My understanding was that they could pierce inventory but if they can’t and since I have no experience with cpg products - I could be wrong.
We’ve been selling expiration dated products for years. Our items have shelf lives of 9 months to 3 years. I can’t find the specific case, but on two occasions seller support has told us their system:
- software picks which warehouse to ship product to customer
- software picks the oldest unit in warehouse to be shipped to customer
So, it’s kind of like FIFO.
See, this is the kind of information that would be VERY useful if they officially published it.
I’m still hesitant to trust Amazon on this because though that makes sense, there’s nothing documented about it.
Yup…and I’ve asked for links the the official policy, but never get it.
This is the exact same information we got from our first SAS manager that started his career at Amazon as a fulfillment center lead.
If this weren’t the case, we’d be in a lot of trouble by now, entering our 7th year using FBA to store and ship goods that have 24 and 36 month shelf lives and doing nothing to control or monitor exp dates at FBA beyond what I mentioned upthread with the occasional dud.
This makes sense to me.
Mainly because it also explains things like this:
FBA sends out the oldest FC stock–even if it’s barely held together by tape and prayer.
Thanks for the great answers everyone! You dropped many golden nuggets!
My 2 cents on various possibilities to manage expiration-dated products, please feel free to criticize 
or expand on them:
1 SKU Only
This is the simplest approach, but it has the drawback that you lose track of your batches. This means that you can only hope that your inventory rotates completely before your oldest batches expire. The longer your product’s shelf-life, the higher the chances of this happening.
Switching between the same 2 SKUs over and over
This approach gives you a bit more control over your inventory, since you can monitor where are the units at each moment, and how many you have left.
To work, you send one batch with SKU-X and replenish your ASIN with SKU-Y as soon as you run low on inventory, and you close the offer for the newly inbound SKU until the older one goes out of stock.
You then continue to switch between these SKUs.
The problem with this method is that you you are stopping an SKU from selling, affecting the ASIN’s organic rankings, as units may go missing in specific geographic areas because older stock is only available in a handful of fulfillment centers.
Another caveat is that if your units are reserved or lost in the fulfillment network for a while, and you have to replenish the same SKU because the other SKU is already running low before the reserved or lost units are found, you will end up with two (or more) commingled batches.
Different SKU for each new batch
Not much to say here on how it works and what the advantages are.
You can confidently keep track of each expiration date you have on hand at the fulfillment centers at any point in time.
Becomes very overwhelming if you have several ASINs to manage. Cluttered inventory and data spread.
Same problem here with geographic availability and organic ranks.
You may be stuck for a very long time with many different SKUs with a bunch of reserved, or missing units.
Can you afford to label each lot differently?
(we can’t)
I would switch the middle to “different SKU each year”
This way if a lost unit shows up after a year or two (and that does happen) you can dispose of it.
Sounds good! I mean, it’s a start 
thank you for sharing
edit
Uh by the way, may I ask you whether you use a single SKU for each ASIN, or adopt a different approach to keep track of them?
thanks
This is precisely what I realized today we could do in our situation, but was waiting for someone to add some more ideas ! I love this forum
edit 
Different SKU each year
Read GGX comment which is on point.
ASV’s solution is good for him because he sells only a few fast moving ASINs, so it tends to work out. If your ASINs don’t move that fast it could be problematic to rely on Amazon to do it right.
He has maybe 8 restocks before the first batch expires, so even with some randomness in the system’s effectiveness it’s unlikely expired product sits around. He also has the advantage of being the manufacturer so it goes from production line to FBA warehouse. Resellers receive stock that’s already been sitting around for months.
If you only have 2 or 3 restocks before the first batch expires the probability of a problem goes up.
Welcome to the club, my friend.
The cumulative wisdom of the seasoned and savvy forum veterans who participate in the SAS/SellersAskSellers Forum may not yet exceed that which could once be found over in the various iterations of the ASF (“Amazon Seller Forums”) - it takes time - but there’s a reason why so many members of our Seller Community suspect that the SAS will put paid to the past in eventually far-exceeding it, Good Lord Willing An’ The Crick Don’t Rise.
I’ll agree with you on this. Our situation is pretty unique and advantageous when it comes to FBA.
We sell through each batch in under 2 months and hold 4 months of inventory at FBA to maintain same day Prime.
Our assortment is small, (10 ASIN’s), under 3 brand names and it is easy to keep track of.
I’ve got this down to a science at this point thankfully. If you are a reseller of a perishable product, I would imagine lots of pitfalls that need to be managed in a more robust way.
With all of that said, I’m sticking with my belief that there’s more going on at FBA to control this than most think.
thank you!!
We are actually a trusted partner of the manufacturer, and they supply us directly.
Our concern arose because these products technically have a very long shelf life, but in practice, we’ve noticed that their quality can deteriorate if they remain in storage for too long in Amazon.
This is why the idea of using a “different SKU each year” appears to be the most sensible solution for us: long enough to prevent us from having to manage numerous codes and offers simultaneously, and it ensures that no new inventory from that batch enters the supply chain. Therefore, any remaining or “reappearing” inventory is likely to be limited in quantity and easier to manage.
Hi - we have product that expires going to FBA, and Amazon actually does a good job of following FIFO. The auto removals do pull the oldest product out. We check the FBA inventory and usually manually remove inventory that has hit the 91 day mark. Just our preference to make sure inventory is fresh for customers. So, we usually remove stuff before the auto removal triggers.
THAT BEING SAID (and a cautionary note) - we now have a major problem because we removed stale inventory, and Amazon is bigly mad that we removed it before they could charge us long term storage fees. They have now blocked those ASINs and we are not allowed to ship any new inventory in.
I have been working with an internal team at Amazon to deal with this issue, and one suggestion that the Amazonian made was to ship in new product before removing stale or expired product. We haven’t tried that yet, so it remains to be seen if it will work, but that’s what we encountered because we want to be responsible sellers and give customers the best product.
They used to do promotions where removal fees are waived for certain periods of time. If you remove something during that time period you’re prohibited from re-sending that inventory. This could be the reason you’re now blocked.