Anyone else seeing FBA pending orders in the thousands? We have 3k pending orders, some over a month old.
I did a deep dive into the pending orders and it isn’t concentrated on specific skus, it is across all listings.
Is anyone else seeing this? Wondering if there is an issue with Amazon’s credit card processing system? Could there really be issues with 3000 customer’s credit cards? Any other ideas? I’m at a loss trying to explain this to our internal team.
Thanks!
It happens when people order multiple things but choose the single shipment option for various reasons. With the delays in FBA inbound your orders are probably waiting for other backordered items to be received and shipped with your item. Happens all the time and more this time of year as transfers and receiving take forever.
Thank you! I hadn’t taken that into account, that totally makes sense.
We are also seeing an uptick in cancellations. Sigh. 
Look at it this way… Cancellations cost you far less than returns.
Do you have anything on Subscribe and Save? That’s when you’ll see tons of pending FBA orders. Those orders get placed 10 days in advance to give buyers an opportunity to cancel. We find that 50%+ do just that. They bang us out for a discount or a discount + a coupon discount and walk away.
The good news is Amazon then blocks them from subscribing again which is nice. We see a lot of buyers come back for more after they cancelled their plan and I’ve yet to see a buyer be able to get it again. I’ve looked at hundreds of thousands of orders 1 by 1 and take note of a lot of things to better understand our customers (well, Amazon’s customers).
We have 2 SKUs in Subscribe and Save, but neither of them are in the pending orders. That is good info to know about Amazon actually blocking customers from trying to subscribe again though just to get the discount.
Still looking at 3k pending orders and some are now 3 months old. Seller support just provides the canned answer that pending orders will be cancelled after 21 days yada yada yada
3K pending is a lot. How many orders do you generally get in a month?
We avg around 10K. At the moment we have 895 pending, the oldest is from 10-29. 99% of our pending orders are within 2 weeks and all of them beyond the last 4 days are subscribe and save orders.
Again, I don’t know what your volume is but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have so many that are that old, especially if they aren’t subscribe and save.
There are anti-competitive ways that bad guys use in an attempt to tie up inventory. If this is something new to your account, it could be just that.
This type of thing used to be a frequent topic of conversation but I haven’t seen it come up in a long time.
We see a similar volume as you do. We’ve seen increased pending orders in Q4 before, but nothing like this.
I will do some digging around in here to read about bad actors tying up inventory, that could potentially be part of it. Thank you for that tip!