My take on Amazon's expanded air-freight options: Fly the products where a stock
By Robinlobo · October 21, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
My take on Amazon's expanded air-freight options:
Fly the products where a stockout would cost you the most. That cost can keep growing after the inventory is back.
The missed sales are only part of it. You can also lose search rank and ad momentum, then pay more per click to get the product moving again.
The comparison is the extra freight bill against the contribution margin on sales you'd otherwise lose, plus the estimated cost of recovering from the stockout.
Take a 0.5 kg product costing $3.40 per unit by air and $0.35 by ocean. (Those are assumptions for this example, not an Amazon quote.)
Flying 1,000 units adds $3,050 in freight.
If waiting for the ship would mean losing 1,000 sales, with $8 contribution margin per unit before the air premium, that's $8,000 in profit at risk. Paying the extra $3,050 makes sense before you even account for recovering rank and ad performance.
The same calculation can look very different for a bulky, low-priced product. The freight premium can consume too much of the margin you're trying to protect.
So I wouldn't fly the whole catalog. I'd pick the products where the economics work and send enough inventory to cover the period before the ocean shipment arrives.
Timing still has to work. If your ocean booking is 4-7 weeks from reaching a fulfillment center, compare that with when you expect to run out and when holiday demand lands.
Before booking air, check the actual AGL quote and shipment minimums, along with receiving capacity. November backlogs can still delay when inventory becomes available to sell, and those units still incur peak fulfillment fees. Those fees belong in the margin calculation.
I'd be comfortable paying more to keep a profitable product in stock. I just want to know how much profit that extra freight is actually protecting.