One aspect of maintaining a healthy seller relationship with Amazon is having enough inventory on hand to cover customer demand. Through Seller Central, you can get “near-real time data” for each product in your inventory on the Manage FBA Inventory Page. As Amazon explains on Winning with FBA, “You can see your Fulfillable and Unfulfillable units, any units that have been put on Reserve for pending sales or other fulfillment center activities, and the Inbound amount, we are expecting from any of your shipments yet to be received.”
The eCommerce giant has been beta testing a new ‘Manage Inventory’ page. With Amazon’s new manage inventory page, sellers have been able to try the new page on Seller Central, while it’s in Beta status. The new page promises a revamped seller approach to managing sales, inventory, payments, customer conversions and removals. It also includes product images for a seller’s products to quickly identify listings. Permanent migration for all sellers to the Manage Inventory page will take place on June 15, 2015.
The new page offers a new navigation header meant to highlight alerts for updating essential Seller Central functions.
It focuses on seller reports, allowing users to see this enhanced navigation with organized headers and sub-heads.
One observation surrounding this new feature involves the speculation that Amazon Sellers are not fulfilling fast enough, resulting in downgraded opinions of vendors and Amazon, in general. Manage Inventory provides an additional level of scrutiny and security in making sure that the people selling on Amazon actually have the product count needed to fulfill an order. In effect, it’s less about managing inventory in the traditional sense and more about supporting Amazon inventory and maintaining high ratings.
Potential Challenges
There are some challenges that may arise for the seller after Amazon’s inventory management is implemented. Amazon sellers may have issues finding some features that moved. Below is a summary of changes as highlighted in a recent article by EcommerceBytes entitled Amazon to Migrate All Sellers to New Manage Inventory Page.
- Navigation moves from left to top. This frees up space for more columns across your screen.
- Simpler names: For example, “Improve Listings Quality” is now “Quality Issues.” “Copy to a new product” is now “Copy listing.”
- Edit on the right. The “Actions” drop down is now called “Edit” and has moved to the far right column. You can place the “Edit” button on the left side if you like via preferences. There was
some negative reaction to the new page last week on this thread where sellers reported a bug that didn’t allow them to filter inventory. Also, a couple of sellers in this thread said they hadn’t been able to get into Manage Inventory at all on Saturday.
Making Inventory Even Better
The new inventory page reinforces the need for tools that do a good job in managing inventory across multiple sales channels and ultimately getting product to a seller’s customers in a timely, accurate manner. A multichannel inventory management system gives the seller the upper hand with the most comprehensive view of inventory across all sales channels. If you’ve become overwhelmed with managing your inventory volume, shipping details and sales channels, an order management system (OMS) can be the solution you’re looking for.
An OMS helps you expand your eCommerce presence & automates back office operations to manage critical aspects of your business: multichannel order management; inventory visibility & control across multiple channels; drop ship management; rapid, reliable order fulfillment; customer management; integration with Amazon, eCommerce platforms selling channels and more. The bottom line – it allows you more time to focus on the growth and potential of your business. To learn more about improving the inventory process, check out some tips here.
Check out the benefits of automating inventory management in the free eBook: Inventory Management For Online Retailers.
