Which products run short in the next four weeks?

Your stock on Amazon read against the demand you expect, not the demand you just had.

Most reorder decisions start from an average of recent sales. That average is built from the past, so it misses a season that has not started yet, and it shrinks after a stockout — the days with nothing to sell pull it down, and the next reorder comes out short. Meanwhile the stock count itself often comes from a spreadsheet someone updated before the last shipment left.

What we do about it

• Stock is read from Amazon, not from a spreadsheet: FBA available plus AWD on-hand for every product, per seller account. Units already on their way to a fulfilment centre can be counted in or left out with one switch.
• Demand is your weekly forecast, and any week you corrected by hand beats the model. Where there is no current forecast, the row falls back to the last 28 days of sales and says so, so you always know which kind of number you are reading.
• Anything under four weeks of cover is red. A product with enough stock in total but too little of it on the FBA shelf is flagged separately, because the fix is an AWD transfer, not a purchase order. Over 180 days of cover is marked overstock — money sitting on a shelf.
• Products roll up under their parent, adding units and demand before dividing, so a family’s cover is a real number and not an average of its variants. Your own warehouse, 3PL stock and open purchase orders are not in these totals.

A real moment

A product had been selling about thirty a day, then ran out for a while. Its average dropped to twenty — not because buyers wanted less, but because there had been nothing to sell. The reorder was sized on that average and came out short, so the stockout that shrank the number set up the next one. Read against the forecast instead of the last month, the same stock turns red while there is still time to act.

A composite scenario, drawn from patterns we see repeatedly — not a named customer's result.