Overview

Amazon's Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) program enforces strict shipping and product preparation standards, and when sellers fall short, they receive inbound performance alerts. These alerts appear as banners on your Seller Central homepage and within your shipping queue, signaling that one or more shipments or products failed to meet Amazon's requirements. Understanding these alerts is essential because they can directly restrict your ability to send inventory to fulfillment centers until the underlying issues are resolved.

Key Points / What Sellers Need to Know

• Alerts can suspend shipment privileges — If Amazon detects non-compliant shipments or products, it may suspend your ability to send additional shipments of the affected items until you address the problem.
• Product-level alerts are ASIN-specific — When a product-related issue arises, only the affected ASIN is blocked from new shipments. You can still create shipments for your other products.
• Shipment-level alerts are broader — Shipment-related problems can suspend your ability to create or modify any shipments until you acknowledge and resolve the issue.
• Alerts cover a wide range of issues — Problems span product preparation (bagging, labeling, wrapping), shipping and packaging (overweight boxes, hazardous materials), and inventory placement (wrong fulfillment center, abandoned shipments).
• Prompt resolution is critical — The longer alerts remain unresolved, the longer your inventory flow is disrupted, which can directly impact your sales velocity and stock levels.

Product-Related Alert Types

Product-related inbound performance alerts focus on issues tied to specific ASINs and how individual items are prepared before being sent to Amazon's warehouses. Common triggers include missing or inaccessible labels, items that require poly bagging or bubble wrapping but were sent without it, and products that need suffocation stickers but lack them. Labeling problems are among the most frequent offenders — this includes unscannable barcodes, mislabeled items, and missing FNSKU labels. Amazon may also flag quantity discrepancies, such as unexpected items found in a box, incorrect item counts, or units that were not part of the original shipment plan. If an ASIN triggers an alert, that specific product is blocked from future shipments until you correct the preparation issue and acknowledge the alert.