In Inventory Planner, Amazon stores separate warehouses showing FBA (Amazon warehouse) for each country in the region and FBM.
For more information about linking Amazon to Inventory Planner, read our article about connecting your store.
Inventory
When a listing becomes INACTIVE, Amazon stops returning correct information - this means that stock and other information might be out of date if you change it in Seller Central.
Inactive listings are marked non-visible in Inventory Planner and do not appear in the Replenishment report by default.
Creating Shipment Plans
When saving a purchase order or warehouse transfer in Inventory Planner to an FBA warehouse, you will have the option to create a shipment plan in your Seller Central account. After saving your purchase order, you'll see the following option to push the PO or transfer to Amazon.
You can customize the following options:
Labels
Using Inventory Planner's print label functionality, you can print product or case labels for products shipping to an FBA warehouse.
If you are printing labels in Inventory Planner, select the Seller option.
Seller: Seller labels the items in the inbound shipment when labels are required.
Amazon only: Amazon attempts to label the items in the inbound shipment when labels are required. If Amazon determines that it does not have the information required to successfully label an item, that item is not included in the inbound shipment plan.
Amazon preferred: Amazon attempts to label the items in the inbound shipment when labels are required. If Amazon determines that it does not have the information required to successfully label an item, that item is included in the inbound shipment plan and the seller must label it.
Unless you are enrolled in the FBA Label Service, Seller is the only valid LabelPrepPreference value.
Metrics and other Amazon-only related features
There are a few metrics that can be added and used as a column when generating a report within Inventory Planner that is specific to Amazon only. Continue reading below to know each metric.
Bundles
All bundles associated with FBA are considered Assemblies - since Amazon only carries finished goods/produced bundles.
Competitive Price
For Amazon sellers, the competitive price is pricing for active offer listings based on two pricing models: New Buy Box Price and Used Buy Box Price.
https://docs.developer.amazonservices.com/en_US/products/Products_GetCompetitivePricingForSKU.html
Order Limit
The order limit metric will reflect the "maximum shipment quantity" from Amazon's restock report in your Seller Central account.
The order limit will be reflected in the 'to order' amount, along with the minimum order quantity and units of measurement amounts.
Platform Variant Fee
Platform variant fee is the fee per unit charged by the connected platform (currently only supported for Amazon connections).
The 'platform' fee' will be the total fees charged by the connected platform for the date range of the report.
Platform Fee
The 'platform' fee' will be the total fees charged by the connected platform for the date range of the report. Platform fees include referral fees, variable closing fees, per item fees, and FBA fees.
Profit/Unit
Profit/Unit is forward-looking to show the listed price and current product landed cost. For Amazon sellers, product profit is the competitive price - landed cost price - estimated platform fee. If the landing cost is not set, Inventory Planner will use the cost price instead.
Here is some calculation for other metrics that may involve Amazon-related metrics:
Profit = Revenue - COGS - Platform Fee
Margin = profit / revenue
Data and API Details
FBA stock is updated when Amazon receives inbound shipment. We use _GET_AFN_INVENTORY_DATA_BY_COUNTRY_ report. The stock is normally the stock in Amazon plus stock reserved due to FC transfers (they are available for sale). This stock does not include and FC Processing and stock reserved due to customer orders.
Inventory Planner ignores sales orders with fulfillment-channel Amazon and sales-channel Non-Amazon if item-status is Unshipped. Such orders are usually removal orders and should not count for replenishment.
Replenishment for FBA can be performed in one of the following ways:
Purchase stock from supplier and ship directly to Amazon warehouse. In Inventory Planner, it corresponds to the creation of a purchase order with FBA as the destination. Such purchase order can be also be saved as Amazon inbound shipment.
Purchase stock from a supplier to your own warehouse/location which is available as FBM stock. In Inventory Planner, this is a purchase order to main warehouse and does not correspond to anything in Amazon. Once you receive products to your warehouse, you then ship smaller quantities to Amazon. In this case FBA listings should have shorter lead times and days-of-stock periods and the replenishment number will reflect how many products should be sent to Amazon. To proceed create a transfer from FBM to FBA which can also be saved as an Amazon inbound shipment.
Purchase stock from supplier and store in your own warehouse/location which is maintained in a different e-commerce system (for example, Shopify)
Note that Inventory Planner also pulls existing inbound shipments from Amazon and records them as transfers from FBM to FBA.
You can save Inventory Planner purchase order or transfer as inbound shipment in Amazon. In PO Edit screen, select 'amazon warehouse' as the destination warehouse:
and make sure Save in Amazon checkbox located near Save button on the bottom is marked:
You can also set shipment name by entering it in PO# field (in advanced mode). If you leave it black, Inventory Planner will use identifier generated by Amazon for the name.
If UOM (units of measurement) is set for a variant, it will be used as quantity in case in inbound shipment.
Troubleshooting
If your listings show in the wrong language or the wrong currency is reflected in your account, go to Account > Settings > Connection settings and verify that the Marketplace ID is correct. This should correspond to your 'home' Amazon country. Country-specific Marketplace IDs can be found here.
You can change this to the desired Marketplace ID, using the option seen in the example below:
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Error when attempting to Save Purchase Order/Transfer to Amazon
Error seen: "Failed to save purchase order: Amazon would split it into XXXX shipments. Please check that you have FBA Inventory Placement Service enabled."
This error returns if you do not have the inventory placement fee enabled in Amazon, but when prompted to save to Amazon you select “do not split shipments”.
The setting must be configured in Amazon in order to avoid splitting shipments, otherwise an error is returned.
More can be read about this setting, here: