TIME! It’s all about time and efficiency. Product comes in, gets shoved in the next closest avail location. Exp date is not noted anywhere in the FBA system on their side. They have zero capability to handle this shockingly.
So let’s say 100 pieces of inventory get shipped into a FC. It gets parked far away due to avail space.
2 weeks later, 100 more get shipped in and get parked closer. That further away inventory will never get picked if inventory remains closer to where the picker is going. It’s borderline insanity.
Amazon just marked 126 units of ours expired. That never would have even come close to happening if things were picked even remotely close to FIFO.
Just writing it off. Not getting involved with the complications of sku / date management of inventory. It’s not worth our time.
Our first and third SAS managers both came from managing Amazon FC’s / DC’s - interesting transition that makes no business sense to me because neither have any business experience but I digress. Both of them told me how it works and both “stories” were identical.
Not to say I was shocked to learn the dirty little secrets but it is surprising that Amazon hasn’t put systems in place that have been widely used since the 90’s by everyone else to fix this and help themselves and their valued selling “Partners”