Unfulfillable Inventory of Amazon | How Unsaleable Inventory Works

Unfulfillable inventory simply means unsaleable inventory. While your FBA shipments are sent to the fulfillment center. Then each item in your shipment will be reviewed for quality and quantity. If they determine that your item is damaged they consider it unfit for sale or shipment. To clarify, they will mark the item as Unfulfillable. These items can be removed automatically or returned back to you.

How Unfulfillable Inventory Works?

Most often “Unfulfillable Inventory” is listed as “Unsellable” on your Current Inventory Report. Items can also “Unsellable” when any customer return them is the condition of that item gets change after leaving fulfillment center.

Once an item is identified as “Unsellable,” it is set aside for 90 days. During that time, you can request to have your unsellable items returned to you at your expense. Until the items are returned or disposed of, you have to pay for the storage of unsellable items. You can request to have your unfulfillable inventory returned to you. For that to have to complete the Create Removal Order form from the Inventory Amazon Fulfills page.

To set up and review these marketplace processes, log into your Amazon account and review your Amazon-Fulfilled Inventory settings.

Unfulfillable Inventory in Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA)

Selling on Amazon.com through FBA can be very lucrative for international sellers.

How it works:

• Create a removal order back to our warehouse.
• Decide on a weekly, biweekly or monthly schedule to ship the returns back to your company directly or your supplier.
• Amazon ship you back your unfulfillable inventory…it’s as easy as 1, 2.3!

There are no monthly commitments, you pay as you go. Service costs are below:

• $0.75 USD to receive each item.
• $5.00 USD handling fee to ship each order.
• Cost of freight back to your chosen destination.
• Amazon will always use the boxes provided by Amazon to ship your returns. If for any reason, Amazon need to use one of their boxes it will be $4.00 USD per box.

Your returns will be shipped on your scheduled ship date (without holidays). If for whatever reason your shipment cannot be prepared on your scheduled ship day, there will be a 15% daily storage charge assessed to your order. This 15% fee will mix daily and will add the charge of shipping. If your inventory is not shipped within 2 weeks of your scheduled ship date, FBA Express will take sole control of your inventory and will reserve the rights to do with it as it pleases.

Reason:

Unfulfillable inventory is inventory that has become damaged, expired, or for some other reasons cannot be sold. When this occurs, Amazon sets the item as unfulfillable and you have (usually) 30 days to have the inventory returned or destroyed before Amazon does as they please with it.

In some cases, no action is needed on your part. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to find out what the problem is. If you browse to your Inventory page in Seller Central, then click on Remove Unfulfillable Inventory (login required), you will see a list of all of your Unfulfillable inventory.

This page has an Unfulfillable column, containing the number of problematic items in your inventory.

Unfulfillable Inventory Dropdown

Clicking on that number will open a popup, showing you the reason(s) your items are Unfulfillable.

These reasons can include:

• Defective – This is usually an item a customer has ordered, claimed it was defective so they would not have to pay for return shipping, and returned it to Amazon. About 50% of the time, the item will have never been opened and can be shipped right back into Amazon.
• Expired food, Health & Beauty, and many other products need expiration dates. Amazon has certain changeable rules on how much life can be left on a product before it is considered expired. Those rules are here. Once that date hits, the items are flagged and show as Unfulfillable.
• Customer damaged item was purchased by a customer and returned. Like defective items.
• Swapped out or parts removed however can also be that an old item was swapped out. Or parts have been removed. It’s often a good idea to have more expensive items returned and verify if there is an issue.
• Warehouse Damaged (Shown in the screenshot above) This is our personal favorite. This means your item was damaged at the warehouse, for any number of reasons. After some time, Amazon is supposed to automatically reimburse you the current average selling price, minus their fees.
• Distributor Damaged Amazon flags item which is received damaged under this classification. Basically, they are saying you did it. If your items were sent in perfect, well protected, and using Amazon’s partner carrier (eg: UPS through Seller Central), opening a case with Seller Support will get you a reimbursement.

Process:

You can request to remove your inventory from Amazon fulfillment centers. Choose either returned to you or disposed of at any time.
To submit a removal order:

1. On the Manage Inventory page, select the items that you want to remove, and then select Create removal order from the Action on the Selected drop-down list.

2. On the Removal Order Details page, under Method of Removal, select one of the following:

a) Ship To Address — To have your inventory return back, select Ship To Address and type the desired address.

Important: Shipping is available for the addresses within the continental United States. Amazon cannot ship to P.O. boxes. If you want to ship to an address outside of the continental United States, you can work with a third-party return provider. For more information, see International Returns Provider’s  ( https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/hel…(See full link), sign-in required).

b) Dispose — To have your inventory disposed of at the fulfillment center, select Dispose.

3. For Set Order ID, type a custom order ID or leave the field blank and an order ID will be created for you.

4. Under Specify Ordered SKUs/Units, a list displays selected items. To add more inventory to the list, in the Search and Add Items text box, type a title, MSKU, ASIN, or FNSKU, and click Search. Select the products you want to remove and click Add Selected.

5. Under Fulfillable Qty, specify the number of fulfillable units to remove.

6. Under Unfulfillable Qty, specify the number of unfulfillable units to remove.

7.  To remove an item from the list, select Delete.

8. Click Continue.

Removals can take from 10 to 14 days to pick and pack. The products remain listed on Amazon and customer can purchase them until they are picked from the inventory.  If this occurs, the remaining quantity will be removed.

Order Cancellation:

Any order can be canceled until the order status is pending. If the order status is processing, the order cannot be canceled. To cancel any removal order the following process should be followed.

1. Go to fulfillment page from report drop-down.

2. Then go to the removal order report.

3. Then select the order ID which you want to cancel.  Remember 1 thing that the order status should be pending. Otherwise, you won’t be able to cancel the order.

4. Then select cancel an order.

This Document is all about Unfulfillable/Unsaleable  Inventory of Amazon. Please keep reading we will come again with another important topic of Amazon.