How much of your FBA stock can you actually sell today?

There is one inventory number next to your product in Seller Central, and most restocking decisions get made from it. That number is not one pool. It is four, and only one of them can ship to a customer today.

The gap is not academic. If you see 400 units and 90 of them are not sellable, your real cover is 310. You timed the reorder against 400, so you run out earlier than your own dashboard says. That kind of stockout always arrives as a surprise, because the number you were watching was on the screen the whole time.

The four buckets

The FBA inventory report (Seller Central, Inventory, then the inventory report, or the FBA Inventory Summary in the API) does not return one field. It returns at least four:

  • Available. This is what you can sell today. Only this.
  • Reserved. Physically at Amazon, but held. Not sellable.
  • Inbound. On the way, or there but not yet received. Not sellable.
  • Unfulfillable. There, but Amazon will not ship it to a buyer. Not sellable.

Three of the four cannot be sold, and on the surface their numbers look exactly as confident as the first one.

Reserved is three different things

Reserved is not a single state. The report splits it into three fields, and they mean very different things.

  • Held for a customer order. You sold it and the parcel is going out. This is good news: a high number here means the product is moving.
  • In FC processing. Amazon is doing something with it, typically a count or a check. Normal for a few days.
  • In FC transfer. It is moving between fulfilment centres. Also normal, but if a meaningful quantity sits here for weeks, that is no longer transit.

The practical difference: the first needs nothing from you, the other two need you to watch how long they have been sitting. A few days is the system working. A transfer that has been open for weeks is money that is not working, and nothing will notify you about it.

Unfulfillable has six reasons, and the reason decides what you do

For unsellable stock the report also gives the reason. There are six, and they fall into two groups.

  • Warehouse damaged and carrier damaged. The damage happened on Amazon's side. These are the ones worth opening a case about.
  • Customer damaged and distributor damaged. The damage happened elsewhere, but the unit is still sitting in the warehouse accruing storage fees.
  • Defective and expired. These come from the product or from how you planned the shipment. Expired units are the most telling of the six: they mean you sent in more than you could sell within the shelf life.

That split is not an accounting nuance. In the first group the money is recoverable. In the second, the decision is whether to remove or dispose before it keeps charging you storage. The worse answer is the same in both cases: do nothing, because you never saw it.

How common is this really

Not an estimate. Across 12 seller accounts and 446 inventory lines in our own system, as of 23 September 2026:

  • 13 percent of lines had stock in a reserved state,
  • 4 percent had unfulfillable stock.

Roughly one line in eight is holding stock that cannot be sold today, and one in twenty five is holding stock that will not become sellable on its own. Those figures are one day and those 446 lines, not the market. You can run the same count on your own catalogue, and that is the point.

What to do about it

Four steps, none of them longer than ten minutes.

  1. Open the inventory report and read the four columns separately. If you have been reading the combined number, this is where you find out how much of it is real cover.
  2. Time restocking against available, not against the total. Inbound can count, but with the actual receive date, not the ship date.
  3. Check the reason on every unfulfillable line. Where the damage happened at Amazon, open a case. Where it did not, decide on removal, because storage keeps charging either way.
  4. Write down how long a unit has been reserved. An FC transfer open for more than a week is worth a question.

Why this is worth more than it looks

Most expensive Amazon mistakes are not bad decisions. They are good decisions made on a bad number. Restocking, pricing and ad budget all lean on inventory, and if the inventory figure is 10 or 20 percent above reality, all three are slightly off in the same direction.

The fix is not another tool, it is a habit: stop reading inventory as one number and start reading it as four. The first week that costs five minutes. After that it is a glance.