I’ve noticed what appears to be a discrepancy between the Restock Inventory tile on the Seller Central Dashboard (image 1) and what my FBA Inventory page tells me to do (image 2).
Assuming the Tile’s “Sales in the last 30 days” is correct (it is) and assuming the Inventory Page’s “FBA On-Hand” of 90 is correct (I hope it is), then the Tile’s “Days of Supply” is correct while the Tile’s “Total Inventory” (18) is way off.
I’d read here that it’s best to have 90 days of FBA inventory at Amazon, so if my 30-day was 90, I’m planning to send in 180 (I should note that this is a summer product and December our slowest month of the year). My question, though, is why would these two reports (Tile vs. Inventory Page) have different numbers and different recommendations when they should be pulling from the same database?
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Glitch - my issue is the restock amount on a specific SKU accounts for historical sales so its asking me to ship 3 x more than my prior 90 days sale (guessing it takes historic sales numbers but no clue as to how many years back). This is partly why my sales are throttled on that specific SKU but until we can get the conversion rate up - not overstocking on it. FBA life.
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Oh, its worse than THAT, far, far worse.
If you have a seasonal product (I do), you will find that to avoid the pesky “low inventory fee”, you will have to keep sending inventory in well past your peak sales date, even knowing that your sales are ramping down, and if you sell a “summer” product, you are overstocking just in time for the higher storage costs of the Christmas season.
The “historical” days of supply do what it says on the label - they look BACKWARDS. There is no trendline analysis to say “oh, sales are ramping down, so ‘historical’ is misleading”. So, one ends up with a complex spreadsheet model to compare the relative cost of higher storage fees with the cost of “low inventory fees”. The answer is, except for a very low-cost product more suited to eBay, that storage fees are always cheaper than paying low inventory fees.
The outcome here is that Amazon is incentivizing the flooding of their FCs with stuff that WON’T SELL IN WINTER just as the Christmas crunch is happening. They are punishing anyone who does NOT do this.
So, ignore the overt messages on the dashboard and on the inventory screen, and look ONLY at what it will take to avoid low inventory fees, which means you will be sending in what will sell in Q1 and part of Q2 in the prior Q3 and Q4.
Don’t blame me - I just do the math.
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