Amazon will send any inbound product or listings straight into what they call stranded inventory if there is anything wrong with the following:
- Product
- Listings
- Your Account
When we get support tickets on stranded inventory, 98% of the time the problems lie with the seller or seller account.
However, we want to know why this has happened so that we can update this article and help others get to the bottom of the problem as Amazon support is not always forthcoming with that information in a timely manner.
All that being said, let's go over some possible reasons as to why your inventory may have been stranded.
New Seller Storage Limits
At the start of 2018 Amazon started imposing limits on storage to new sellers in an effort to control quality and make room for more experienced sellers.
Here is the official article on the subject below but Amazon will throw all of your products that are over your storage limit right into stranded inventory until you come down in your inventory levels.
Seller Restrictions
Another big culprit of stranded inventory is restrictions placed on sellers for certain brands or product categories.
This can be frustrating, we understand.
Your best bet is to ensure you are always approved in the product category before you send in any items, even if you are doing retail arbitrage and your products vary across many categories.
As your seller metrics improve and the age of your account becomes older you may be eligible to sell in other categories.
In addition to just general product category restrictions, sellers may be restricted to just USED conditions and not able to sell a particular product in NEW condition.
Pricing Errors
We try to ensure within our application that we have set up enough guardrails for setting pricing rules that you never have an issue with price errors as your products go into stranded status.
However, sometimes something happens within the application that we didn't catch, and/or there is a setting on your repricer or Seller Central that creates the pricing error.
If this happens, you'll need to isolate the items affected and bring the pricing of those items back in line so that Amazon will mark the inventory as active and salable again.
Merchant Fulfilled Shipping Templates
As an MF seller you MUST add the exact name of your shipping template you will be using into each batch being processed with AccelerList or it could cause your entire batch to be pushed into stranded inventory.