Make your excess stock pay: Amazon offers FBA Liquidations
If you need to get rid of excess and customer-returned stock, Amazon has a nice solution.
It’s called FBA Liquidations, and it can help you avoid disposal costs and long-term storage fees – as well as letting you recoup up to 20% of your stock’s usual sales price.
What is FBA Liquidations?
In the past, FBA (fulfilled by Amazon) sellers would have their unsold FBA stock either disposed of or returned to them. Both options had large fees attached.
But with FBA Liquidations, Amazon values the unsold stock based on sales history and average FBA prices, and finds a buyer among its network of wholesale liquidators.
It then transfers the recovery value of the stock, minus fees, to the seller’s account – typically 5-10% of the stock’s sale price.
How do I liquidate my stock?
It’s simple: in your inventory pages on Seller Central, you can select single or multiple ASINs and click ‘Create removal order’, then ‘liquidate’.
Once you’ve confirmed it, you can’t cancel the liquidation (though, while it’s still pending, you can still use that stock to fulfil customer orders).
From then it’s around 30 days till the removal order status changes to ‘completed’. Then approximately 60 days until the net recovery value appears in your Seller account.
Who can use it?
The programme is open to Sellers using the FBA program.
Currently it’s only available for stock stored in Germany, France, Poland, Czech Republic, Spain, and Italy. Other countries, including the UK, are likely to join soon.
There are certain types of product that aren’t eligible, in addition to those already FBA-prohibited (including alcohol, weapons and fireworks):
- Hazmat goods
- Meltable goods
- Expiry-dated products that are out of date
- Stock with a selling price less than €7.
It’s worth bearing in mind that Amazon’s fees are based on size and weight of products: the lighter your inventory, the lower the fees will be.
Any other benefits?
Other than the benefits of not having to pay for storage or to dispose of unwanted and customer-returned stock? Yes!
Having excess inventory lowers your Inventory Performance Index (IPI) score; getting rid of that excess improves your FBA sell-through rate, which improves your IPI score.
It also gives you more space in fulfilment centres for newer or better-selling stock.
Could my liquidated stock be re-sold on Amazon?
Amazon’s liquidators are strictly prohibited from selling FBA liquidated stock directly on Amazon. However, after re-selling, there’s no reason why it might not end up on Amazon again with a third party.
Our experts at e-Comas recommend you make sure your brand is protected with Amazon Brand Registry.
Drop us a line if you want to find out more!