Deciding How Much Aged Stock to Remove
Compare keeping your aged stock against removing some of it, see the optimal amount, and check it against your Max FBA Days setting before you place a removal order.
The Aged Inventory Analyzer tells you which SKUs are being surcharged. The Aged tab on a product answers the next question: should you remove some of this SKU's aging stock, and if so, how many units? It prices keeping everything against removing, picks the amount with the lowest total cost, and warns you if that amount would leave you short.
Opening the Aged tab
Click any SKU row in the Aged Inventory Analyzer, or any removal recommendation in the Storage Breakdown, and the product opens straight to the Aged tab on the sales channel you were viewing. You can also open any product and click the Aged tab yourself.
The tab is always available. It appears dimmed when the product has no aged or approaching stock anywhere.
Aged inventory is per marketplace, never per product. Units, sales pace, currency, removal fee, and your Max FBA Days setting all belong to one channel, so the tab works one channel at a time and every figure below the selector is scoped to it.
Choosing a sales channel
The selector at the top works the same way as the analyzer's. You view one channel at a time and all figures use that channel's local currency. Pan-EU marketplaces share one pooled inventory, so they appear as a single combined option; channels outside the EU pool stay separate.
If the SKU is aging in other channels too, a line under the tab names them so you know to plan those separately.
The three plans
Three cards sit side by side, each showing Cash required now, Total cost over the projection, and how many days of cover the plan leaves you:
- Keep everything (tagged Do nothing): every unit stays and sells, and you pay the surcharge until the stock clears. Its total matches the Lifetime fees figure for this SKU in the Aged Inventory Analyzer, by design.
- Remove N units (tagged Optimal): the amount with the lowest total cost at the current sales pace that still leaves you enough stock (see The Max FBA Days guardrail).
- Choose your own (tagged Custom amount): set any number with the slider below the cards.
Cash required now is what leaves your bank today: the removal fee multiplied by the units you pull. Total cost adds the surcharge you still pay on what stays, plus what it costs to buy the removed demand back later.
The optimal amount is rarely everything. Removing every aged unit means paying to pull stock you would have sold anyway, and then paying again to replace it.
Setting your own amount
The slider under the cards sets a custom quantity. As you drag it, the summary tells you how many units stay at Amazon and how many days of cover that leaves. Two marks on the track give you your bearings: optimal, and the Max FBA Days floor described next.
The Max FBA Days guardrail
Removing too much creates a different problem: a stockout. Profit Hawk checks your chosen amount against Max FBA Days (see Product Settings). Go below it and a warning appears telling you how many days of cover the plan leaves, what that setting works out to in units at the current pace, and the largest amount you can remove without dipping under.
The Optimal plan never breaches it. If the cheapest amount on paper would leave you short, the recommendation is capped at the largest safe quantity instead.
Max FBA Days is described everywhere else as a ceiling: the most days of stock to keep at Amazon, the level where transfer recommendations stop. On this tab it works as a floor, and the slider mark is labelled Max FBA Days floor for that reason.
It is the same number doing the same job from the other side. When you are restocking, it stops you sending more than that many days of stock. When you are removing, it stops you dropping below them. Either way it is the stock level Profit Hawk thinks this SKU should sit at.
Your monthly bill under this plan
The chart shows what you actually pay Amazon each month under the plan you have selected, broken into three bands:
- Removal invoice: the one-time cost, in the first month
- Aged surcharge: what you keep paying on the units that stay
- Ad spend: only if you add any with the levers below
A Keep everything line runs across the chart for comparison, so you can see the month where removing starts costing less than waiting. Hover any month for its breakdown, and switch between Next invoice and all billing months.
The chart shows cash going to Amazon only. Total cost on the cards also includes buying the removed demand back later, so the two figures differ on purpose.
If nothing is surcharged yet
When a SKU only has units aged 91 to 180 days, nothing is being charged yet and the tab says so. The chart still shows when the bill starts if nothing changes, which is usually the cheapest moment to act.
Advanced: sales and ad spend
The Advanced section lets you test the plan against a different future rather than assuming today's pace holds.
- Sales change: shift the planning pace up or down for anything you know is coming, such as seasonality, a price move, or a competitor going out of stock.
- Extra ad spend: add a monthly advertising budget and the planning pace rises with it. The lift is derived from the SKU's own return on ad spend with a diminishing-returns discount, so a SKU that already converts well on ads gets more credit than one that does not. A SKU with no recent ad spend to model from falls back to a flat planning assumption, and the tab says which one it used.
Ad spend is billed every month of the projection and appears as its own band in the chart. Reset to today's numbers puts both levers back.
Ad lift is a planning assumption, not a promise. The profit on those extra sales is not credited back, so a plan that leans on advertising is optimistic about pace and pessimistic about profit at the same time.
The removal fee
Every cash figure on the tab runs off one number: the per-unit removal fee, shown at the top and editable. Profit Hawk estimates it from the marketplace's published removal rate card using the product's size tier and shipping weight (see Estimating removal and disposal costs).
Three things can happen there:
- A rate is estimated. Click it to override with the figure Seller Central quotes you.
- Amazon has waived removal fees in that marketplace. The field says so instead of showing a bare zero, with the end date when the waiver has one.
- Profit Hawk cannot estimate one. The field becomes a Set removal fee prompt. Enter what Seller Central quotes and every figure below uses it.
A fee you enter yourself is saved in your browser only, for that product and channel. It is not shared with your team and does not sync between devices.
How the numbers are worked out
The footnotes under the tab state the model, and they matter if you are about to spend real money:
- Oldest units sell first, and the projection takes 30-day snapshots at your forecast sell-through, the same seasonal pace behind the analyzer's lifetime fees.
- Total cost includes buying removed demand back later at your landed unit cost (manufacturing plus freight, prep, duties, and 3PL). If the product has no cost on file, the rebuy is not priced in at all and removal looks cheaper than it will be. See Product Costs.
- Three things are left out on purpose, all of which would make removal look better: the base monthly storage you would also save, any recovery value on the removed units, and the inbound cost of the rebuy. The figures are deliberately conservative.
Nothing on this tab places a removal order. When you have picked an amount, create the removal order in Seller Central.
Related pages
Aged Inventory Analyzer
Find which SKUs are being surcharged and how much they cost you each month.
Storage Breakdown
Project your peak storage bill and see which SKUs are worth removing before it.
Product Settings
Set Max FBA Days, the stock level the removal guardrail checks against.
Product Costs
Add landed costs so the rebuy in Total cost is priced correctly.