Explaining The Status of Your Products
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When adding products to your inventory or creating a shipping plan, you will see four different statuses for each product in your inventory; these are: "available", "inbound", "unfulfillable" and "reserved". Each of these represents a status in which your products are currently at.
Available inventory means that your stock is available for purchase on Amazon.co.uk and you should see your seller (store) name on the product listing. If the stock has just recently gone into the available status then you may not yet qualify for Prime delivery. This will mean that you're delivery time won't be 1-2 days and thus you may not yet have a portion of the buy box.
Here is an example of this.
This is nothing to worry about as over the next few days, once your stock has been checked into your inventory at the Amazon fulfilment centre and is eligible for Prime delivery, it will be updated automatically. Once you have qualified for Prime delivery, assuming that your product is competitively priced, you'll then qualify for the buy box.
Inbound inventory simply means that your stock is on route to an Amazon fulfilment centre (FC). The stock should change to this status shortly after you have completed a shipping plan and your stock has been collected by UPS or relevant courier. It can take anywhere from 1-14 days for your stock to arrive at an FC depending on the current climate with the courier or time of year. Typically 3-5 days is the average shipping time and 5-7 days during Q4.
Unfuilfillable inventory can be due to a variety of reasons but essentially the unit(s) does not meet Amazons standards to send to a customer and, therefore, becomes unfulfillable. The main cause for this is when the product has been damaged, either due to it being damaged in transit when being delivered to the FC, during transfer from one FC to another or when it has been returned from the customer. Unfulfillable will also apply to any products with an expiration date that has passed.
Amazon will investigate any unfulfillable products to see what they deem the cause to be, if it is UPS or Amazon at fault, you will be reimbursed automatically for the NET proceeds of that unit. Therefore, it would be as if you sold that unit to a customer, getting your cost of goods and profit for that unit. If they deem that it is you at fault, the inventory will remain in unfulfilable and you will not be reimbursed therefore resulting in a loss for that unit.
You can always contact Seller Support and ask them to investigate how your stock became unfullfilable if you do not agree with their decision, or you can jump into the Live Chat within Seller Circle to get the teams expert opinion on the matter.
It's best to enable automatic removal settings for your unfulfillable inventory; you can do so here. This automates the process for when you have a large amount of stock at Amazon and manually deciding what happens with the stock becomes time consuming.
The best practice would be to set your settings to "Grade" and "Resell" which involves Amazon reviewing the unfilfilable unit and deciding what condition it is in, based on this decision the product will then be available to purchase on the product listed in a used condition at a discounted sale price. This is a good method for recouping some funds for a damaged item. You can also select "Liquidation", this will result in Amazon disposing of the unfillable on a weekly basis on your behalf.
Your products can be reserved for a number of reasons, however, this will down to three main causes...
A customer has purchased one or multiple of your products and therefore this unit is removed from your available inventory and placed into reserved to fulfil that customer's order.
