🚨 West Coast Congestion Alert: IXDs and AWD are full 🚨

If you’re sending inventory to West Coast facilities, it’s time to pay close attention.

The situation is critical, and it might just change how you navigate the rest of Q4.

Amazon’s West Coast facilities are facing severe congestion. To sum it up, AWD and all West IXDs are completely filled up, and backup options have reached their limits.

This has forced Amazon to take some drastic steps, including temporarily halting inbound shipments to certain facilities and others like:

• Reduced Fees for East Region: to encourage sellers to send inventory there, they lowered the inbound placement service fee for shipments to the East region by $0.05 per unit.

• Extended Shipment Closure Windows: For shipments created between August 7 and October 31, the automatic closure window has been extended to 90 days, and the abandoned shipment window is now 45 days.

So, if you don’t plan on sending certain shipments, cancel them to avoid unnecessary impacts on your capacity limits.

Digging Deeper: The real issue stems from Amazon's cross-dock (IXD) network, which handles the distribution from national and regional cross docks (nIXD, rIXD) to fulfillment centers (FCs). With the high demand on the West Coast, these IXDs are now heavily congested, adding weeks to the inbound process.

Amazon’s solution? Redirect shipments East, but that comes with its own set of challenges.

Additionally to the bad news, I found that Amazon is launching and reconfiguring multiple warehouses in the middle of Q4 ... right when sellers need things to run smoothly, which adds to the complexity. And remember, they said that the appointments in November and December will be (more) limited 🙄

This means the “just in time” inventory strategy many sellers rely on might not be the best option this season. If your shipments get stuck in this bottleneck, it could mean late deliveries, stockouts, and lost sales opportunities.

So, it might be time to adapt if your business relies on fast turnaround during the holidays. Will your inventory arrive on time?

And that's what happens when you rely on Amazon for all your supply chain 🙃