What are long-term storage fees in Amazon FBA?
18 March 2026
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In the previous article, we broke down what long-term storage fees are, when Amazon applies them, and how they’re calculated. But understanding the problem is only part of it. What most sellers actually want to know is: how do you stop these costs from growing — or avoid them altogether?
Because once long-term storage fees start appearing, they rarely stay flat. They build up over time, especially if part of your inventory isn’t moving as fast as expected. The good news is that these costs are predictable — and in most cases, preventable.
So in this article, we’ll focus on the practical side: how to spot when your inventory is at risk, what actions actually make a difference, and how to structure your stock so fewer units stay in Amazon long enough to trigger additional fees.
When you should get concerned about slower selling products?
If you already got an invoice with a much higher fee for long-term storage products, you need to act right away, as this is a sign that your current sales pace is no longer enough to clear the inventory you already have in Amazon. The good news are, all the information you need to see which of your products are "overdue" according to Amazon is in the seller's center, and you can use the information to catch the moment when your inventory won’t sell in time — and act before it crosses the threshold.
For example, let’s say you’re holding 1,200 units and selling 10 units per day. At that pace, you’ll sell around 300 units per month. So after 3 months, you’ll have sold about 900 units — and around 300 will still be in Amazon. Those remaining units will now be around 90 days older than when you started.
But if the sales slow down to 5 units per day, the timeline stretches, and now you’re selling only about 150 units per month. After 3 months, you’ve sold 450 units — but 750 units are still in storage. They continue aging every day they stay in Amazon. So while some of your inventory is selling, a large portion of it is simply getting older — moving closer to the 181-day threshold.
That’s the moment that matters: when part of your inventory is no longer clearing fast enough to “keep up” with its own aging. And at this point, there are a few things you can do to avoid or minimize the fees you might have to pay for overstayed product.
Monitor inventory age with a simple sell-through check
The Inventory Age report is one of the few places in Amazon where you can see a problem developing before it turns into a cost. You’ll find it in Seller Central under inventory reports, and it breaks your stock down into age brackets — for example: 0–90 days, 91–180 days, 181–270 days, and so on.
The most useful way to read this report is to connect those age brackets with your current sales pace. Start by looking at how many units are already in the 181–270 day range, and then check what sits right behind them in 91–180 days and compare it to you average daily sales from the last 30 days to estimate how much of that stock can realistically sell in the next few weeks.
For example:
- you have 600 units in the 181–270 day range
- your average sales are 10 units per day
Over the next 30 days, that means roughly 300 units will sell and the remaining 300 units will increase their age and get closer to the higher fees range. Now, check how many days are left until the next 15th, when Amazon applies long-term storage fees and estimate how many units will sell before that date.
If there are 20 days left and you’re selling 10 units per day, you’ll clear around 200 units. So out of your 600 units about 200 will sell and about 400 will still be in storage at the time of the assessment. That remaining portion is what will most likely be included in the next fee calculation if not sold and how many items you should remove out of the inventory to not get charged extra.
Increase sales velocity for at-risk inventory
Once you know how many units are at risk, the goal is no longer “improve sales” in general. It’s much more specific: you need to increase your daily sales enough to clear a defined number of units before the next assessment date. Let’s say you need to sell 400 units in the next 30 days, but your current pace is 8 units per day. That means you’ll only clear around 240 units — leaving a gap of 160 units that will likely move into older age brackets.
At this point, the question becomes very practical: what needs to change in your listing to move from 8 units per day to around 13 or 14?
One option would be to adjust the prices based on your competitors prices. If your product is, for example, priced at €24.99, and most comparable listings are between €19.99 and €21.99, you can:
- reduce it step by step (for example, from €24.99 → €22.99)
- or keep the list price and add a coupon (e.g. €3 off) so the product appears with a visible discount badge in search results
The key difference is visibility. A coupon changes how your product looks in search — it adds a green badge and a lower “perceived price,” which often improves click-through and conversion without permanently changing your base price.
