When connecting your Inventory Planner account to Amazon, you will need a separate connection per region. Then, each country in the region will have a warehouse for FBM, and separate warehouses for each FBA (Amazon) location.
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When a listing becomes inactive, Amazon stops returning correct data, which means stock and other information might be out of date if you make changes in Seller Central.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 (Send to Amazon workflow) in your Seller Central account. After saving your purchase order, you'll see the following option to push the purchase order or transfer to Amazon.
You can customize the following options:
Note that if UOM (units of measurement) is set for a variant, it will be used as the quantity for the case of inbound shipments.
The options are:
Prep owner
Specify who prepares the goods, from the following options:Seller
Amazon
No prep is required
Note that the prep owner differs from the "prep category", which should be set in Amazon Seller Central. If an item hasn't had its prep category set up in Amazon, the prep owner will be automatically set to "No prep is required" when this order saves to Amazon, where you can change it if necessary.
Who labels
Specify who creates the label for the shipment plan, from the following options:Seller
Amazon only
Amazon preferred
No label is required
Vendor address/Ship from address
The address the shipment is being sent from. This field is necessary for Amazon to create the shipment plan.Vendor addresses are synced from Amazon whenever Inventory Planner receives a shipment update.
Amazon requires phone numbers. If the phone number field isn't populated, you can add it in this modal to allow the order to sync via the API.
Prep owner and labeling owner item overrides
These are optional overrides to use if any items have different setups to the order defaults.
Note that the prep owner and labeling owner will be used for all items, unless overridden at the bottom of the modal.
Clicking "Save" creates the shipment plan. Creating a shipment plan means the order can no longer be edited in Inventory Planner - all further actions in the Send to Amazon flow must be taken in Amazon Seller Central.
If the order results in a split shipment, the additional shipments will sync to Inventory Planner as purchase orders or transfer orders as usual.
Labels
Using Inventory Planner's label printing functionality, you can print product or case labels for products being shipped to an FBA warehouse.
If you are printing labels in Inventory Planner, select the Seller option.
Seller: The 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 produce a label.
Unless you are enrolled in the FBA Label Service, Seller is the only valid LabelPrepPreference value.
Metrics and other Amazon-only features
There are a few metrics that can be added as columns when generating a report within Inventory Planner that are specific to Amazon.
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
Used Buy Box Price
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
The platform variant fee is the fee per unit charged by the connected platform (currently only supported for Amazon connections).
Platform Fee
The 'platform fee' is the total fee 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 a forward-looking metric that shows the listed price and current product landed cost. For Amazon sellers, product profit is the competitive price minus the landed cost price minus the estimated platform fee.
If the landing cost is not set, Inventory Planner will use the cost price instead.
Other metrics that may be relevant:
Profit = Revenue - COGS - Platform Fee
Margin = profit / revenue
Data and API details
FBA stock is updated when Amazon receives an inbound shipment. Inventory Planner uses the _GET_AFN_INVENTORY_DATA_BY_COUNTRY_ report.
The stock is calculated as the stock in Amazon plus stock reserved due to fulfillment center transfers (as they're available for sale). This stock does not include FC Processing stock and stock reserved for customer orders.
Inventory Planner ignores sales orders that have a fulfillment-channel of Amazon and sales-channel of Non-Amazon if the 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 the stock from supplier and ship it directly to the Amazon warehouse. In Inventory Planner, this method is represented by the creation of a purchase order with FBA set as the destination. Such a purchase order can be also be saved as an Amazon inbound shipment.
Purchase stock from a supplier, delivered to your own warehouse to be considered as FBM stock. In Inventory Planner, this is a purchase order with the main warehouse set as the destination and does not correspond to anything in Amazon. Once you receive products at 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 your supplier and store in your own warehouse, which is then 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 also set a shipment name by entering it in the PO# field (in advanced mode). If you leave the field blank, Inventory Planner will use an identifier generated by Amazon for the name.
Troubleshooting
My listings appear in the wrong language/currency
If your listings are shown in the wrong language or currency, go to Account > Settings > Connection settings and verify that the Marketplace ID is correct. It should correspond to your 'home' Amazon country. Country-specific Marketplace IDs can be found here.
If it's wrong, you can change it to the desired Marketplace ID, using the option seen in the example below:
I get an error when attempting to save a purchase order/transfer to Amazon
Error: "Failed to save purchase order: Amazon would split it into XXXX shipments. Please check that you have FBA Inventory Placement Service enabled."
This error is returned 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.