Amazon advises sellers to get their holiday inventory into warehouses before Halloween

The holiday shopping season is still a few weeks out, but behind the scenes retailers are already scrambling to get inventory placed and ready for shipping. Retail Brew is digging into this process as it plays out in real-time to see how companies are hitting the sweet spot between ordering too much and too little so they can avoid both shortages and gluts.

Earlier this month, Amazon issued a warning to sellers who use its fulfillment services: Get your Black Friday inventory into warehouses by Oct. 26 or risk capacity issues come November.

The reason for the warning has to do with how Amazon prepares for the annual influx of holiday goods. Throughout the month of October, the company’s warehousing operations will focus almost entirely on receiving products rather than shipping them out.

“As we do every year during September and October, our fulfillment center teams are focused on receive processes to ensure that your products are properly placed in the right fulfillment centers,” the company said in a message to sellers.

Switching gears: After the deadline, however, Amazon will focus mainly on processing and delivering customer orders—so pushing product out rather than taking product in.

In other words, if sellers miss the recommended deadline, Amazon warehouses will be less prepared to accept more orders. As the company noted in the message, sellers will likely see higher capacity limits in October, but then lower estimated limits in November.

Missing the deadline could impact the rest of the holiday season as well.

On Amazon Seller Central, an online hub for communicating with sellers, one anonymous member asked if inventory sent in after the deadline would be ready in time for the holidays. The company responded that it was the “recommended date to ensure product availability for the holiday season,” and while it’s still possible that products placed after that date will be available for processing in time, “it is not certain that they will be.

Cross-promotion: Prior to this latest message to sellers, Amazon had stressed the importance of proactive inventory management and even offered tips to help prepare for the holiday season.

At the same time, it didn’t waste an opportunity to push sellers toward its Amazon Warehousing & Distribution (AWD) business, which launched last summer.

AWD is a separate but related business to Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). The former is limited to order fulfillment, while the latter is a full suite of storage, distribution, and fulfillment services.

“To ensure that you stay in stock, you can use Amazon Warehousing and Distribution and we’ll automatically replenish fulfillment centers as needed,” the company said.

Alternatively, companies could work with a third-party logistic provider to make sure they are able to meet the deadline. Remington Tonar, co-founder of logistics provider Cart.com, told Retail Brew he encourages customers who rely on FBA to “pre-stage” their inventory.

“One of the practices that we work with our customers on is kind of pre-staging that FBA inventory so that it can be easily injected into that network when the time comes,” he said.