Thanks to the new Send to Amazon program, Amazon now does not consider any receiving count or transfer data to mean anything. Essentially, if Amazon receives your inventory, then subsequently loses it, they simply say you never sent it in the first place, by doing a negative receipt at the location they transferred it to.
Here is the message from the “Executive Team” using the Jeff@amazon email regarding this issue.
Well TBH, the amount they lose is very tiny as we just did inventory and wrote off more this year to a roof leak and a single forklift accident than all the Amazon lost inventory for a year for a multi million dollar operation. I’m more concerned with the potential risk of this program and the precedent it sets for inventory control at Amazon. If was not like this before Send to Amazon came out.
Currently the $ amount they have negative received and eventually never found is less than the hourly rate of our lowest paid employee if they did the emailing regarding the issue.
I am pissed about the risk and the principle of the problem… well currently anyway. If we had items that were a few $K, my tune would change.
This is fake news. My SAS guy ran an Amazon FC for several years. As unbelievable as it sounds, they scan every freaking unit, even those that are in sealed cases. They go on a belt under a scanner. (the new “visual scanner”) Anything that fails to scan, gets hand scanned with a Zebra scanner.
When we ran into that “72 units out of 6000 didn’t scan” issue again recently we discussed the internal process in detail. Didn’t sound like he was making it up either and I have to imagine the SOP is the same across the network.
Sounds like a giant waste of time to me and they still get it wrong.
I don’t believe a lot of what I hear or read at Amazon but this guy has no reason to make ■■■■ up in this instance and we did get that issue resolved and removed from our “PROBLEM RATE”
Yea, we got a problem rate. What’s amazon’s problem rate?
Ya, its bullshit, because we have items sent in a single case to the same FC that gets split up to single unit transfers and then we get -1 at random locations.
Couldn’t these be from changing locations within the facility?
The most recent system I helped with over the system showed this in the data (negative receipts on movement) but the actual inventory at the facility never changed. It was a piece of documenting the location swap.
I know you’ve seen this change your physical FBA count so guess not. Have you actually correlated the negative receipts with a “live” change in total FBA inventory for an ASIN?
Just curious…
Since both of us have looked into this (you way more than me) and have both come back with very minimal actual losses when it’s all said and done, as annoying and seemingly unprofessional as it seems, is it really worth all the person angst and time?
In a past life I was working with a 3PL run by DHL and they lost a few hundred grand a year.
I think DHL got out of the 3PL business after us because it was such a disaster. We split from them after a year which was a huge deal starting all over again with the level of inventory we had and the complexity of properly storing / recording supplements. Something Amazon doesn’t do.
IDK how they get away without recording the lot # of what they ship to each and every customer. That’s the law for recalls.
Then again, they don’t rotate stock for perishables which I still can’t believe. That can’t be true. It’s 2023.
Yes. This has caught our attention several times where inventory is on hand one day and gone the next due to a negative receipt at a location it was at previously. I showed an example in the private chat where I was over one day then short the next. The change in total changed with each iteration of what they received and un-received.
Sorry, I forgot. Simply insane then and the “executive team” tells you there’s nothing to see here.
I suspect this hasn’t been caught by bigger players because bigger players probably have inventory levels that would never make this really visible. Those bigger players probably have people managing the accounts that have no ownership stake or care.
Everyone else probably isn’t smart enough to realize it’s happening so Amazon can go wild doing whatever they want unchecked.
This has to be some sort of programming glitch. It’s since STA so that makes sense. Amazon can never do anything right the first time. With that said, STA has been around for a long time. Something this blatantly obvious and wrong should have been fixed by now.
ETA - Amazon never fixed the sales total issues from early Jan. Hopefully we got paid for those phantom sales. It’s throwing off our totals though and our goalpost for 2023 since I don’t know what the real totals are supposed to be for those 2.5 days. Well done…
Same situation for me too, and usually the random FC would receive “1” from transfer, than a few days later “-1” from receipt. Fortunately, my last couple un-received units were found and added back as Receipt again by the FCs before the shipment were closed.
I think it’s more like human “glitch”. Somebody at those FC couldn’t locate the units after the units were already received from the transfer, and instead of mark those units as misplaced, they just mark them as not received from the original shipment, maybe they don’t want to get blamed or penalized for lossing inventory. If those units happen to turn up, then they add them back as receipt again to even out the numbers.
If the units don’t turn up before the shipment is close, then depends on the the amont of money, sometimes it’s really not worth all the effort we have to go through to try to ask for reimbursement with reconcile of shipment.
I don’t think its humon. I think it is all automated because the overwhelming majority of the time the stuff shows up later and is corrected on a scale that cannot be human.
Here are the positives and negatives alone for yesterday. We don’t ship in one unit shipments, meaning each of these locations is doing this.
It sounds like they are claiming IXD centers have different operations than a FC which actually accepts the product for inventory. I have no idea if this is true.
I have enough problems with Amazon losing my stuff and shrugging at me when i show them evidence. I don’t want to deal with this at all.
tells you there’s nothing to see here.