New Amazon sellers are often confused by the reserved inventory in seller central.
What does it mean? How does it affect your business? What should you do about it?
Well, it can mean one of three different things:
Customer Orders - Amazon has pulled the product out of your available inventory to process it for a customer's order.
Fulfillment Center Transfer - Amazon is moving your inventory from one warehouse to another.
Fulfillment Center Processing - These are units at the fulfillment center going through additional processing and verification.
The dropdown arrow next to the number of reserved units pulls up a graphic that explains where the reserved units are.
Customer order reserves are already sold and no longer available.
Amazon will transfer inventory to other warehouses to bring it closer to potential customers. Amazon does this at their own cost and it helps sellers receive more sales.
Units in the transfer are available for purchase but will be presented to customers as back-ordered if the seller does not have any units available for immediate fulfillment.
Transferred units then need to be processed by the fulfillment center and will remain in reserve until everything is verified. Units in the processing stage are not available for sale but will become available in the future.
All of this information is important for inventory management. The goal is to always have products available for sale.
A strategy to ensure available units is to be more aggressive with your inventory management and purchasing.
Sellers need to be aware that a small percentage of their inventory will in reserve for a few days and maybe even a couple of weeks. Keep that in mind when you are ordering your inventory.
Reserved inventory is not something to be overly concerned about but it is something to be aware of.
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