How to Move Stubborn Inventory on Amazon

Sluggish inventory got you down? Spending too much money on long-term FBA fees? Here’s how to move stubborn inventory and free up capital for your Amazon business.

Tom Rohlf

October 3, 2023

It’s happened to every Amazon seller at one time or another. Your products just aren’t selling. That stubborn inventory is taking up space and you want nothing more than to sell it and move on.

But “out with the old, and in with the new” isn’t so easy. Many sellers are torn between finding techniques for how to make more sales on Amazon or cutting their losses with a lagging product. While each situation is different, below are a few strategies to move stubborn inventory on Amazon.

Just to Remove the Product

We’ll start with the most obvious answer—simply removing the product from Amazon. This is the best decision if you have SKUs that aren’t selling at all. These products are only dragging you down. They negatively impact your overall conversion rate, cost you FBA fees, and generally weigh on your mind. It doesn’t feel good to cut and run, but it’s sometimes the prudent option. Note that there are still things you can do to break even on these investments, and we’ll cover that more later.

Alternatively, your problem might be that you are selling some product, but just not enough to justify your FBA fees. This is really an issue of inventory management. By right-sizing your inventory, you’ll reduce the amount you spend on storage. In some cases, this can lift your profits enough to justify continuing to sell that product.

It’s wise to clear out products from time to time, especially when you consider the cost of storing your Amazon FBA goods. Long-term storage fees can be expensive. These long-term storage fees kick in after 365 days for apparel and 180 days for non-apparel products. If you sell seasonal products unrelated to clothing, you can remove them from FBA to save on inventory costs. Just replace it when the appropriate season comes back around.

Cut Prices to Sell More Products on Amazon

Offering discounts is a tried and true method of moving products. If your goal is to clear out inventory, then don’t be afraid to offer deep discounts, even to the point of selling your goods at cost. Sure, you might not make a profit, but you can break even. This is great for recapturing capital so you can reinvest in different parts of your business. Cash flow is better than sitting on a product that no one wants, after all.

Beyond just reducing the cost of your product, you can entice customers with:

Coupons: Coupons in your product listings to attract price-conscious shoppers. Setting this up is as simple as accessing the “Coupons” section under Promotions in the Advertising section of Seller Central.
Promotions: Lightning Deals or Deal of the Day promotions are time-limited discounts that boost visibility and sales. Buy one, get one (BOGO) deals can help alleviate overstocked inventory too.
Prime Days: Shoppers love this annual sales event because they know they can find great deals. Try piggybacking on this opportunity to move your inventory quickly. You have to plan ahead, obviously. Prepare in advance by optimizing your inventory, setting competitive prices, and running advertising campaigns to increase visibility. But that also means you can use this strategy each year to clear out your backlog.

Sell Your Excess Inventory to Discount Retailers

If you operate a bigger Amazon brand, you might have the opportunity to sell a bulk of your unsold goods to a wholesaler or discount retailer like TJMaxx. These traditional retail relationships benefit from buying your goods for next to nothing and reselling them for a little more than that. It’s not going to be a high-stakes revenue generator, but it can help you break even as you offload stagnant inventory.

Note that retailers like TJMaxx will buy your surplus with no guarantees, which is good news. This differs from retailers that require contracts. If you fail to sell a certain number of goods, the contracted retailer will send the stock back to you—which is the last thing you want.

Placing Sluggish Products Under a Different Parent ASIN

Sometimes the reason your products aren’t moving is due to listing content or listing structure issues.

Let’s say you sell cryptid-themed pajamas. Your Bigfoot sleep pants are performing pretty well, but your Mothman and Loch Ness Monster onesies aren’t. The problem might be that each product has its own listing. Rather than trying to make each and every one of your products rank individually, try putting all your themed PJs under parent ASIN. This invites customers who land on your listing to click through each variation with ease. So, a customer who would have at least looked at the Bigfoot pants will find your Mothman onesie instead.

