If you‘re an Amazon FBA seller, your calendar just got a lot more urgent.
Starting May 2026, Amazon will begin forcibly removing sellable inventory that has been sitting in fulfillment centers for more than 270 days—just nine months. European sellers face a May 5 deadline to configure removal settings, with the first wave of removals hitting on May 6. North American sellers have until May 13, with removals beginning May 14. Japan went first, starting March 21. And this is only the beginning: additional removal waves are scheduled for late June, late August, and late September.
This is not a drill. If you haven’t configured your automated removal settings in Seller Central by the deadline, Amazon will make the decision for you—and you may not like the outcome. Your inventory could be disposed of, donated, liquidated for pennies on the dollar, or returned to you at your expense, with removal orders that cannot be canceled once created. Even if you manage to keep the inventory, you‘re still on the hook for monthly storage fees and the steep aged inventory surcharges that continue to accrue.
For cross-border sellers already navigating razor-thin margins, rising ad costs, and shifting tariff policies, this is the wake-up call that inventory management can no longer be an afterthought. It must be a core competency. The question isn’t whether you‘ll be affected—it’s whether you‘ll act before the system acts for you.
The Economics Behind the Enforcement
To understand why Amazon is pushing this policy so aggressively, you need to follow the money. Long-term inventory sitting idle in fulfillment centers occupies valuable shelf space that Amazon would rather allocate to fast-moving, high-velocity products. Every cubic foot occupied by a nine-month-old kitchen gadget is a cubic foot that cannot store a bestselling item generating daily sales and referral fees. From Amazon’s perspective, slow-moving inventory is a drag on the entire fulfillment network.
But Amazon isn‘t just pushing inventory out to free up space. It’s also charging more for the privilege of storing stale products. Starting January 2026, Amazon significantly tightened its aged inventory surcharge structure. The policy now imposes steep, tiered fees that escalate dramatically the longer your inventory sits unsold:
- 6-12 months: The base surcharge kicks in, and it‘s not trivial. For many categories, the aged surcharge alone can be 300% higher than standard storage rates.
- 12-15 months: The minimum aged inventory surcharge increases to $0.30 per unit per month (or $6.90 per cubic foot, whichever is greater) for US sellers. In some categories, surcharges at this tier can reach 500% of standard rates.
- 15+ months: This is where the numbers become genuinely alarming. For inventory languishing over 15 months, the aged surcharge can spike to 13 times the standard monthly storage fee. Per-unit surcharges rise to $0.35 per month (or $7.90 per cubic foot).
Think about what that means in practice. A product that costs $0.50 per month to store at standard rates could be costing you $6.50 per month once it crosses the 15-month threshold—just to keep it sitting in a warehouse, unsold. Multiply that across hundreds of slow-moving SKUs, and you‘re bleeding thousands of dollars every month in fees that generate zero revenue.
The 270-day forced removal policy is the logical conclusion of this trajectory. If you won’t actively manage your inventory, Amazon will do it for you—and the outcome is unlikely to align with your financial interests.
Step 1: Audit Your Inventory Before Amazon Does It for You
The first and most urgent action is simple but non-negotiable: log into Seller Central and assess your exposure. You need to know exactly which ASINs are approaching or exceeding the 270-day threshold, and you need to know it now.
Amazon provides several tools to help with this audit. The FBA Inventory Age report, accessible under the Inventory Planning dashboard, shows exactly how long each unit has been in fulfillment centers. Alternatively, you can download the Inventory Health report and filter for items with “inventory age 181+ days”—this gives you early warning before the 270-day cliff. The “Recommended Removal” report also highlights items that will incur aged surcharges within 30 days.
While you‘re in Seller Central, navigate to Settings > Fulfillment by Amazon > Automated Removal Settings and click Edit. Review your current configuration. If you’ve never touched these settings, the default behavior is to apply Amazon‘s mandatory removal policy—meaning your 270+ day inventory will be processed according to Amazon’s standard rules. You can choose to enable automated removal (and specify return, disposal, or liquidation preferences) or disable it entirely (keeping inventory but continuing to pay storage and aged surcharges).
But here‘s the critical nuance: even if you disable automated removal to keep your inventory, you’re not solving the underlying problem. You‘re just shifting from “Amazon removes it” to “I keep paying for it.” The only sustainable answer is to prevent inventory from ever reaching the 270-day danger zone in the first place. That requires a fundamental rethinking of how you source and select products.
Step 2: Rethink Your Sourcing Strategy—Speed Matters More Than Ever
The 270-day clock is a direct challenge to the traditional sourcing model that many cross-border sellers rely on. The old playbook—order large quantities to get lower unit costs, ship by slow boat to save on logistics, and let inventory sit until it sells—is now mathematically broken.
Consider the financial reality. When you order 1,000 units to get a better price per unit, you’re effectively betting that those units will sell through before the cumulative storage and aged surcharges eat your margin. For a product that takes 9+ months to sell through, that‘s an increasingly risky bet. Every month of storage adds costs that compound against your original profit calculation.
