Which of your FBA products are about to run out? Compare available stock with Amazon's minimum level

The last article was about stock that sits in the warehouse too long. This one is about the other end: products that are about to run out. Running out costs you the sales you miss while the product is unavailable, and the new shipment still has to travel and be received before it can sell again.

The same report covers both ends. It is the FBA Inventory Planning report, and every claim below points at a column in it. We checked the claims on three real reports: one from the US and two from Germany, 71 product rows in total.

Where the report is

In Seller Central it sits in the Inventory menu, under Inventory Planning, where the FBA inventory view can be downloaded. Through the API it is the FBA Inventory Planning report (GET_FBA_INVENTORY_PLANNING_DATA). The column names below are from the downloaded file.

These columns matter for low stock:

  • sku, asin, product-name. Which product.
  • available. Units you can sell today.
  • inbound-quantity. Units on their way to the warehouse.
  • units-shipped-t30, units-shipped-t90. How many units you sold in the last 30 and 90 days.
  • fba-minimum-inventory-level. The stock level Amazon considers the minimum for this product.
  • fba-inventory-level-health-status. Amazon's label for the product: Low stock, Out of stock, Excess, or empty.
  • Short term historical days of supply, Long term historical days of supply, historical-days-of-supply. How many days your stock covers, based on past sales.
  • Recommended ship-in quantity, Recommended ship-in date. How much Amazon suggests you send, and by when.
  • snapshot-date. The day the report is from.

Low stock is one comparison

The status column looks like a judgment Amazon makes somewhere out of view. In the reports we checked, it was a simple comparison.

Every product whose available stock was below fba-minimum-inventory-level was marked Low stock, or Out of stock when available was zero. Every product at or above the minimum had an empty status in the German reports and Excess in the US report. There was no exception in 63 products that had a minimum level.

That means you do not have to wait for the label. Put the two side by side and subtract fba-minimum-inventory-level from available. The products with the largest gap are the ones to ship first.

One number is the larger of two

The report gives you days of supply twice, calculated over a shorter and a longer stretch of past sales, and then a third column, historical-days-of-supply. In all 52 rows where the three had a value, the third column was simply the larger of the first two.

Read the two source columns, not only the summary. If the short-term figure is much lower than the long-term one, the product usually sells faster now than it did before, and the summary column hides that because it shows the larger number.

The ship-in date can already be in the past

The recommended ship-in date is easy to read as a deadline ahead of you. Compare it with snapshot-date first.

In one of the German reports, all eight products that were out of stock had a recommended ship-in date before the report date: seven of them three days before, one a day before. The recommendation was already late when the report was generated. For those products the question is not when to ship, but how fast you can.

Not only the flagged products get a recommendation

It is tempting to filter the report to Low stock and Out of stock and stop there. In the reports we checked, eight products with no status at all also had a recommended ship-in quantity and date, including one with 193 units available.

Filter on the Recommended ship-in date column instead. Anything with a date in the next two weeks belongs on your shipping plan, whatever its status says.

The fee columns are not in every report

The US report had 99 columns. Two of them were about the low-inventory-level fee: whether the product is exempt, and whether the fee was applied in the current week. The German reports had 93 columns, and those two were not there.

If your report has these two columns, read them first: they answer the fee question product by product, and you do not have to work it out from the days of supply. If your report does not have them, that does not tell you the fee does not exist in your marketplace. Check the fee page in Seller Central help for the marketplace you sell in.

Ten minutes a week

Download the FBA Inventory Planning report. For each product, subtract fba-minimum-inventory-level from available, and sort with the lowest result at the top. Add inbound-quantity next to it, so you do not reorder what is already on its way.

Then check the Recommended ship-in date against snapshot-date. Anything already in the past goes out first. Anything in the next two weeks goes on the plan. And for the products at the top of the list, compare the short-term and long-term days of supply: if the short one is much lower, the product is speeding up, and next month's shipment should be larger.