Removal Orders and Stock That Will Not Sell

Stock in a fulfilment centre is not free to keep. It pays monthly storage, it pays more per unit once it has been there long enough to hit the long term bands, and it occupies capacity you may need for something that sells.

A removal order is how you get it out. There are four things you can ask for and choosing between them is an arithmetic problem most sellers do late.

Return. Amazon ships it back to an address you give. You pay per unit, and you get stock you can inspect, repack, sell elsewhere or send back in properly.

Disposal. Amazon destroys it. Cheaper per unit than a return, and the right answer only when the goods are genuinely worth less than the cost of getting them back.

Liquidation. Amazon sells it to a wholesale liquidator and pays you a fraction of the value. No shipping to arrange, a small recovery, and no control over where it ends up.

Do nothing. A real option, briefly, for stock that is close to selling through. It is only a decision if you have worked out what the storage will cost between now and then.

Illustrative figures, to show the arithmetic rather than Amazon's current rates, which change and should be read from the fee pages for the product's size tier.

The position. 300 units of a product that sells for $25 have been in the network long enough to attract aged storage charges. The product sells about 10 units a month. At that rate the stock lasts two and a half years.

The cost of waiting. Suppose storage with the aged charges comes to about $1 per unit per month on this product. Holding all 300 for the next six months costs roughly $1,800, falling as units sell, and the stock is no closer to selling through by the end of it.

The cost of a return. Suppose the removal fee is about $1.50 per unit and shipping to the seller's own address adds $1 a unit. Bringing back 250 units costs about $625. Sold as clearance on another channel at $12, after that channel's fees and shipping, they might recover $6 to $7 a unit, about $1,600.

Keep some, remove the rest. Leaving 50 units in the network, about five months of sales, keeps the listing selling and its rank intact. The other 250 come out.

The comparison. Waiting costs far more than removing, and removing recovers money that waiting never would. Disposal would cost less than a return, but throws away the $1,600 the clearance channel recovers.

Run the same sum on every aged product before each storage assessment date. The answer is rarely close, and when it is, the cheaper option is usually the one that frees the space.

Unfulfillable units are customer returns Amazon has graded as not sellable, plus anything damaged in the network. They sit in your account waiting for an instruction, and they still cost storage while they wait. Standing removal settings can deal with these automatically, which is the single most useful setting most sellers have never opened.

Sellable units that are not selling are the harder case: nothing is wrong with them, they are just aged, seasonal or overordered. Those are the ones the arithmetic below is for.

A removal is not the only way out, and Amazon offers routes that keep stock selling instead of shipping it anywhere. FBA Grade and Resell lets Amazon grade returned units and resell them in used condition, paying you for the sale, rather than leaving them in the unfulfillable pile. For returns that are only lightly opened, that recovers far more than disposal and needs nothing from you once it is switched on.

For sellable stock that is simply not moving, a deliberate price reduction is the first test, and Amazon's outlet deals put excess and aged items in front of shoppers looking for discounts. Liquidation through Amazon is the last of the options that keeps the stock out of your warehouse: a small return, no shipping, no control over where it goes.

Each of these is a decision about margin, so put a number on it the same way as a removal: what the route recovers per unit, against what storage would cost while waiting and what a removal would cost.

For each unit: what will storage cost between now and the point it would realistically sell, against what you would recover by removing it. Removal costs a fee per unit, and liquidation returns a fraction of the price, so the comparison is rarely close once a product has crossed into the long term bands.

The decision people get wrong is holding aged stock through another peak in the hope it moves. If it did not sell in the last year, storage on it for another one is a payment for optimism.

The other one is disposing of something that would have sold at a discount elsewhere. A return to your own address plus a clearance listing on eBay often beats disposal for anything with a real second-hand market.

Most unfulfillable stock needs the same decision every time, which is why Amazon lets a seller set it once. An account without these settings collects unfulfillable units month after month, each one paying storage until somebody notices.

The standing removal setting. In the FBA settings, a seller can choose what happens to unfulfillable units automatically: returned to an address or disposed of, on a schedule. Pick the default that suits most of the catalogue. Products worth more than the cost of bringing them back are returned; cheap, bulky or perishable ones usually are not.

