How to read and track your Amazon FBA inventory

Amazon’s FBA Inventory API documentation defines five quantities. Fulfillable is inventory that can be picked, packed and shipped. Inbound is inventory on its way to Amazon’s fulfilment network. Reserved is inventory in the network that is being picked, packed and shipped, or set aside for measurement, sampling or other internal processes. Unfulfillable is inventory that cannot be sold. Researching covers units that are misplaced or warehouse damaged and are being confirmed at a fulfilment centre.

A sixth state, stranded, is described in an Amazon post on the Amazon.in forums as FBA stock with no active offer attached, so it cannot sell. Typical causes are a deleted or closed listing, a switch from Fulfilled by Amazon to Fulfilled by Merchant, or a listing problem. The fix is to reactivate the listing or remove the stock, and the post says to allow 24 hours for the status to update once the cause is fixed.

An Amazon staff post on the Amazon.in forums splits Reserved into three. Customer orders are units tied to orders being prepared, released once shipped. FC transfers are units moving between fulfilment centres, which the post says usually takes 22 to 25 days and sometimes longer; the units can sell during this time but are not eligible for Prime delivery until they arrive. FC processing covers units held for checks such as size and weight, investigations or pending removal orders, typically a few days to two weeks.

The practical effect is that Reserved stock is not equally available. Customer-order units are already sold. Transfer units are slow to become useful. Processing units may return to Fulfillable within days. The Reserved Inventory report breaks this down, and the post recommends it for tracking reserved units.

Suppose a product sells 12 units a day and the dashboard shows 140 Fulfillable, 200 Inbound, 60 Reserved and 25 Unfulfillable. These numbers are illustrative. The total of 425 sounds comfortable, but Fulfillable stock covers only 140 ÷ 12, about 11.7 days of sales.

Now apply a reorder point. Reorder point = daily sales × total lead time + safety stock. If your supplier needs 14 days, transit and check-in take 10, and you want 7 days of buffer, that is 12 × 24 + 12 × 7 = 372 units. Counting Fulfillable plus Inbound (340), you are already below it, so the next order should be placed now. Use your own lead times, because the check-in period is the part sellers most often underestimate.

Stock that sits in Unfulfillable or Stranded may still be taking up space you pay for, since Amazon’s FBA page describes storage as charged per cubic foot per month. The rate differs between Amazon pages, so read the current one in the Seller Central fee schedule. Review the reason shown for each unfulfillable unit, then decide whether to remove it, dispose of it or fix the cause.

If you think units were lost or damaged inside a fulfilment centre, raise a case with Seller Support with shipment IDs and dates. The Inventory Ledger report is described in Amazon’s documentation as being like a bank statement of your inventory, with a detailed view for tracing movements to and from fulfilment centres. Eligibility for any compensation is set by Amazon’s policy, so read the current rules before filing.

An Amazon staff reply on the Amazon.in forums describes an aged inventory surcharge on units held for 181 days or more, assessed from an inventory snapshot taken on the 15th of each month, on top of monthly storage. Age is counted first in, first out across the network, so a sale or removal uses up your oldest units first. The reply names two ways out: submit a removal or disposal order before the cleanup deadline, or run an Outlet deal at a discount of at least 20 percent.

Treat the dates and thresholds as something to confirm, since Amazon changes them. What does not change is the habit: look at which SKUs will cross the age line within the next two months, and decide on a discount or a removal before the snapshot, not after the charge.

Once a week, open the inventory dashboard and check each SKU’s Fulfillable days of cover, the Reserved Inventory report, the Stranded Inventory report, the Restock Inventory recommendations and the storage fee report. Amazon’s developer documentation lists reports with exactly these names, and an Amazon.in post places Restock Inventory under Inventory, then Inventory Planning Dashboard. That post is from 2018, so the menu may have moved.

Treat the Restock tool as an input, not an answer. Amazon’s own post says it is not a substitute for your own judgment about demand. Amazon’s global selling blog also offers a rule of thumb to maintain four weeks of inventory cover, which is a reasonable starting point if your lead time is shorter than that. Set your own cover targets per SKU from the lead time in your reorder calculation.