Amazon FBA Shipment Warnings
I’ve had some good wins with Profit Sourcery this week. The product stream has been mostly toys for a range of ages. It’s really satisfying to see that toys I packaged and sent to Amazon one evening earlier in the week have already been sold to customers in Spain, France, and Germany. However, I encountered two Amazon FBA shipment warnings this week and here I explain what they were and what I did to resolve them..
This past week plastic figures of characters from films like Star Wars and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were a good buy, and so were certain dolls that are part of a range, which makes them collectible – children love to have the full set!
One thing that I saw for the first time was this message:
Inventory alert. We’ve identified this product to be slow-moving, overstocked or both, and it likely will incur Long-Term Storage Fees. We recommend that you remove it from the shipment.”
This appeared while adding products and preparing a shipment in the Amazon Seller dashboard. Obviously I double checked the analysis on Profit Sourcery, and I went ahead with the shipment anyway because all the indications were good.
I suspect that the Amazon mega computer flags this as a warning in case you’re about to ship hundreds of a single product, but if like me you’re only shipping in small quantities, five to twenty-five for example, then there’s no need to worry. It may be something that sells slowly, but it will sell out eventually.
What it does remind us though is the importance of the size of the products. The volume i.e. the amount of space that your product takes up in the Amazon warehouses has a proportional effect on your long term storage fees, so if you do ship a slow selling product then it’s probably best not to send anything large and bulky, particularly if the profit margin is less than ideal.
Another warning I encountered for the first time was in the form of an automated email that came started with this statement:
We are writing to inform you that we have temporarily blocked your ability to create and send in shipments to Amazon.co.uk fulfilment centres due to a problem that we found with your inbound shipment (FBAXXYYZZ).
No need to panic though. It was quickly resolved by going to my Seller dashboard and clicking a few acknowledgements. The shipment was then accepted and the block was instantly removed. I suspect that I made an error with the labels and/or the packing lists as it was a two parcel shipment.
That’s probably the main lesson of the week – take the time to examine each product’s analysis carefully and concentrate when preparing the shipment.
Give Profit Sourcery a go yourself and let me know how you get on in the comments below.
