Inventory and Supply

The chain, not the spreadsheet.

Selling rate decides what you are short of. Being short decides what you order. What you order becomes a lot, and the lot becomes the shipment Amazon is expecting. Every link is usually somewhere else.

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Inventory and Supply Beta

You sell first. Then you make more.

Nobody manufactures a year of stock and hopes. You sell, you watch the rate, and you place the next run in time for it to land before you run out. That is a chain of decisions, and every link of it is somewhere else: a spreadsheet, an email to the factory, a shipment ID you paste into Seller Central.

Real demandSelling rate per week, read across several windows
ProjectionStock on hand, inbound, FBA and AWD, week by week
Shipment planWhat is short, after minimum quantities are checked
Purchase orderThe plan, sent to the manufacturer
AllocationThe received lot, split into FBA and AWD shipments
Tracked lotMapped to the real shipment, with an arrival date

Material planningThe purchase order proposes the components it needs, projected week by week against what is on hand and on order, per supplier. For sellers who buy the parts, not just the box.

One chain, one place. The plan that says you are short becomes the order you send, the lot you receive, and the shipment Amazon is expecting.

The week your stock runs out, before it does.

Every pack SKU gets a projected end-of-week stock line: what you hold in FBA and AWD, what is inbound and when it lands, against the rate you are actually selling at.

Pack SKU	Buffer	Sales / week	Proposal	W36	W37	W38	W39	W40	W41	W42	W43
HRB-1P	32w	66	Planned +1,080	365	299	342	276	inbound1,290	1,224	1,158	1,092
HRB-2P	32w	22	Planned +540	200	178	372	350	598	576	554	532
HRB-3P	35w	7	Waiting for minimum	121	114	143	136	129	122	115	108

End-of-week stock

Expected: 1,290
Buffer level: 2,112
Added this week: +1,080 from an inbound lot
Expected to land: 21 September

Open the cell to see the lot it came from.

Illustration — Red is below cover, amber is close to it, and the marked week is when an inbound lot lands. Figures and SKUs are invented.

Buffer weeks, not guessworkYou set how many weeks of cover you want to hold. The projection works back from it through production time, transit time and the expected arrival date, so the week a plan has to be placed is a date, not a feeling.
Minimums, on both sidesA proposal waits until the SKU clears its own minimum order quantity and the order clears the minimum your manufacturer accepts. Until both pass, the row says it is waiting rather than pretending it is ready.
However you pack itMake 1,000 units and pack 400 as singles and 300 as twin packs, and every pack SKU carries its own stock, selling rate, buffer and projection, while the production run behind them stays one number.

Inventory and Supply is in beta. It is included from the plan where Inventory and Supply becomes available, and it is being tested with real catalogs while the chain is completed.

What happens after you approve a plan.

The plan is the easy half. The part that usually lives in email and a spreadsheet is what happens between the factory and the Amazon shipment, and that is the part this holds.

After the plan is approvedIt becomes a purchase orderThe shortfall the projection found, addressed to the manufacturer, with the quantities that cleared both minimums.
When the lot arrivesYou allocate itSplit the received quantity into FBA and AWD shipments, or take the split the shipment plan already proposed.
Instead of duplicating itIt maps onto what existsShipments you have already created are matched, so a lot lands on the shipment Amazon is expecting rather than creating a second one.

Every lot is a column, not a note in a file.

The inbound pipeline puts one column against each purchase order, shipment or AWD lot, and each cell is the number of boxes of that pack SKU in that lot. A lot carries its pickup date and its estimated arrival, and says whether it is being tracked or kept as history.

Lot	1 pack	2 pack	3 pack
Lot ARecently arrivedCompleted 23 Aug	540	·	·
Lot BIn transit, trackedArrives 24 Sep	1,080	270	·
Lot CIn transit, trackedArrives 13 Oct	1,080	162	72
New planApproved, awaiting dispatchArrives 24 Nov	1,080	1,080	·

Illustration — Lot names, dates and box counts are invented.

And the parts that go into it.

If you buy the components rather than a finished case, the purchase order proposes those too. Component stock is projected week by week per supplier, and where the projection turns negative the row carries the quantity to order.

Printed carton, smallSupplier A−2,106Suggested 3,000
Printed carton, largeSupplier A7,701No proposal
Foil pouch, 40 countSupplier B−864Suggested 2,000
Outer shipperSupplier B3,570No proposal

Illustration — Component names, suppliers and quantities are invented.

Stock does not argue an advertising decision.

The two sides are kept apart on purpose. An advertising decision is argued from the advertising record, and stock is planned here, on its own evidence.

A brief is never written because of stock. AI Analyst reads your advertising record and the relationships between your products, and it does not read Inventory at all, so no proposal arrives arguing from how much you happen to hold. Knowing what you are about to run out of is a real question — it is simply a different one, and it is answered here.

How a rule decides and what stops it What a Decision Brief reads

Plan the run before you need it.

Set the cover you want to hold, and the week you have to place an order stops being a feeling and becomes a date.

Create account Inventory and Supply docs