Fulfilment by Amazon is a good service that occasionally stops behaving like one. Restock limits tighten, inbound appointments move three weeks out, and goods that arrive at the fulfilment centre take a fortnight to appear as sellable. None of that is a surprise any more, and it usually happens in the quarter when it hurts most.
The sellers who come through it in reasonable shape are not the ones who found a trick for getting a better appointment. They are the ones who had somewhere else to put the goods.
What actually goes wrong
Three failure modes account for most of the damage we see.
- Restock limits. You can only send in what the account is allowed to hold, and the allowance is calculated from recent sales. A product that is about to take off is precisely the product you are not allowed to stock up on.
- Inbound appointments. In Q4 the appointment, not the freight, becomes the long pole. A container that landed on schedule can sit in a yard for weeks, accruing demurrage.
- Receiving delays. Even after check-in, the gap between delivered and sellable stretches. Your inventory report shows the units; the listing shows out of stock.
The consequence is always the same: a listing goes out of stock in the middle of its best fortnight, the ranking drops, and it takes months of paid traffic to recover the position.
The plan B
The workable answer is to put a buffer between the vessel and Amazon. Goods are delivered to a European overseas warehouse rather than straight to the fulfilment centre, and from there you have two outlets instead of one.
The first is FBA Transshipment. We receive the container on the day it arrives, break it down, store it, and feed it into FBA in batches as appointments and restock allowances open up. You stop paying demurrage, you stop gambling on a single delivery window, and you send in exactly the quantity the account can take.
The second is Dropshipping from our warehouse. Your best sellers do not have to wait for an appointment at all. We ship them directly to the buyer on a local carrier, which keeps the listing in stock through Merchant Fulfilled or through your own web shop and other marketplaces. In practice this is what protects the ranking.
A concrete example
One phone-accessories seller had two containers arriving in week 44, with German FBA inbound appointments running three weeks out. We received and held the goods at Braunschweig on the day they landed and fed them into FBA in batches as slots opened, while shipping the top SKUs straight to buyers from our own shelves. Days waiting at port: zero. Peak-season sales: uninterrupted.
What about stock already stuck inside FBA
Removal orders can be sent to our warehouse rather than back to China. We receive them, inspect them, replace damaged packaging, apply new FNSKU labels where required, and send the units back into FBA or sell them through another channel. That is far cheaper than paying long-term storage on units that will never sell at the current price, and far cheaper than disposal.
How to set it up before you need it
Do the groundwork out of season. Get the VAT registration and EORI number in place, agree the warehouse and the labelling standard, connect the Warehouse Management System to your Amazon account and your ERP so stock levels are visible in one place, and run one small shipment through the whole flow while nothing is urgent. When the appointments tighten in October, the alternative route already exists and you simply use it.
