Has anyone found a way to appeal or avoid the low inventory fees successfully? This happened to me the same time last year. We have some seasonal products that are popular for the end of school year / mother’s day / father’s day – all which have now passed.
On the left it says we have 19-22 “historical days of supply”. In the middle, it says inventory is a ‘healthy’ level with significantly more than the recommended min. level. And on the far right it says we have 57-129 days of supply.
I have my own warehouse, so I like to only keep 30-45 days of stock in Amazon’s. But now I’m being hit with insane inbound fees, high tariffs, and these low inventory fees. Amazon just keeps chipping away at my margins. And I know as soon as I decide to send more units in, I’ll be overstocked and have to pay storage fees.
And yes, I’ve tried FBM, but the majority of sales are FBA.
It is a very tricky thing to do. As you pointed out, sometimes, when you send too much stock, product might not continue to sell as well and you might get hit with LTSF. You just have to do your best to find the balance between both scenarios using current and past volume. Something else I do is throttling sales for products that have hit the low-level-inventory fee by raising their price; that way, I’ll still keep decent margins while volume will decrease, which in turn will increase the Historical days of supply. Sometimes, I even dramatically increase the price to avoid sales at all (rather than closing the product, which I think would have a negative impact on our IPI). That way, if product has less than 20 sales in a week, it’ll be exempted from that fee the following week, giving you a couple of weeks while the Historical days of supply recover. Of course, all of this is at the expense of sales.
The “Historical Days of Supply” is a 90-day backward looking average. But my understanding is that Amazon uses the HIGHER of the two numbers - short term (last 30 days) average and long term (last 90 days) average to determine if they will charge you the Low Inventory Fee.
So this is worth trying to deal with seller support, as they don’t seem to be following their own rules here, as the 30-day average should be higher, unless the numbers at right are due to very recent shipments hitting your inventory total.
That is correct. Also, they sometimes charge the low-level-inventory fee for products that have sold 20 units or less in the previous week, which are supposed to be exempt. I’ve tried to fight this a couple of times, but haven’t been successful.
