Overview

When you send inventory to Amazon's fulfillment network, your shipping plan may split your products across multiple receive centers and fulfillment centers — a standard process Amazon calls distributed inventory placement. Understanding what happens when shipments go wrong — whether they're deleted, sent to the wrong facility, or left incomplete — is essential for avoiding costly fees and inventory delays.

Key Points / What Sellers Need to Know

• Distributed inventory placement is standard — Amazon routes your inventory across its fulfillment network based on shipment volume and customer demand, so a single shipping plan often generates multiple shipments to different locations.
• Your approved plan drives Amazon's operations — Once you approve a shipping plan, Amazon begins coordinating receiving operations around your expected inventory. Deviating from that plan creates downstream problems.
• Six common actions trigger penalties — Deleting shipments, misrouting products, sending incomplete shipments, resending closed shipments, canceling after approval, and failing to complete multi-destination plans within 30 days can all result in fees.
• Two fee categories apply — Inbound defect fees and inbound placement service fees are the primary financial consequences for shipment errors.
• All product sizes are affected — These requirements and potential penalties apply regardless of whether you're shipping standard-size or oversize products.

How Distributed Inventory Placement Works

When you create a shipping plan in Seller Central, Amazon's system analyzes where your products are most likely to be needed based on historical customer demand patterns and your shipment volume. Rather than sending everything to one warehouse, the system may direct portions of your inventory to several different fulfillment centers across the country. This distribution strategy allows Amazon to deliver products to customers faster, but it also means sellers must carefully manage multiple shipments within a single plan. Each shipment in your plan has a designated destination, and Amazon expects you to follow through on every one of them exactly as approved.