The products don’t have to be a perfect match—in this case, sleep pants and onesie pajamas. Just so long as they are reasonably associated with what customers might expect to find within your listings.

Discount and Reframe Your Offerings to Capture a New Audience

Sometimes all it takes to move merchandise is reframing how someone finds your offerings.

For example, my children’s clothing brand Cuddle Club was having difficulty selling baby swaddles. The keyword was just too competitive. So we instead decided to focus on search terms related to “baby gift” which helped attract a new audience. Parents might not have been buying our swaddles for their utility, but their friends and family members certainly are thanks to that shift in our target market.

Is your mid-level cookware failing to resonate with your target audience? Maybe moms and dads aren’t buying your kitchenware. But dropping the price and rebranding it as “the perfect cookware for college students” or an “ideal gift for grads going away to college” could change that trend for the better.

You can piggyback this strategy on holiday purchases. Grill brush not selling? Sell it for a discount on Father’s Day by targeting “Father's Day grill accessories.” The strategy here is niching down and selling for a very low price to liquidate your stuck inventory.

New Promotional Tools for Amazon Sellers

Here’s an exciting tip I only learned about recently. Amazon sellers can target repeat customers with an email calling out relevant products. In your Amazon account go to Brands, Customer Engagement, and Create a Campaign. From here, you can select an audience and campaign.

Sellers can now retarget audiences with specific campaigns inside of Seller Central.

The goal is to put your sluggish products in front of an already receptive audience in hopes of garnering more visibility and sales. This is a great tool for improving sales for Amazon sellers, so give it a whirl!

Take Advantage of Amazon’s Virtual Bundles

Another opportunity to make more sales as an Amazon FBA seller is to bundle together low-conversion products with high converters. For example, if your sun hats are underperforming, you could offer a bundle deal with your highly popular bikinis. The hat-plus-swimsuit combo is added to your listing as a child variation.

Virtual Bundles allow sellers to offer multiple products as a child ASIN.

This is a big win for buyers and sellers alike. Buyers feel as if they are getting a better deal. Sellers get to offload products with subpar sales while boosting the appeal of a winning product. If the hat-swimsuit bundle becomes a runaway success, you might have even discovered a SKU that will work in the long term. Note: If you do decide to sell this bundle long-term it will likely make sense to source and sell the bundle directly from your manufacturer to get better rates on FBA fees.

There’s no extra packaging for Amazon virtual bundles. When it arrives at the customer’s front door, it’s packaged just as if they bought the products separately. Sellers can bundle between two and five products. So, feel free to get creative and experiment with virtual bundles to move stubborn inventory.

Tracking Your FBA Inventory and the Success of Your Initiatives with Junglytics

Gut instinct and knee-jerk reactions are a surefire way to miss opportunities. It’s much better to rely on good data to make decisions. Unfortunately, pulling detailed and accurate insights from Seller Central is cumbersome.

That’s why I created Junglytics. As a seasoned Amazon seller myself, I wanted to explore the KPIs most aligned with my goals—in an instant, without a lot of hassle. That’s why Junglytics is the most customizable business intelligence tool for Amazon sellers.

Our Junglytics dashboards track 40+ metrics including profit, revenue, advertising insights, and so much more. Here’s a quick look at a card showing FBA inventory by product line.

Junglytics provides vital information at a glance inside our easy-to-use analytics dashboards.

With a few clicks, Junglytics users can view different timeframes, zoom into product variations, and compare investments across different regions.

If you are interested in getting clear insights into your Amazon business, I invite you to explore a live demo. In a few short minutes, you’ll understand the power and simplicity of our highly customizable data analytics platform for Amazon sellers.

Follow me on LinkedIn for more tips.

Check out our resources for more thought leadership for Amazon sellers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tom Rohlf

Tom has been selling on Amazon since 2014 - He exited his first business (Playerten.com) in 2019 and is the CEO and Co-founder of Cuddle Club an Amazon native children's clothing brand.

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