Tomorrow (August 15th 2019) long term storage fees will quick in for any products that have been in an Amazon warehouse for 365 days or more and they’re not cheap. In the UK the fees are £4.30 per cubic foot (with a minimum charge of 10p per item).
In the past I’ve always avoided LTS Fees by automatically getting items returned before LTSF kicks in. However I’ve been trying to run down my inventory some what so thought it was worth looking at what my fees were going to be and if it was worth me sucking up the LTSFs and leaving the inventory in an Amazon warehouse ready for Q4.
The easiest way I’ve found to find your items that will incur LTS fees is to download the FBA Inventory Age Report as a CSV. Then upload this to Google Sheets and do the following:
- Click ‘View -> Freeze -> 1 Row’ this means the column headers are always visible
- I’m only interested in co.uk at this point so I select the entire sheet and do “Data -> Sort Range -> Sort by ‘Column B’” This sorts the spreadsheet so amazon.co.uk are the first rows. I then delete all rows that are not co.uk (you can also do this by filtering).
- To find the items that will be hit by LTSF, I filter out all items whose inventory age is not 365+. To do this: “Data -> Create Filter -> In the heading for column N (inv-age-365-plus-days) and deselect the zero”
You now have a sheet that shows all your products that are subject to LTSF.
If you go to the end of the sheet and scroll to column ’N’, you can enter the equation =SUM(N1:N???) (where ??? Is the row number above the row that you’re on). This will give you a count of the number of items.
To get the amount that you will be charged you need to do a bit more. Select the entire sheet again and do “Edit -> Find and Replace -> ‘Find: GBP ‘ and Replace with an empty string”, what this does is removes the GBP so we just have a number that we can do equations on. If you copy the Sum equation you put in the last row of column N to the last row of column S you will now have an estimate of what your long term storage fees will be.
I did this and it turns out I have 439 units that will incur fees of £208.07, which is a lot less than I was expecting (I have been better at repricing this year, especially any over size items). If I got all these items removed the removal cost would be 439 * 0.60 – £263. So I’m going to deactivate automatic removals, do a bit of manual removing of stuff that will never sell and hold onto the rest for Q4. Removal costs are being reduced (in October I think) so I can always remove stuff then.
Any questions let me know.