The alternative is a “small batch, high frequency” sourcing model. Instead of ordering 1,000 units at once, order 200 units, monitor sell-through velocity, and reorder when inventory hits a predetermined threshold. This approach has several advantages in the 270-day world:
- Lower risk exposure: If a product underperforms, you’re only stuck with 200 units, not 1,000.
- Faster feedback loops: You can test new products with minimal inventory commitment, then scale what works.
- Reduced storage costs: Less inventory in FBA means lower monthly storage fees.
- Agility: You can pivot quickly if market conditions change, rather than being anchored to slow-moving stock.
But here‘s the catch: to make this model work, you need to be able to find and evaluate suppliers quickly. If every sourcing decision requires hours of manual research across multiple platforms, the “small batch, high frequency” approach becomes operationally unsustainable. You’ll spend more time researching than selling.
Step 3: Use Price History to Avoid Overpaying for Inventory
One of the most insidious ways sellers trap themselves in the 270-day danger zone is by overpaying for inventory at the sourcing stage. When you pay too much upfront, you‘re forced to set higher retail prices to maintain margin—which slows sales velocity and pushes inventory toward the 270-day cliff. Conversely, if you source at the right price, you can price competitively, accelerate sales, and keep inventory moving.
The challenge is that supplier pricing on platforms like 1688 and AliExpress isn’t static. Prices fluctuate based on raw material costs, seasonal demand, and supplier-specific factors. A price that looks reasonable today might actually be 15-20% above the product‘s historical average—and without visibility into that history, you have no way to know.
AiPrice addresses this blind spot directly. The platform displays price history trends for 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year for products on 1688, AliExpress, and Amazon. This data transforms sourcing from guesswork into informed decision-making. Before committing to a supplier, you can see whether current pricing represents a genuine opportunity or a temporary spike. You can also set price alerts to notify you when a product drops to your target range.
For the “small batch, high frequency” sourcing model to be economically viable, every purchasing decision must be cost-optimized. Price history data ensures you‘re not eroding your margin at the very first step of the supply chain.
Step 4: Build a 180-Day Early Warning System
The 270-day cliff is a hard deadline, but the smartest sellers don’t wait until day 269 to act. They‘ve built a 180-day early warning system that flags inventory well before it enters the danger zone, giving them time to implement strategic responses rather than desperate fire sales.
Here’s what that system looks like in practice:
At 90 days: Review sell-through velocity. If a product isn‘t moving at the expected rate, ask why. Is the pricing off? Is the listing under-optimized? Is competition undercutting you? This is the moment for diagnostic action, not panic.
At 120 days: If velocity hasn’t improved, create a promotional plan. Amazon Outlet deals allow you to offer minimum 20% discounts to move older inventory quickly, with no additional participation fees. This is often the most cost-effective way to clear inventory while recovering meaningful value.
At 150-180 days: This is your final window for proactive action before the 270-day clock starts ticking loudly. Consider creating high-value coupons (30-50% off) or running external traffic campaigns to accelerate sales. If the product still won‘t move, initiate a removal order or use Amazon’s FBA Liquidations program to recover a portion of your investment before aged surcharges and forced removal fees compound the loss.
The key insight is that time is not your friend when inventory sits idle. Every month of inaction increases the total cost of eventually disposing of that inventory, whether through fees, forced removal, or both. The 180-day early warning system ensures you‘re making decisions proactively, not reactively.
Step 5: Accelerate Sourcing Decisions with Image Search
The final piece of the puzzle is speed. In a world where the 270-day clock is ticking from the moment your inventory arrives at an FBA facility, every day spent on sourcing research is a day subtracted from your selling window. Traditional sourcing—manually browsing supplier websites, copying and pasting product details, and comparing options across platforms—simply consumes too much time.
AiPrice‘s image search capability fundamentally changes this equation. On any e-commerce platform—Amazon, AliExpress, Ozon, Coupang, and over 30 others—you can right-click a product image and instantly search for the same or similar items across the entire supply chain ecosystem. The search spans 1688, Taobao, AliExpress, and multiple other platforms, giving you immediate visibility into alternative sources and competitive pricing.
This capability is particularly valuable for cross-border sellers who need to quickly validate whether a product they‘ve identified on a retail platform can be sourced profitably. Instead of spending hours manually searching with translated keywords—often with poor results—you get visual matches in seconds.
Once you’ve identified promising suppliers, AiPrice‘s batch export functionality allows you to extract product information—titles, images, prices, and supplier links—into a structured format for analysis. This eliminates the manual copying and pasting that otherwise consumes hours of sourcing time.
The cumulative effect is a dramatic acceleration of the sourcing lifecycle. Decisions that previously took days can be made in hours. Products can be evaluated, sourced, and ordered before competitors have even finished their initial research. In the 270-day era, this speed advantage translates directly into more selling days, faster inventory turnover, and reduced exposure to aged surcharges and forced removals.
