Amazon sellers have until November 2nd to get their inventory into the company’s Fulfillment Centers to be available for sale by Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And in order to ensure their items are available for Christmas shoppers, sellers must get their items in by December 1, 2022.
Complicating matters, however, is Amazon’s holiday restock limits, which EcommerceBytes wrote about on Friday. The natural tension is between sellers who want to send in enough product and Amazon, which wants to ensure it has the right mix of products to meet demand given its limited warehouse space. Amazon ties FBA restock storage limits to a metric called “IPI” and typically eases the restrictions again in January.
This page on Amazon Seller Central provides “Key FBA holiday selling dates for the US” where it notes that its recommendations were based on estimates and were subject to change (we confirmed the page is for 2022).
It’s interesting to compare this year’s deadlines with those from last year when Amazon recommended sellers have inventory to fulfillment centers by November 15 in order to ensure they had enough stock available for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and December 11th for Christmas orders.
Some sellers had stated they believed those dates were unrealistic given the restock limits and given the amount of time it takes Amazon to check-in the inventory after it’s been received in their warehouses. Are this year’s recommendations more realistic?