If conversion is already stable, the next lever is traffic — but again, not in a general sense. Go into your Sponsored Products campaigns and identify which keywords or campaigns are already generating sales for that SKU:
- campaigns with consistent orders
- keywords with good conversion (even if volume is low)
Then make targeted adjustments and for a short period (for example, 2–3 weeks), you can:
- increase bids on your top-performing keywords to improve their position
- raise the daily budget so campaigns don’t go offline midday
- move well-performing keywords into a separate campaign with higher bids to push them more aggressively
For example, if a keyword currently brings in 2–3 orders per day, improving its visibility might push that to 4–5. Across several keywords, that difference can be enough to close your daily sales gap. The goal is simple: increase how often your product appears in high-intent searches where it already converts
There’s also a third option that’s often overlooked. Instead of trying to generate more orders, you can increase how many units are sold per order. Bundles or multi-pack offers can help move inventory faster without needing a proportional increase in traffic. What matters most is tracking how these changes affect your daily sales over time. After a few days, you should be able to see whether your new pace is enough to close the gap. If it isn’t, you still have time to adjust further — but now you’re working with a clear target.
Remove inventory based on what won’t sell
At some point, numbers will tell you that even with pricing and ads, you won’t clear all units in time - unless you remove those products from Amazon warehouses. Start from your Inventory Age report and identify which specific SKUs and how many units are already in the 181+ day range. Then estimate how many of those units can realistically sell before the next 15th, based on your current daily sales.
Let’s say:
- SKU A has 500 units in 181+ days
- you’re currently selling 5 units per day
- there are 20 days left until the next assessment
That means you’ll sell around 100 units before the cutoff. The remaining 400 units will still be in storage when Amazon takes the snapshot — and those are the ones that will be included in the fee calculation.
Now compare how much Amazon will charge you to keep those 400 units (based on their size and age) and how much it will cost to remove them (per-unit removal fee). If the expected storage fees over the next 1–2 months are higher than the removal cost, then keeping that inventory in Amazon simply doesn’t make financial sense. At that point, you can create a removal order for only the portion that won’t sell (not the entire stock) inside the seller FBA account. This way, you’re separating the part that can still generate revenue from the part that is more likely to generate costs than sales. The units that are likely to sell in the next few weeks stay in Amazon, where they can still convert into orders. But the remaining portion, the one that won’t clear in time, is removed before it starts accumulating additional storage fees.
Plan shipments based on realistic sell-through time
Before sending a shipment to Amazon, it helps to calculate how long that stock will stay in FBA at your current sales pace — and whether that timeline fits within Amazon’s thresholds.
Let’s take a simple example:
- you plan to send 2,400 units
- your current sales are 12 units per day
At that pace, you’ll need around 200 days to sell through that inventory. After ~180 days, part of that shipment will already be in the 181+ range. That means even if sales stay stable, a portion of those units will start qualifying for additional fees before they sell.
So instead of asking “how much can I send?”, the more useful question is:
How many days of stock can I send without crossing 181 days?
Using the same numbers:
- 12 units/day × 120 days ≈ 1,440 units
That’s roughly 4 months of stock — a much safer range, because it gives you a buffer if sales slow down.
Plus, this changes how your inventory flows through Amazon over time. Instead of sending all 2,400 units at once and letting them sit in FBA for months, you send only the portion that can realistically sell within a shorter window — in this case, around 1,400–1,500 units. That gives you roughly 3–4 months of stock at your current sales pace. The rest of the inventory stays outside Amazon as reserve. Once your stock numbers starts dropping toward 2–3 months of coverage, you send a smaller replenishment batch to top it back up.
What this does is spread your inventory over time.
Instead of having one large shipment aging all at once, you have multiple smaller batches moving through Amazon at different moments. Some units have just arrived, some are in the middle of their lifecycle, and some are about to sell — but very few stay long enough to cross into the 181-day range. And this has a direct impact on your costs, as most of the units sell within a shorter cycle — typically within 60 to 120 days from arrival — which keeps them well below the thresholds where long-term storage fees start to apply.
