UPDATE Sunday 5th February, 2023. Amazon has just found all 1,428 bags of Rackstuds in their LAS1 fulfilment centre and are in the process of distributing that inventory to various FC's across the country. Woohoo! We should now have plenty of inventory once those bags arrive at their destination. Thanks for your patience. It's been a very stressful couple of months for us.
UPDATE 9th January, 2023. Amazon have officially 'lost' our inbound 1428 bags sent to LAS1 and as at 28th December, we've been able to launch an investigation which is ongoing. That date also saw our inventory allowance increase by this number meaning we could send in more stock.
In an attempt to circumvent the issues encountered below, we've sent in lots of single carton shipments to several different fulfilment centres to try and mitigate our risk. This is an ongoing process we are undertaking every 2 days or so from our 3PL warehouse in Utah.
29th November, 2022. Auckland, NZ. A quickie update to let you know what is going on with Amazon in the USA and why we have no stock.
We could see late September that stock was going to be an issue as Rackstuds were selling very well on Amazon.com. On the 13th of October, we dispatched 1428 bags to Amazon's NV warehouse in Las Vegas (their choice). These arrived on the 21st October and we were notified that they were in 'receiving' status. This process normally takes around 5 days.
Well, it's the 29th November, and we're still waiting. Multiple attempts to contact Amazon have fallen on deaf ears with the response below being typical.
I understand how frustrating this is for you but rest assured I will do my best to assist you with this matter. We understand that you are contacting us regarding Shipment ID: FBA16XM3PHKP. Due to a higher volume of shipments, you may experience longer than usual receive times.
Note: We are unable to manually expedite the shipment receive process, and Selling Partner Support does not have further guidance.
To make matters worse, around the same time as we dispatched the inventory to NV, Amazon slashed our inbound allowance from 5000 bags to 1408 so with the inbound inventory and our remaining stock, that put us in an overstocked situation as you'll see below.
So we're kind of caught between a rock and a hard place. Amazon won't unpack what we have in Nevada and won't let us send any more in to any other fulfilment centre. Our only hope is that in a few days when the dust settles from Cyber-Monday, things will free up.
In the meantime, we have four suppliers in the USA and one in Canada that have access to Rackstuds in our Utah warehouse so please view there websites below and make an enquiry.
Lastly, it is obvious that being beholden to Amazon is not a good long-term strategy so we are expediting our own online store with a goal to going live 2nd April 2023 (or sooner) so keep an eye on Twitter (assuming that is still alive then).
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