Amazon’s third-party sellers have slammed its new quantity limits which are preventing many from meeting demand for their goods this Christmas period.
Amazon’s fulfilment service, Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA), which stores, packs and ships items for third-party sellers in exchange for a percentage of their sales, imposed strict new stock limits in August.
The newly imposed limits, which have been applied to all product categories, were designed to help Amazon conserve warehouse space in the face of a huge influx of online orders throughout the year due to the coronavirus.
According to CNBC these same measures are now preventing its marketplace sellers, which now account for over two thirds of sales on Amazon’s platform, from meeting demand over the peak holiday shopping season.
Jason Lautenschleger, who sells a range of novelty board games through FBA, told CNBC he is now limited to shipping just 230 units to Amazon’s warehouses, despite clear demand for thousands of units.
Prior to these measures, Lautenschleger says he would typlically send in 5000 units during late summer and monitor sales throughout September and October, but now has had to “take on a daily inventory watch job” alongside his usual duties.
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“You have to sell the products to be able to send them in, but you have to have them in in order to sell them,” he said.
“So that’s the Catch-22 that we find ourselves in now.”
According to Lautenschleger the measures have seen his company lose out on masses of potential sales and prevented him from determining how many new employees he can afford to hire in the new year.
Amazon is understood to determine quantity limits on items based on their demand over the last 90 days, making it even harder for retailers to sell new products, facing a “hard cap” of 200 units.
While Amazon allows customers to send in new stock whenever their old stock has depleted, sellers are facing further issues due to delivery delays, seeing products take between 10 days and two weeks to arrive at warehouses.
Jerry Kavesh, who sells cowboy boots, hats and belts on Amazon, said: “We’re out of stock in our warehouse and I know I have 30 units at Amazon, but they’re being processed. It’s been that way for five days. It’s killing us.”
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