Tuesday IPI panic is a distraction. Amazon's Inventory Performance Index, or IPI
By Vanessa Hung · May 29, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Tuesday IPI panic is a distraction.
Amazon's Inventory Performance Index, or IPI, updates every Tuesday in Seller Central, and each update creates a wave of reactive inventory decisions across accounts.
For reference, IPI is a score between 0 and 1,000 that measures how efficiently you manage your FBA inventory, with 450 as the threshold separating healthy accounts from those at risk of capacity restrictions.
The working assumption for many sellers is that a drop in score triggers immediate storage restrictions, leading to same-week inventory pulls, shipment cancellations, or catalog-wide discounts.
Amazon evaluates IPI quarterly to set FBA capacity limits for the following period, with checkpoints typically landing in late December, late March, late June, and late September.
Tuesday updates are a monitoring tool, not a penalty mechanism, they exist so you can identify trends and correct course before the quarterly evaluation window closes.
Your IPI draws from four inputs: sell-through rate (units sold over the past 90 days divided by your average on-hand inventory), excess inventory percentage (ASINs with more than 90 days of forecasted supply), stranded inventory percentage (FBA units with no active listing that generate fees but cannot be sold), and FBA in-stock rate (weighted by 60-day sales history per SKU).
Stranded inventory pulls your score fastest because those units accumulate storage fees while contributing nothing to sell-through, that combination is the most expensive combination in your IPI calculation.
So it is a good idea to anchor your optimization work to the six to eight weeks before each quarterly evaluation window, that is when the score that sets your capacity limits is actually captured.
If your IPI sits below 450, start with stranded inventory, then move to ASINs approaching 365 days in fulfillment centers to avoid long-term storage fees, then address your lowest sell-through rate SKUs in that order.
♻️ Repost it to share with sellers who are still optimizing for the wrong window.
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