How AiPrice Fits Into the New FBA Reality
The 270-day forced removal policy is not an isolated change. It‘s the visible edge of a broader transformation in how Amazon expects sellers to operate. The platform is systematically disincentivizing the “warehouse in the cloud” model—where sellers treat FBA as cheap, indefinite storage—and pushing toward a “just-in-time” model where inventory moves quickly or gets out.
AiPrice aligns with this new reality by addressing the root cause of most slow-moving inventory: suboptimal product selection. Sellers don’t intentionally stock products that will take nine months to sell. They stock products they think will sell, based on incomplete information, and discover too late that their assumptions were wrong.
By enabling faster, more informed sourcing decisions, AiPrice helps sellers:
- Test more products with smaller batches, reducing the risk of any single SKU becoming a 270-day problem
- Identify the most cost-effective suppliers, preserving margin that can be reinvested in advertising and promotions to accelerate sales
- React quickly to market shifts, pivoting away from slowing products before they become liabilities
The sellers who thrive under the 270-day regime won‘t be the ones with the deepest pockets or the largest catalogs. They’ll be the ones who can source smarter, move faster, and adapt quicker than their competitors. Tools that accelerate the sourcing and evaluation process aren‘t just nice to have—they’re essential infrastructure for profitable Amazon selling in 2026.
Conclusion: The Window Is Closing—Act Now
The May 5 (Europe) and May 13 (North America) deadlines are not suggestions. They are hard cutoffs, and they‘re approaching rapidly. Sellers who fail to configure their removal settings will find their inventory decisions made by an algorithm that doesn’t care about their margins, their cash flow, or their business plans.
But the deadline is also an opportunity—a forcing function to overhaul inventory management practices that were probably overdue for improvement anyway. The sellers who emerge stronger from this policy shift will be those who:
Audit their inventory immediately and configure removal settings before the deadlines
Implement a 180-day early warning system to catch slow-moving inventory before it becomes a crisis
Shift toward small-batch, high-frequency sourcing to reduce exposure to any single product
Use tools like AiPrice to accelerate sourcing decisions and optimize supplier costs
The 270-day clock is ticking. The question isn‘t whether you need to adapt—it’s whether you‘ll adapt before Amazon makes the decision for you.
FAQ
Q1: What are the exact deadlines for the Amazon FBA 270-day forced removal policy?
European sellers must configure removal settings by May 5, 2026, with the first removal wave on May 6. North American sellers (US and Canada) must configure by May 13, with removals beginning May 14. Japan began enforcement on March 21. Additional removal waves are scheduled for late June, late August, and late September 2026.
Q2: What happens if I don’t configure my automated removal settings?
If you haven‘t configured your settings by the deadline, Amazon will automatically process your 270+ day inventory according to its mandatory removal policy. This may include disposal, donation, liquidation, or return at your expense. Removal orders created under this policy cannot be canceled. Even if you choose to disable automated removal to keep your inventory, you remain responsible for ongoing storage fees and aged inventory surcharges.
Q3: How do the 2026 aged inventory surcharges work?
Starting January 2026, Amazon implemented a tiered aged inventory surcharge structure. For US sellers: inventory aged 12-15 months incurs a minimum surcharge of $0.30 per unit per month (or $6.90 per cubic foot); inventory aged 15+ months incurs $0.35 per unit per month (or $7.90 per cubic foot). For inventory stored over 15 months, surcharges can reach 13 times the standard monthly storage fee. Surcharges are assessed on the 15th of each month and charged between the 18th-22nd.
Q4: How can AiPrice help sellers avoid 270-day forced removals?
AiPrice helps sellers address the root cause of slow-moving inventory—suboptimal product selection and inefficient sourcing—by providing image search across 30+ platforms to quickly find suppliers and compare pricing, price history data to avoid overpaying for inventory at the sourcing stage, and batch export capabilities to accelerate competitive analysis. These capabilities enable a “small batch, high frequency” sourcing model that reduces exposure to aged inventory surcharges and forced removals.
**Q5: What’s the difference between removal, disposal, and liquidation?
Removal (Return to Seller) : Amazon ships the inventory back to you. You pay removal fees based on size and weight. This option makes sense for high-value items you can resell through other channels.
Disposal: Amazon destroys the inventory. You pay disposal fees (similar to removal fees) and recover nothing from the merchandise. This should generally be a last resort.
Liquidation: Amazon sells your inventory to wholesale liquidators. You pay a 15% commission on the recovery value plus a processing fee, but you recover some portion of the inventory‘s value. This is often the best middle-ground option for inventory with residual value.
**Q6: What should I do with inventory that’s already approaching 270 days?
For inventory already in the danger zone, you have four immediate options: (1) Promote aggressively with Outlet deals (minimum 20% discount) or high-value coupons to accelerate sales; (2) Remove and resell through alternative channels if the item has strong value; (3) Liquidate through Amazon‘s program to recover partial value while avoiding further fees; (4) Dispose as a last resort for low-value items where removal fees would exceed any potential recovery. The most expensive choice is doing nothing and letting Amazon decide for you.
Top comments (0)