There may be situations you don’t expect to come upon when you are selling your products on Amazon, and one of these is reserved inventory. If you are running low on stock on one of your top sellers, but Amazon won’t let you send in more stock, it may be due to the Amazon reserved inventory system causing a restriction. When it comes to storing products within the Amazon FBA system, the system doesn’t only take into account the inventory that is sitting on the shelves in the warehouse, but also inbound shipments and unused plans, reserved inventory, and current pending orders. If you are getting stuck in not being able to send in more stock, you need to take a closer look at how Amazon reserved inventory works, and how to better manage it.

What Does Reserved Mean for Amazon Inventory?

Generally, when inventory is reserved within the Amazon FBA inventory management system that means it is currently being transferred between Amazon warehouses in order to get them closer to customers for 1 and 2 day shipping, or being sidelined for further processing before being made available. Further processing can include anything from pending customer orders, to units being checked into or out of FBA warehouses. If customers are seeing “in stock soon” that generally means the inventory is being shipped between FBA warehouses, but is still available for purchase.

When your inventory is being processed by FBA warehouses, it could be marked as both being transferred, and being processed at the same time. 

Where to Find your Amazon Reserved Inventory Levels

You can check your Amazon Reserved Inventory Levels through your Seller Central Account

1. Log into your Seller Central Account
2. Visit the Reports page
3. In the inventory section click the “Fulfillment” button
4. Go to “Reserved Inventory”
5. Access you daily reserved inventory reports

How can Amazon Reserved Inventory Affect Your Bottom Line?

Due to recent issues with having all their FBA warehouses working at full capacity, they have started counting reserved inventory against FBA sellers to ensure that their warehouses don’t get overcrowded. Due to this, it becomes harder to replenish stock due to maxing out your storage limit with stock that is being processed and going out of stock more often. This can hurt your ranking, sales, IPI score, and restock limits.

Quick Tips to Manage Amazon Reserved Inventory

1. Utilize your storage space more efficiently: check your utilization quantities and restock limits in the inventory performance tab of Seller Central account, attempt to maintain a 30% utilization rate, turning over inventory every month, giving you three months worth of storage.
2. Get your inventory checked in faster by using UPS Freight, or mixing it with small parcel deliveries.
3. Create removal orders for stock that isn’t selling to free up inventory.
4. Using FBM: having a backup warehouse, so you can switch from FBA to FBM immediately when stock is low, and ship from your own warehouse.
5. Remove unused shipping plans, as inbound shipments affect your reserved inventory limit. If you can’t remove them yourself, contact seller support.

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