of how to outsmart Amazon, which we have always been able to do with every change they make at FBA. Redacting to try and protect revealing our sales but if you want to dig in, you can probably figure it out. Nobody knows who we are anyway so it doesn’t matter. Let’s just say we do OK on Amazon. The secret is LOTS OF INVENTORY AT FBA….. Fast time to home = conversion - PERIOD…. The only way to achieve that is to overload FBA sadly.
Oh.. If you do end up buying space - bid as early as you can. We did Sept in July. It’s less than half the price when you do it in advance. Pro Tip….
Thats good to know, Thanks!
That’s some kind of BS I must say… That 1347 feet you got there, how much space is that in terms of months? Our 256 Base is less than 2…. We move 160K units through FBA annually.
Nobody can explain to me at Amazon why we are so restricted. Assuming you have a very seasonal business with limits jumping in Oct / Nov? Ours ain’t budging….
Its about 6 months worth of space- We don’t go over 3 as a rule. Actually we make more B2B products and November/December are some of our slowest months of the year. People don’t typically think of our products when it comes to holiday gifts lol. Maybe its the size of our products?- most are at the larger end of standard size.
I suspect there are multiple reasons for this:
Nah….. It’s always been like this for us, since Amazon introduced limits. Same old song and dance.
I’ve heard from sellers that are in the same boat and then there are others that have more space than they need for no discernable reason.
The roads to my local post office are a bit curvy, but FWD is working well enough.
Well ain’t that some ■■■■…..
Amazon moved to Oct early! Thankfully we created our last shipment plans on Friday. Still had 150 feet to spare with our buy. These numbers only reflect on hands and not in transits which is new….
Gonna be a lot of pissed off last min sellers who wanted to maximize their inbound by waiting till the last min if they bought space for Sept.
Looking at this from the view of a smaller seller, Amazon’s claim is that one would save on inbound shipping fees (and “placement fees”) vs the newish “ship half your stuff all the way across the continent” impact of “Ship to FBA” or the placement fees to ship to a single FC in a “region”.
But there are many dire warnings and stories of Amazon SNAFUs in their “automatic management” of the AWD inventory and replenishment of FBA inventory.
Is it really that bad?
And where are the cost savings?
Comparing shipping the same 7 cases of a single SKU, I get:
AWD $101.50
FCs $106.62 (Amazon picks placement)
So I save $5? Not even a buck a case? And risk 2 additional layers of Amazon incompetence (a) at the AWD, and (b) in transport between AWD and the FCs?
Why would anyone even consider AWD as an option unless they simply could not ship “as required” to FCs, due to minimum orders from a contract manufacturer?
I think there is information missing.
For instance with AWD - you waive placement as long as you allow Amazon to auto-replenish inventory to FC’s and you can set min and max thresholds as rules which is still considered auto-replenish. So as long as 70% of inventory from AWD is managed auto even with rules in place, you won’t get placement fees at any quantity.
Obviously, there is considerable caution:
So just my two cents. It’s inevitable - I think Amazon is here to stay for the next decade or so until a new breakthrough happens that is related to Ai - but my guess is, it won’t happen until after the next economic downturn where a lot of things get shaken up.
By then, I would’ve already looked at other horizons.
@ASV_Vites has some good isnights here.
Well, sure you don’t pay “placement fees”, but I can avoid that now, all one has to do is to have a mere 5 cartons to ship at a time, and enough foresight to be able to ship roughly 2 to 3 weeks ahead of need.
But worse, Amazon can’t work out for itself when to fetch from AWD to replenish FCs? So one must set their own thresholds, and risk Amazon then charging the comical and costly “low inventory fee” when there are thousands of units at AWD? 'Splain this one to me slow, so I won’t miss the nuance.
I can’t even find out what the lag time is from AWD deciding to ship to FBA “in stock” status, so how does one set a threshold based upon how many sales per day? I built a model of their “low inventory fee” calculated daily based upon the last 4 years of daily sales figures, as a highly seasonal product gets nipped by this fee if one does not deliberately overstock after the peak of the seasonal demand. It was crazy how much more space I will occupy in their FCs in Sept and Oct, when sales are steadily declining, but they made the rules up, I just have to comply with them.
But it looks to me like AWD won’t help anyone except those importing by the container load with no warehouse of their own. It certainly does not help a US-based manufacturer like us.
Ok maybe I misunderstood but my understanding was costs were at parity or more using AWD because of placement fees. But if that’s not the case, then theoretically, AWD should be cheaper to store unless you’re storing in your garage, rent free.
But you won’t have that issue if you set your own thresholds. We are presuming that the restock algo would be faulty for one reason or another. Let’s say, the algo can’t account for seasonality despite claims of doing so, then the manual rules you set allow you to ensure that you are not faced with placement fees nor are limited by capacity (again I could be wrong)
yah, there are most certainly nebulous portions to all of this. do doubt. But you can guess 2-3 weeks from AWD to FC and then from FC 1.5 weeks to reserve obviously you account for seasonality and peak congestion on your own.
agreed. This is key, the volume has to be large enough and only you can do the math because no one has those variables but you.
