The Seller Central Inventory Reports You Need to Know

Maintaining balanced inventory levels and a healthy overall inventory position on Amazon is essential to business success. An important piece of inventory management is identifying your business objective and clearly defining what you are trying to accomplish. 

Whether you are restocking top-performing products, coming up with a strategy to work through stale or overstocked inventory, or launching new products, for example, will determine the actions you take. In this article, we highlight two of the top, must-know two Seller Central inventory reports to help shed light on your overall inventory management standings, including specific areas at risk or that are performing optimally.

Inventory Health

The Inventory Health report — which is exclusive to FBA sellers — provides in-depth data on your sales, current sellable and unsellable inventory, inventory age, how many weeks of coverage you have on hand, and information about additional offers that are available on your products. For instance, you can see how many FBA offers, new and used, are available for a certain product.

This report, which refreshed on a daily basis and shows information that is about 24-72 hours old, shows how many weeks of sellable inventory you have in Amazon fulfillment centers based on a velocity estimate of sales in the last 7, 30, 90, 180, and 365 days. For ease of use, the report includes the SKU, ASIN, product name, condition such as new or used, sales rank, and product category. 

It also includes various buckets to help you monitor your inventory’s age, including the number of sellable units you have for a SKU that has been in a fulfillment center for 0-90 days, 91-180 days, 181-270 days, 271-365 days, or more than a year. You can also gain insights into the estimated number of units that have been in a fulfillment location for more than 365 days, indicating they are eligible to face the long-term storage fee (LTSF) charge, which is also quantified and estimated for you. 

If you are requesting units to be removed, such as unsellable or slow-moving inventory, you can reference how many units have removals in progress. Additionally, you can track sales of the product in the last 24 hours as well as the last 7, 30, 90, 180, and 365 days. Being able to track the products’ sales, selling price, the number of inbound units to an Amazon fulfillment center, and inventory status in one report provides a holistic view of your business’s bandwidth and overall inventory replenishment process. 

Inventory Age

The Inventory Age report, on the other hand, is more actionable, providing you with insight into how long products in your inventory have been in Amazon fulfillment centers and the items that are subject to impending LTSF charges. Like Inventory Health, this report includes basic information such as the SKU, ASIN, product name, condition, number of sellable units, and quantity of products with removals in progress. 

This report specifically drills down into aged inventory, bucketing the number of units that have been in fulfillment centers for short periods of time (0-90 days) through longer periods of time (over 365 days). The way this report differs from Inventory Health, though, is by providing alerts and actionable ways to address any areas causing pressure on your supply chain. 

The alert might say “low traffic” or “low conversion.” If the former, this indicates that a low number of potential customers have been the listings, so you should incorporate SEO best practices to optimize the listing for relevant search queries. You can also incorporate the product into a Sponsored Product ad to help boost exposure and ultimately conversion. 

A “low conversion” alert indicates that prospective buyers see the listing, but are not continuing on their path to purchase. To combat this, be sure that your listings are optimized for organic search through compelling, easy-to-digest product descriptions and bullet points, organized naming conventions, identifiable and thorough product specs, benefits, and features as well as high-quality images showing the product by itself and in use. Amazon also says that ensuring the product is priced competitively will help optimize your conversion rates.

Recommended actions that could populate in the report include advertising the listing, editing the listing, lowering the price, and creating a sale for the product, among others. These actions depend on your inventory position, ASIN alerts, and any known inputs at the time the report is pulled.

Amazon also includes a “healthy inventory level” column, which indicates the inventory that is not considered excess based on variables such as your product demand and cost inputs. Amazon may also include a recommended sales price you can use if you are working toward selling through a specific number of inventory units, as well as how long you should keep the product listed at that lower, promotional price. 

Final Thoughts

Both the Inventory Health and Inventory Age reports can be leveraged to help you gauge where your inventory is in its life cycle, if it is or will soon be subject to LTSF charges, and decide if you need to take actions such as advertise a product with low-glance views or liquidate a product that has not had any sales traction in a certain number of days.

Whether you sell exclusively FBA inventory or it represents some of your catalog, isolating your inventory performance to your FBA SKUs can help you take specific steps to optimize your overall inventory management strategy.