Grade and Resell first. Where FBA Grade and Resell is available, switching it on lets lightly opened returns be resold as used before they ever reach the unfulfillable pile. It recovers more than either automatic route.

Exceptions by hand. A few products will not suit the default: an expensive item that should always come back for inspection, or one that must never be resold for safety reasons. Note those and handle them with manual removal orders.

The address that receives them. Automatic returns arrive whenever the schedule runs. The receiving address, whether a warehouse or a prep partner, needs to expect them and to count each delivery against the removal order.

A monthly look anyway. Automatic settings deal with the routine. A monthly read of what was removed, and why, still shows the products whose returns keep rising, which is the problem no setting can fix.

Removals are processed over days rather than hours, and the queue is longest exactly when everybody wants one: before the storage assessment dates, and around peak when the network is busy.

Which means the removal that saves you the fee has to be placed well before the date it was meant to beat. Put the assessment dates in a calendar and decide a fortnight ahead of each, not the week of.

Unfulfillable stock is graded with a reason, and the reason decides what to do next. Units damaged in Amazon's network, in a warehouse or by a carrier on Amazon's side, are generally Amazon's responsibility, and the right step is a reimbursement claim, not a removal. Units a customer returned damaged or used point back at the product or its packaging. Units marked defective point at quality.

Read the reasons by product before deciding anything. A single product with a run of customer damaged returns often has packaging that fails in transit or a product that looks different from its photographs, both of which keep producing unfulfillable units until fixed. A rise in warehouse damage across many products is a claims job.

The same reading feeds the listing and the supplier conversation, which is where most of the long term saving is. Removing the units deals with this month's pile; the reasons tell you how to make next month's smaller.

Removal orders are a symptom. The causes are ordering too deep on an unproven product, seasonal stock sent in without a plan for the tail, and returns nobody has looked at.

Ordering shallower and reordering more often is the structural fix, and it is the same discipline as keeping stock cover honest: the first replenishment tells you more than any forecast.

It is also worth checking what you are owed before removing anything. Units lost or damaged in the network are reimbursable, and a removal is not the moment to discover you never claimed for them, which the reimbursements piece covers.

A return removal ends with boxes arriving at an address, and the work starts there. Count them against the removal order, because removals can arrive short and a shortfall is claimable. Inspect and grade every unit: sellable as new, sellable as used or open box, or not sellable at all. Each grade has a different next channel.

Units going back into FBA need preparing again: new labels where the old ones are damaged or covered, packaging restored to the condition the listing promises. Sending them back without that just recreates the unfulfillable units the removal was meant to clear, and pays inbound fees for the privilege.

Decide the destination before placing the removal, not after the boxes land. Stock removed without a plan tends to sit in a corner of a warehouse for months, where it costs less than Amazon's storage and still recovers nothing.

Seasonal products produce most of the aged stock in many accounts, and almost always for the same reason: the plan covered the stock going in and not the stock left over when the season ended.

Plan the tail before shipping. When seasonal stock is sent in, decide at the same time what happens to whatever is left on a set date after the season: a markdown in the final weeks, a deal aimed at clearing it, a removal to another channel, or holding it for next year. Write the date and the route down.

Storage costs more in the busiest months. Monthly storage on Amazon is charged at a higher rate from October to December than in the rest of the year. Seasonal stock sent in early for the fourth quarter pays that higher rate for every month it waits.

Mark down while there is still demand. A price cut in the last weeks of the season sells units that would otherwise sit for eleven months. The same cut in January sells far fewer, because the shoppers have gone.

Decide honestly about next year. Holding seasonal stock for the next season is a real option for products that do not date and pay little storage. For anything bulky, fashionable or likely to be redesigned, a year of storage usually costs more than the units recover.

Order the next season from this one's tail. The units left over are the clearest evidence of how far the forecast missed. Next year's order starts from what actually sold, not from what was hoped.

Standing removal settings, an aged inventory review on a schedule and a reimbursement check before anything leaves are part of running an Amazon account properly, and they are three of the easiest wins on an account nobody has been watching.

Stock removed and not thrown away has somewhere to go: a clearance channel on Walmart or your own store will often recover more than a liquidator, with the trade-off that you handle it.

If your storage bill is rising faster than your sales, that is worth an hour of somebody's time.