The Manage Excess Inventory tool helps you quickly identify listings that may have excess inventory levels and review relevant information to take the appropriate action. The tool highlights factors that may be limiting sales of your products and suggests actions that could help you improve inventory performance.

Important: Manage Excess Inventory is intended to provide you with information to help manage your inventory levels, but use of this tool should not be a substitute for your own judgment about demand for your products. Many factors may influence actual demand for your products, including price fluctuations, consumer demand shifts, and changes in competing offers for those products. Recommendations are not a guarantee of future results, and sellers remain responsible for determining their prices and inventory levels.

Maintaining between 30 to 60 days of inventory can be an effective way to maximize in-stock performance and avoid unnecessary costs. By default, inventory is identified as potentially excess if all of the following conditions are met:

At least one unit of inventory is more than 90 days old,

The product has over 90 days of supply, and

The cost of holding your inventory without taking any action is more than the cost of taking action (such as reducing prices to increase sell through or removing excess units)

We calculate excess inventory based on your economic inputs (like unit cost and recovery rate) and sales data (like demand forecasts and price elasticity). The estimated excess quantity is the number of units for which the cost of holding your inventory would likely be more than the cost of taking action (such as reducing prices to increase sell through or removing excess units). This value is based on product demand and your costs (including fees, unit costs, and cost of capital inputs), and estimates the level of inventory that could give you the highest return on your inventory investment.

For an FBA listing, available quantity refers to fulfillable inventory units that are available for customers to buy. It does not include products being shipped to fulfillment centers that have not yet been received, unfulfillable units (such as damaged units), or units bound to a customer order. For a seller-fulfilled listing, the total quantity is the same as the available quantity, as specified by the seller. Only available inventory is included in the excess inventory calculations

The estimated costs you would incur if you take no action to help sell through or remove your inventory. This includes storage fees, including any long-term storage fees, and the holding cost of capital, if applicable.

You can set your own unit cost and recovery rate per SKU by selecting Update product settings in the drop-down menu to make changes for individual SKUs, or by clicking the Product setting button and uploading these settings in bulk. You can make changes to your default settings by clicking the Inventory settings link. After making changes, please allow up to 24 hours for the changes to be reflected in your recommendations.

We only display your products on this page if your inventory has units that have been identified as excess.

Our goal is to help you easily identify potentially excess inventory and provide recommended actions aimed at helping you better manage the return on your inventory investment.

Recommended actions

The recommended action is the default action shown in the drop-down menu to the right of each product. Recommendations are based on economic calculations specific to your business and products. You can take another action by selecting from the drop-down menu. Possible recommended actions are:

Edit listing – This recommendation appears when your listing may have quality issues. By clicking on this action, you will be taken to the product catalog. Look for the alerts in the catalog to fix the listing issues.

Improve keywords – Your product may have low traffic because customers cannot find your product via search. This action helps you optimize how your listing appears in searches.

Advertise listing – This starts the Sponsored Products workflow. Advertising is a proven way to drive additional traffic to your listing.

Create sales – Based on the price elasticity of this product and your product inputs, we make this recommendation if we feel that you can get a higher return on your inventory by temporarily marking down prices to sell through your inventory faster. We provide a recommended sale price and duration. We may recommend lowering beyond the lowest price to boost sales.

Create removal – We recommend creating a removal order when we feel that you can get a better return on your inventory through sales channels other than Amazon, based on your recovery rate input and product demand. We may not recommend you removal all inventory, just enough to get back to healthy levels.

SKU-level alerts

These alerts help identify listing issues that may be affecting your product visibility and sales.

Quality alert – Indicates that the listing may be incomplete or incorrect. Customers search and browse the Amazon catalog using specific product details. If your listing information is incomplete or incorrect, it becomes more difficult for buyers to find, evaluate, and purchase your inventory. Clicking Edit Listing will allow you to edit the listing and fix quality issues.

Low traffic – Indicates that a low number of potential buyers have seen the listings. Use the Improve Keywords feature in the actions list to optimize how your listing appears in searches. The Advertise Listing feature allows you to advertise through Sponsored Products to drive additional traffic to your listing.

Low conversion – Indicates that potential buyers are viewing the listing but do not follow through and purchase the product. Ensuring a high quality detail page through the Edit Listing feature and pricing competitively through Create Sale or Lower Price helps improve conversion rates. In some cases, due to low demand, we may recommend removing some of the inventory if we calculate that removal is more cost effective than incurring storage fees.

Demand

In addition to the alerts, you can also view how many units of a product have been sold over the last 7, 30, 60, and 90 days by hovering over a product’s Units Sold column. This will allow you to gauge sales relative to your total inventory. If you find that you have an item that you’d like to remove from your inventory, click Create removal order from the action menu.

Inventory settings

In your Inventory Settings, you can enter details about your inventory cost structure to help us to make better recommendations. These settings include:

Cost of purchase – The cost of your products as a percentage of their current selling price. The default value is 50%. You can also enter unit cost at the SKU-level for more accurate recommendations.

Cost of capital – The minimum return you want to earn on your inventory. The typical range is 0-25%. The default is 15%.

Recovery rate – The expected recovery as a percentage of the cost if you removed your inventory from Amazon and sold the inventory on your own. The recovery rate should refer to all of your inventory, not a single unit. For example, if there are 5 units of a SKU, and you can recover 50% on all units through liquidation, then the input should be 50%. However, if you can only recover 50% of 3 units and 0% for 2 units, the input should be 30%. The default is 30%. If you do not have a set cost-recovery channel, like a buy-back contract with your supplier, we suggest you set this value to 0%.

Your feedback is important for helping us improve our inventory management tools. If you think there may be an opportunity for improvement, please provide us feedback in one of the following ways:

Rate the page using the Feedback link on the Manage Excess Inventory page

Select Improve recommendations in the drop-down menu to the right of each product

Email [email protected]

The estimated number of days your current inventory supply will last based on the projected demand for your product.

The estimated number of units for which the cost of holding your inventory without taking any action is more than the cost of taking action (such as reducing prices to increase sell through or removing excess units). Default is quantity greater than 90 days of supply.

An alert that indicates that fewer buyers are purchasing the product after viewing the listing relative to other listings in the same category.

An alert that indicates that the ASIN listing has a low number of viewers compared to other ASINs in the same category.

For FBA listings, available quantity equals all units that are available for purchase by customers. For seller-fulfilled listings, total quantity is equal to the available quantity that the seller has defined.

The volume in cubic feet that the ASIN is occupying in Amazon fulfillment centers. Available units x volume per unit = cubic feet.

Category of the product for which storage limits are set. Products are categorized in one of six possible storage types: standard-size, oversize, apparel, footwear, flammable, or aerosol.

Sales price recommended to help you sell through your inventory based on your current inventory settings. This value may be different from the lowest price or Buy Box price. We recommend that you keep your product at this price until you have sold through your excess inventory.

If a sale is recommended, this is the estimated sale duration in days that would likely help you sell through your excess inventory.

Estimated storage costs you would incur on your inventory if no action is taken to help sell through or remove your inventory. This includes storage fees, including monthly long-term storage fees, and the holding cost of capital, if applicable.

Note: These values are based on a daily snapshot of your inventory and may differ from your actual fees.

Estimated quantity of inventory that would likely benefit from removal instead of being charged storage fees.