Optimal Restocking of Inventory on Amazon FBA

A main issue that ecommerce sellers face is not knowing when and how many items to restock. In a nutshell, ecommerce businesses need to know the optimal amount to restock otherwise it puts them at risk of overstocking and understocking.

We want to avoid these three scenarios because overstocking means having excess inventory sitting on warehouse shelves where the long-term storage fees will start racking up (especially in Amazon warehouses) to a substantial amount.

The long-term storage fees can be around 20-30% of you inventory cost, another reason to void overstocking. Understocking should also be avoided because you will lose opportunity cost for not being able to sell if the item had otherwise been restocked to the optimal amount.

The table here shows the inventory status of these 5 items. The items are sorted by their restock status with the items that need immediate restocks showing up first and the least urgency on the bottom of the list. Items that are out of stock will be on the top of the list and will show a recommended restock date.

If the item is not out of stock but will go out of stock soon, AiHello will give you a recommended restock date so you don’t go out of stock. If you click on the “more” button, it will bring you to the full list of your items where you can see the inventory status of all your items and the recommended dates for each item. You can also set whichever filter you do or do not want.

For example, if we go to sales velocity and put in 0, the list will give you all the products that have sold in the last 30 days. If we sort the list by reorder date, we can see that the product is increasing in sales and the date which AiHello recommends to reorder. If you want to get different recommended restock dates, you can configure each SKU by clicking the eye icon where you can input your own values for fields such as lead time, cycle time and sales velocity.