What Is Reserved Inventory On Amazon?
Harness the power of automated Amazon FBA Reserved Inventory performance insights reporting
Amazon offers many inventory reports, and Reserved Inventory is one of them.
What is Reserved Inventory?
Reserved Inventory is a feature in Amazon’s inventory management system that allows sellers to set aside a certain number of units of a product for a specific purpose, such as fulfilling a large order or launching a new product.
What is Amazon Reserved Inventory reports?
These reports provide detailed information about reserved inventory levels for units of a product that have been set aside in the seller’s Inventory. These reports can be accessed manually in the “Reports” tab of Amazon Seller Central or via code-free data pipelines.
What information do Amazon Reserved Inventory reports provide?
These reports provide a variety of information about the units of a product that have been set aside, including the ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number), the number of units reserved, the date the units were reserved, and the reason for the reservation.
How can I use Amazon Reserved Inventory reports?
There are several ways sellers can use Amazon reports to manage their inventory and optimize their sales strategy. For example, sellers can use these reports to:
- Monitor the number of units set aside and ensure they are used effectively.
- Identify any units of a product that are not being used and consider releasing them back into the general inventory.
- Analyze the reasons for reserved inventory and identify any trends or patterns that may be useful for future planning.
- Better understanding of reserved inventory's affect on lost sales.
- Track the effectiveness of different sales and marketing campaigns by comparing the number of units reserved before and after the campaign.
What does “reserved” mean on Amazon FBA?
Per Amazon, inventory in the reserved status will be tied to a customer order shipped between fulfillment centers or set aside at a fulfillment center for additional processing. While inventory is being sent to another fulfillment center, it is still available for purchase.
On Amazon’s fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) service, “reserved” inventory refers to items set aside in the fulfillment center to fulfill customer orders. This means that the inventory is unavailable for sale and cannot be removed from the fulfillment center. It is important to properly manage your inventory to ensure that you have enough stock to fulfill customer orders and to avoid running out of stock.
If you are a seller using Amazon FBA, you can view your inventory by logging into your Amazon seller account and going to the Inventory menu. There, you will see a column labeled “Reserved” that shows the number of units of each product currently reserved in the fulfillment center. You can use this information to track your inventory levels and plan your restocking and shipping strategies.
If a customer tries to purchase an item on Amazon, they may see a message that an item is “currently unavailable” or “out of stock” if the item is reserved and not available for sale at the moment. A customer may need to wait until the item becomes available again or choose a different product.
Why is my Amazon Inventory Reserved?
Units can be reserved for the following reasons:
- Customer order: These units are used to fulfill customer orders.
- Fulfillment center transfer: These units are being transferred from one fulfillment center to another to help place the inventory closer to customers. Units in the FC transfer status are available for customers to buy. However, customers might be shown a future ship date if no other units are available in the fulfillment centers for immediate fulfillment. Transfers may take up to 22 to 25 days to complete. In some cases, transfers may take longer, and investigation may be required (for example, delays due to COVID-19 or weather restrictions).
- Fulfillment center processing: These units have been sidelined at the fulfillment center for additional processing, such as verification of item dimensions and weight, pending investigations, or pending removal orders.
What does Amazon “FC” mean?
The acronym Fulfillment Center (FC) is employed to signify a specific condition of your existing inventory or those items located in the “processing” status at an Amazon warehouse. This depicts the elements housed in one of Amazon’s distribution hubs globally. Once your FBA supply reaches the FC processing stage at an Amazon center, it is categorized and shipped to other warehouses so that Amazon can dispatch orders quickly and proficiently while lessening costs.
When inventory is being processed for transfer to another Amazon fulfillment center, those units might show up under FC transfer and FC processing for a short time. Units in FC transfer are available for sale but can only be eligible for Prime delivery once they are transferred to destination fulfillment centers.
What is Amazon Inventory Reserved in relation to overall inventory levels?
The total number of units you have for an SKU in a shipment sent to a fulfillment center equals:
Available quantity + Unsellable quantity + Reserved quantity* + Inbound quantity.*Reserved quantity is not included in Available or Unsellable quantities.
Is there an Amazon Reserved Inventory Report for an FBA seller to review?
The reserved inventory report is part of a broader inventory performance and management datasets collection. Specifically, the Amazon Reserved Inventory report shows a breakdown of reserved units in your inventory. Here is a snapshot of the data you can get in this report;
- sku: SKUs are unique blocks of letters or numbers that identify your products. SKUs are assigned by you as the seller.
- fnsku: A unique identifier assigned by Amazon to items stored in and fulfilled from a fulfillment center.
- asin: ASINs are unique blocks of 10 letters or numbers that identify items. Amazon assigns ASINs. You can find the ASIN on the product detail page.
- product-name: The title of your product.
- reserved_qty: The total number of units in the reserved status.
- reserved_customerorders: The number of units reserved for customer orders.
- reserved_fc-transfers: The number of units transferred from one fulfillment center to another.
- reserved_fc-processing: The number of units that have been sidelined at the fulfillment center for additional processing, which includes units tied to a removal order.
The report can also help you find more information about the reserved units. Amazon inventory levels are available for sellers globally.
Is the Amazon Seller Central Reserved Inventory data available for export?
The Amazon FBA reserved inventory report can be downloaded manually as a CSV report. However, rather than messy and time-consuming manual data wrangling, you can automate the flow of reserved amazon inventory information to a leading data lake or cloud warehouses like Databricks, Redshift, Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Azure Data Lake, Ahana, and Amazon Athena.
Automation provides a unified, analytics-ready single source of truth for BI tools. For example, you can use your tools for e-commerce insights like business intelligence, data visualization, SQL, or data science tools. Examples are Google Data Studio, Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Looker, and Amazon Quicksight.
What type of data is available to help with Amazon inventory management?
Amazon FBA inventory reports cover a broad cross-section of data points. There are reports for Amazon fulfilled, stranded inventory, active listing, all listings, and many others. For example, here are a collection of FBA-specific reports;
- Inventory Ledger NEW
- Multi-Channel Fulfillment Inventory
- Dangerous Goods (DG) Status
- Restock Inventory
- Stranded Inventory
- Reserved Inventory
- Subscribe & Save Forecasting
- Inventory Reconciliation
- Small and Light Inventory
- Amazon Fulfilled Inventory
- Multi-Country Inventory
- Daily Inventory History
- Monthly Inventory History
- Received Inventory
- Inventory Event Detail
- Inventory Adjustments
- Manage FBA Inventory
- Manage FBA Inventory Report — Archived
- Inbound Performance
- Exportable Inventory (US)
- Bulk Fix Stranded Inventory
- FBA Inventory
These Seller reports will contain data about Amazon sales, stock level, restock limits, storage fees, storage type, and many others for inventory planning or analysis.
If you are looking for broader report automation for sales, fulfillment, finance, and other data FBA feeds, see Amazon Seller Central Sales Report Automation.
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