How to Handle Multiple Warehouse Transfer Times?

Overview

Sometimes Amazon sellers have multiple warehouses for the same inventory. These warehouses may be located in different regions, and thus have very different transfer times (the time it takes to get from the warehouse to Amazon FBA). Here is a simple way to solve that issue in SoStocked.

We are working on a more advanced tool to create multiple transfer times. Currently, SoStocked is set up to offer one transfer time per product or per warehouse. In other words, we do not currently have the option for multiple transfer times for the same warehouse, or the same product.

Transfer Times With Multiple Inventories at Multiple warehouses in Different Locations

The default transfer time of 10 days can be edited and saved from the Forecast page. From here it can be saved to all products or any grouping of products you wish. For example, all products in the UK, EU, Canada, etc. (per marketplace).

Go to your forecast page, open any product you wish to edit, and scroll down.

This is where you can set your transfer time. The default transfer time for all products when you first come into SoStocked is 10 days. You can save this at a vendor level (warehouse), or override it here per product, or grouping of products.

In this example, let's say that you are selling this product in the US. But you have a warehouse in China and a warehouse in the US, both storing inventory for this same product. Let's say it takes only 15 days to transfer inventory from your US warehouse to the US FBA fulfillment center. But your 2nd warehouse in China takes 30 days to transfer from China to US FBA.

Since SoStocked does not currently have the option for multiple transfer times, here are a couple of solutions:

3 Ways To Solve Your Problem

There are three different options that you can choose from to solve your problem, depending on what your comfort level or workflow is. If you have multiple inventories at multiple warehouses in different locations, there's this "80/20 rule" where 80% of your inventory is stored in one warehouse and 20% is stored somewhere else.

For example, you have inventory in the US and also in China. Your first option is to set your transfer time based on where you keep 80% of your inventory. Let's say that you keep most of your inventory in China, so this transfer time of 30 days is based on China.

Your second option is to get the average of the transfer times. Let's say that the transfer time for your warehouse in China is 30 days, and 10 days in the US, the transfer time that you will set should be 20 days.

Your third option is to simply go with the longest possible lead time or transfer time. So, if you will have to choose between 30 days or 45 days of transfer time, set your transfer time to 45 days. The worst-case scenario for choosing this option is that you'll have a little bit more inventory in Amazon than you expect for a week or two.