Seeing that our cubic storage is essentially going to triple our current usage - I wanted to survey how many of you were keeping more than 1.5months of your FBA inventory at Amazon FC’s.
Since we have our own storage facility that’s the maximum we keep to avoid unnecessary Amazon FC storage fees keeping the 14-21 days it would take for amazon to receive inventory and distribute it.
Does that sound about right? Is their a specific metric that you guys use based on reports for better management?
I haven’t gotten around to using an inventory management software yet - I think I won’t need it until/if I get to $10m annually.
In our detailed analysis and personal experience, if you have less than 65 days at FBA, you are missing out ON A LOT of sales. I don’t know what you sell but if it’s a commodity product that people need, it’s even worse to keep less.
We lose our Amazon’s Choice badges as soon as we drop below 60 days to our competition of “like” product.
Sales of those items drop 35% when that happens. There’s also a correlation to overall unit volume. Our examples are of items that sell hundreds of units per day.
For example - We have a listing with 11K units at FBA and it should have AC (and has before) but we don’t have it at the moment - also organically ranked first for all its major keywords. Our competitor has it and their price is $1 more for 50% less servings.
When checking the 20 zip codes that we target for same day delivery we know exactly when we will or will not have the AC badge. That’s the number 1 driver of that badge - inventory.
In a perfect world, 90 days is the key to success on Amazon. Others will argue with me but I have spent years studying this and complaining about the limits because they have cost us dearly.
The main reason we got SAS support was to get exceptions to the limit. We just got SAS in Jan which was bad timing and now SAS is saying exceptions are going away forever when the new capacity limit manger comes online and I’m OK with that. We we save some $ and drop SAS.
I’ve kind of had it with Amazon at this point. It’s a constant battle against one ridiculous problem after another or one fraudulent competitor after another. It’s exhausting and leaves no time to actually grow a business.
Our limit is going up 5X on 3-1 and we intend to use every last inch of it so we can set it and forget it… Our products are tiny. Our monthly rent at 500 cubic feet will inconsequential. That’s 70,000 units for us.
In my world, if you can’t deliver to the whole country same day or max next day, you lose. Too many choices and the Amazon consumer is too stupid to know what real quality is anyway so it doesn’t matter and don’t bother trying. Cheap wins no matter what.
I have a container on its way and placing another order in a couple weeks to be overstocked. We just got over our supply chain hurdle by changing our manufacturer and that was a half a year process in between fine tuning and confirming samples. I know its a tad different with you since you’re domestic and vertically integrated in your supply chain.
For me personally, less than 65 days and I still have the choice for a very low number sfr keyword. But I suspect overall you’re correct. I will definitely heed your advice going forward and play with stock levels. The goal this year is to never have stock issues ever again and this took about 2 years to pull off.
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don’t see it yet 
