Days Until Stock Out Don't Match With Amazon Seller Central

Overview

SoStocked uses Amazon's current FBA inventory levels, in conjunction with your selected forecast settings to determine how many days of inventory you have left at FBA. If you notice that the "Days Until S.O." (Days until you are stocked-out at Amazon FBA) in SoStocked is not perfectly matching what Amazon Seller Central is telling you, this video will explain why.

Amazon Seller Central Forecasting

There are a couple of reasons why your Days Until Stock Out in SoStocked are different from the Days of Supply showing up in Amazon Seller Central and one reason is the forecasting itself. Seller Central uses some kind of an algorithm to figure the Days Until S.O. It's the average of the last so many days based on the marketplace (we don't know the exact formula). Amazon very rarely tells us exactly what its algorithm formulas are.

SoStocked Forecasting

In SoStocked, the forecasting might differ slightly based on what you're using to calculate your adjusted velocity. For this particular product, you're looking at the last 180 days or 6 months, and you're averaging out all seven of these periods to get an average adjusted velocity of 3.48 sales per day which leaves you at about 53 days worth of inventory.

If you scroll down, your inventory timeline will show you the projected sales based on that average of 3.48 sales per day. Also, based on the current inventory that you have at Amazon FBA, it will last for about 53 days.

As soon as you start turning on some of these additional forecasting tools, your adjusted velocity will start to change. Now, try changing the value of your additional sales growth.

Let's say that you expect your sales to grow by 10%, simply type "10" and click "Save & Apply To This Product Only".

As you can see, your adjusted velocity has changed from 3.48 to 3.83 sales per day. However, this doesn't change your inventory level so that's going to lower your Days Until S.O. (from 53 to 48 Days Until S.O.). If you scroll back over to Amazon Seller Central, your Days Until S.O. certainly won't match so you have to make sure that you're comparing apples to apples and you're looking at a forecast that is equivalent to the forecast that you're getting from Seller Central. As mentioned earlier, we don't know exactly what their formula is but that's one reason why it could be a little bit off.

Different Timezones

The other reason just has to do with the time of day that we're pulling the data. We pull all of this data (inventory levels) typically from 12 a.m (pacific standard time) to 3 a.m (pacific time). In case you're wondering why pacific time, that's what Amazon gives us since their headquarters are probably located in Seattle, Washington, USA.

Now, you do have the option to go over your "Settings" and go to your "Inventory Settings".

As you can see, you can choose a second data pull at any time of the day. You can also calculate your own timezone by clicking on "Calculate Timezone".

From here, figure out what time of the day you want to do this second API pull, and then just save that.

What we would recommend is logging into SoStocked and then coming and doing all of your work right after the inventory and API data have been updated.

So those are the two main reasons why your Days Until S.O. might differ between SoStocked and Amazon.