How to fix Amazon inventory mismanagement

Most vendors still treat inventory like an operations problem. But your inventory decisions determine your ad ROI, sell-through velocity, and even how Amazon perceives your reliability.
Here’s what you can do differently:

• Track net received vs. open POs weekly, not quarterly
• Pause ads spent on low-stock ASINs and double down on high-velocity winners
• Build your own predictive layer of reordering logic and automate it internally
• Regularly audit your MoM and YoY as well as Prime event performance to act on demand

Amazon doesn’t wait for your next planning cycle. Weekly forecasting will help you stay on track and build up a routine and deeper understanding of how your assortment is moving and shifting. Plus it’ll help to stay on top when Prime Day, Prime Big Deal Days or Black Week and other Amazon high roller events are coming in.

When Christmas or any other season comes around where you have distinctive imagery – go make use of this iconic imagery. This might entail greens, reds, candles Christmas lights or any other typical decoration to make your content fit the occasion. In Summer you might switch it up with more light blue, orange and yellow tones and iconic imageries like lemons, the sea, flowers.

Additionally use keywords that take on that role of the specific event. In the examples below you’ll find “Christmas”,  “cozy”, “girls gift” e.g. in the product title and description. This way you will catch specific consumer intent as well as pushing your products in the right direction for the holiday season.

Aligning your content (imagery and keywords) with ads and stock is going to  create conclusive and clear communication for your end customers.
And in the end, it’ll act like your revenue’s life support.

Let’s talk peak season – Q4 – the moment where 40% of your annual sales are on the table.
What can you do to prevent leaving inventory behind or not having enough stock to conquer these seasons?

• Begin weekly ASIN performance audits in early October
• Bundle slow movers with high runners (clever, not desperate)
• Align ads, listing content, and SEO with holiday buyer intent
• Pause spent on borderline ASINs to avoid wasted clicks
• Use Alerts to stay updated through the event

Q4 isn’t “just busier.” It’s a stress test for your entire system and I get that. The key is preparation. When you show up prepared and you know how your stock usually behaves as well as how your end customers behave you are on the bright side of inventory management.

Start understanding the Amazon Prime event pattern.
Download the report now:

• Category benchmarks
• Sales and traffic analytics
• Ad efficiency data
• The Prime readiness scorecard

Here’s the kicker: Most teams know what to do but they can’t move fast enough.
Here are three ways you can automate the hustle

• Automate Vendor Central data extraction via SP-API
• Build BI dashboards (Power BI, Looker, AMVisor) to surface lead time gaps, PO mismatch, aged stock, etc.
• Use an operating system like AMVisor to stay alerted the whole time

Stop waiting for your team to “pull the report.” Make the report pull them.

Amazon 1P Vendors often lose margin not because of weak products but due to poor inventory planning, slow forecasting cycles, and a lack of visibility in Vendor Central.
To fix this, 1Ps must treat inventory not as operations but as strategy: forecast weekly, track essential KPIs like Vendor Confirmation Rate and Aged 90+ Inventory, sync ads to stock levels, and prepare early for Q4 where up to 40% of annual sales occur.
Seasonal demand alignment, proactive stranded inventory fixes, and category-specific adjustments further reduce revenue leakage.
Automation through SP-API or tools like AMVisor enables faster decisions and prevents stockouts, overstocks, and aged inventory issues.

The result: more reliable Amazon ordering behavior, better profitability, and a scalable Vendor business due to a unified and enabled team.