How Amazon Inventory Location Impacts Delivery Speed

Most brands default to West Coast 3PLs for Amazon. It feels obvious. Freight from Asia lands in California, you bulk store there, then feed into FBA. Here’s the problem: last Q4, Amazon completely bottlenecked the West Coast. Containers sat. Inbounds stalled. Inventory starved. The brands that survived? They pivoted East. We analyzed inbound speed across 50+ FBA facilities. The East Coast outperformed the West Coast by 2 to 3x on check-ins. Add in cheaper storage, lower labor, and fewer lockouts, and the math starts to flip. That is why we are now moving more inventory into Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Alabama, and Chicago for merchants. Not because it is convenient, but because it is safer, faster, and cheaper when it counts. Here is what it solves: - Faster inbounds = fewer stockouts - Cheaper storage = real margin back - Diversified footprint = less Q4 risk It is not the obvious play. But obvious does not win Q4. If you are dominantly on Amazon, would you pay more up front to move inventory East if it meant faster check-ins and fewer blackouts?

If your inventory lands on the West Coast and stalls for two weeks, you didn’t plan wrong, you planned late for Q4. Earlier this year, sellers watched their units disappear into Southern California. Not in a dramatic way. Just slowly, quietly. A few days turned into a few weeks. Inventory was marked “received,” but remained unsellable. And when it finally went live, their numbers were really hurt. For some, it felt like déjà vu because it wasn’t the first time. Back in 2023 and 2024, West Coast ports, especially LA and Long Beach, became choke points for e-commerce. Containers sat for days. Inventory lead times ballooned beyond forecastable limits. And when Amazon FCs near the coast got backed up, it triggered delays across the country. The cause was clear: too much volume, not enough space. But what many sellers still miss today is how Amazon’s cross-dock system works during these moments. When you send inventory into a West Coast FC like ONT8 or LGB8, you’re often not sending to a destination, you’re sending to a pass-through, since a cross-dock isn’t where Amazon stores your inventory. It’s where they receive, sort, and reroute it to a final fulfillment center based on expected demand. That handoff can take days. Sometimes weeks. Especially when the network is strained, and once your units are stuck in transfer, you’re out of the Buy Box, out of stock, and out of options. Amazon knows this too. Which is why, ahead of Q4, they’re now recommending sellers: • Plan for longer lead times on West Coast entries • Store safety stock in domestic warehouses like AWD • Reroute containers to East Coast or alternate ports • Use non-West Coast Amazon sites to avoid transfer overload • Use air freight when time is more valuable than margin It’s not a panic warning, but lets not forget the real risk of your not product arrives on time. For Amazon that’s not a warehouse issue. That’s a strategy issue. How are you planning for Q4? #AmazonFBA #LogisticsStrategy #Q4Readiness

Being in stock is not enough! Most brands on Amazon aren’t losing to better products; they’re losing to where their inventory’s sitting. Amazon’s algorithm has gotten heavily regional. If your product isn’t stocked close to where people are searching, your organic rank drops even if everything else is on point. We’ve seen this play out again and again with client accounts. Fixing it isn’t complicated, but it’s often overlooked: 🦏Pull order and inventory data by region 🦏Identify where top sales are coming from 🦏Spot any stock gaps or long delivery windows in those regions 🦏Reallocate inventory to high-demand fulfillment centers 🦏Track the Units-to-Sold ratio and delivery estimates to measure impact One client had 60% of orders coming from just 8 states, but was understocked in 4. Fixing that instantly improved both visibility and conversion. Bottom line: Amazon rewards fast delivery. If you’re not showing up regionally, your rank and revenue are taking a hit. This is one of the lowest-effort, highest-return moves you can make right now.

How Amazon Killed One of Our Best-Selling Products Who said geo-ranking isn’t important? Let’s take a look at what exactly happened in our case: When sending inventory to Amazon, sellers now have the option to either distribute the inventory themselves or send it to a warehouse and let Amazon handle the distribution (for a placement fee, of course). We went with the second option and sent our inventory to one of the warehouses on the East Coast, expecting Amazon to distribute it throughout the country. Two weeks after we sent in the inventory (around the time we sold out the units from the previous shipment), we noticed that sales for one of our best-selling product dropped by more than 60%. I had no idea what could have happened—we made no changes to the listing, pricing, or PPC. So, as a data analyst, I started digging into the data to find the reasons. After hours of research, I discovered an interesting pattern: when searching for our product using our main keywords and a West Coast postal code, we appeared in the middle of the first page. However, with an East Coast postal code, we ranked mostly in organic positions 1 or 2 (and even had the Amazon’s Choice badge in some states). I checked it several times a day for at least a week to see if the situation would change... Unfortunately, it didn’t. I started to analyze the metrics that can impact rankings on the West Coast vs East Coast: 1. Sales Velocity (from the Order Report) – I noticed that in the past few months, we had more sales from the West Coast than from the East Coast. But recently, there was a drop in the number of orders coming from the West Coast (likely due to the lower rankings). 2. Refund Rate – Our refund rate on the East Coast was higher. 3. Delivery Times – On the West Coast, our delivery times were significantly longer. This got me thinking... why are our delivery times longer on the West Coast? Then it hit me—Amazon didn’t distribute our new shipment to the West Coast. I took the Inventory Ledger Report, uploaded it to ChatGPT, and asked it to create a heat map so I could visualize our inventory distribution for this ASIN. ⬇️⬇️You can see the result below (not the best looking, but it gets the job done). The result is clear... we have no inventory on the West Coast. How to handle or avoid this situation: a. Distribute your inventory yourself—make sure you send enough units to both the East and West Coast. b. If you’re already in the same situation, recall your inventory and send it back to different parts of the country. c. Don’t rely solely on Amazon! They prioritize customer satisfaction over seller satisfaction. #amazonseller #amazonfba