In the past couple of days I have had a few people reach out to me with questions regarding ASIN quantity limit issues on some items in their FBA shipments.  They are seeing a restriction in Amazon at the point when they are creating an FBA shipment for certain items.  In today’s post, I will show you how to find items that are currently subject to ASIN limits, and how I plan to handle things going forward.

First, if you’ve never heard about these ASIN limits, you should read Amazon’s ASIN limits policy.  Effectively, it’s another way for Amazon to ensure the items in their warehouses will sell relatively quickly, and are not used as storage facilities. This is another measure in addition to the long term storage fees that are assessed every 6 months.

This is not a new policy related to ASIN quantity limits, but it does appear that these limits are beginning to be enforced on a much larger scale.

How to Check for ASIN Limits

Now, here’s the process for identifying items in your inventory that are subject to ASIN limits:

1. Login to your Amazon seller account
2. Hover over reports at the top center of your screen
3. Click on “Fulfillment”
4. On the left side of the screen under the Inventory header, click “show more”
5. Click on “Inventory Health”
6. Select the “download” tab in the center of the screen
7. Click “Request Download”
8. It may take a few minutes for this report to download, once it’s available click the “download” button toward the right hand side of the screen.
9. This will download a text file, open this file
10. Click anywhere in the text file, hold the control key and then press A (ctrl + A) to select all of the data
11. Once all of the data is selected, copy the data (ctrl + C) or (right click and select copy)
12. Open up Excel or google sheets and paste the data (ctrl + V) or (right click and select paste)
13. Scroll to the column that is titled “asin-limit,” for me it’s column “AR”
14. Scan through this column and you will be able to identify all of your asins that are affected.

Depending on the amount of inventory you have, I would recommend using a filter to be able to quickly sort all of the items that are affected.  This way you don’t have to scroll through an endless list of items.  To do this in Excel:

1. Click to the left of cell A1 to highlight the entire row
2. Select the “Data” tab within Excel
3. Click “Filter”
4. Now sort the “asin-limit” column from high to low to see all of your affected items at the top of the list

That’s it.  For me there are only a handful of items that have a limit, and some are as high as 100,000 units.  Overall it doesn’t look like it will have a huge impact on my current inventory.

Now, I will discuss how this changes my process going forward.  As this doesn’t have a huge effect on my current inventory, a drastic change is not needed.

However, there will be a slight change before I place any wholesale orders or make any new larger quantity buys.  That change will be creating the FBA shipments prior to actually buying the items.  By creating the FBA shipment prior to buying the items I will be assured that I am able to ship the items to FBA before they are actually in my hands and it is too late.  Again for clarity, this will only come into play on items that I am purchasing significant quantity of.

On smaller quantity purchases, I don’t plan on changing anything, and will deal with any affected items on a case by case basis.  Most likely I will just merchant fulfill the items instead if ASIN limits are restricting me from being able to send via FBA warehouses.

That’s all I have for today.  Hopefully this post helps to clear up some of the questions you have about ASIN quantity limits.  How many items do you have affected by this? How do you plan on handling this? Let me know in the comments.  If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments as well.