What does Amazon idle inventory mean? What should I do if I have excess inventory on Amazon?

When opening a store on Amazon, you must manage your inventory, because if the inventory problem is too large, it will affect the normal development of the store. In the process of inventory management, you will come into contact with many related terms, such as overage inventory, idle inventory, etc. So what does idle inventory mean?

What does idle inventory on Amazon mean?

Idle inventory: ASINs that have no sales records for six consecutive months or longer and have been stored in Amazon's operations center for 180 days. In the Amazon logistics settings, select Disable on the [Automatic Settings for Available Inventory] page.

If your product has been in stock for more than 180 days and you still want to continue selling it, you must disable automatic inventory removal. Failure to understand the platform rules in a timely manner will cause you great losses. Whether it is overage inventory or idle inventory, if it is not dealt with for a long time, it will be a loss for us Amazon sellers.

What to do with Amazon inventory surplus?

The first method: Sellers can increase store sales by reducing prices or advertising to deal with inventory. This method is simple and crude, but it will cause the store to lose profits. Generally speaking, redundant products themselves are prone to poor sales, which means that when dealing with redundant products, it is difficult to control advertising investment by reducing prices or advertising, and it is easy to make the promotion costs go to waste.

The second method: sellers can use off-site promotions and discounts. The current promotion price requirement for off-site sales is generally around 40% of the product price. When clearing inventory through off-site activities, it is necessary to pay attention to calculating the price of the product to achieve a break-even point.

The third method: Sellers can use variant splitting and merging to leverage the traffic of good products in the store to drive sales of slow-selling products. Merge the SKUs of slow-selling products into hot-selling listings. Then set a minimum price for the SKUs of these slow-selling products, and use the price difference to guide customers to buy low-priced clearance products.

The fourth option: Sellers can sell redundant inventory products to FBA buyers at a low price. Generally speaking, the purchase price of redundant inventory is 20% of the normal selling price. In this case, the seller will suffer some losses. However, for sellers who are in urgent need of cash flow, this is a good choice.

The fifth method: Sellers can discard redundant inventory. This is often the case when the honorary inventory affects the store's performance, causing the store to be unable to restock or put new products on the shelves. This method is most effective for restoring the normal operation of the store in a timely manner.

Sixth: When the seller’s products meet the requirements of Amazon’s backend outlet program, they can sign up for such activities to handle excess inventory.

Amazon idle inventory refers to products that have no sales records for 6 months or more. These products are called idle inventory. If you want to continue selling these idle inventory products, you must set them up, otherwise these idle inventory products may be automatically processed by the system.

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