If demand slows down, you can simply delay your next replenishment instead of being left with excess stock already inside Amazon. And if demand increases, you can respond quickly by sending additional units from your reserve, without overloading FBA in advance.
What if FBA optimization isn’t enough?
At some point though, you might notice that the usual strategies to clear Amazon's inventory aren't helping that much anymore, as your sales pace simply doesn't match Amazon's strict regulations. For example, let's say you have 2,000 units in stock and you’re selling 8–10 units per day - even if you push sales and increase that to 12 units per day, you’re still looking at around 160–180 days just to clear what you already have. That puts a large portion of your inventory very close to the 181-day threshold — and any slowdown in sales pushes it beyond that. If it happens once or twice, it's manageable. But lowering prices below a comfortable margin, increasing ad spend just to maintain volume, or risking not having enough stock to fulfill a sudden surge of orders in time, every month? That's unfeasible.
However, there is a way in which you could keep enough stock in the inventory to cover the extra orders without worrying about having to sell products below the production cost or paying for removals, just to avoid the extra long-term storage fees.
Namely, it's working with a 3PL partner.
How a 3PL helps reduce long-term storage fees
Moving a part of your stock into a 3PL warehouse located in Europe instead of keeping everything inside the Amazon FBA or sending regular batches of products internationally to Amazon solves a few problems right at the start. First, instead of sending your full inventory to FBA, you keep only a portion inside Amazon — just enough to cover your current sales pace for the next few weeks or months. The rest stays in a separate warehouse, outside Amazon, and only gets sent in when it’s actually needed - and since the stock stays in a European warehouse, you can restock the products in a matter of few days, rather than a week or two.
Instead of sending one large shipment that takes 5–6 months to sell, you’re working with smaller batches that are designed to clear much faster. For example, if you send 900 units to Amazon and your sales are 10 units per day, that batch will sell in about 90 days. Before it drops too low — for example, when you reach around 30–40 days of remaining stock — you send another batch from your 3PL warehouse. Because of that timing, most units spend around 2–4 months inside Amazon, not 6 months or more.
At the same time, the rest of your stock isn’t under any pressure to move quickly, those units can sit in your 3PL warehouse for 2–3 months without triggering additional fees, while you wait for demand to recover, for example, during the next seasonal peak or promotional period. Then, instead of trying to clear all 1,200 units at once, you send back a smaller batch, for example, 300–400 units, when sales start picking up again. That way, only the portion that can realistically sell within a few months is exposed to Amazon’s storage timeline, while the rest stays outside until there’s actual demand for it.
How FLEX. Logistics supports Amazon sellers
Setting up this kind of inventory flow — where part of your stock stays outside Amazon and is replenished in smaller batches — works well in theory. The challenge is making it work consistently in day-to-day operations.
This is where a 3PL partner like FLEX Logistics comes in.
Instead of managing removals, storage, and replenishments separately, you can move that entire process into one setup. For example, when you identify inventory in Amazon that won’t sell before the next threshold, you don’t have to decide between keeping it or disposing of it. You can request a removal and have those units sent directly to a FLEX warehouse instead of losing them. From there, the inventory becomes part of your reserve stock.
If demand increases again, you can send a portion of those units back to Amazon in a new shipment — without having to reorder or wait for production.
The same applies to incoming inventory. Instead of sending full shipments directly to FBA, you can route them through FLEX. A portion is prepared and forwarded to Amazon, while the rest stays stored outside and is released in smaller batches based on your actual sales.
And besides just storing your products at our warehouse, we have a few other services dedicated to Amazon sellers that we know are making our clients life easier:
- prepping shipments according to Amazon FBA requirements
- forwarding to different Amazon fulfillment centers
- handling product returns and removals from Amazon warehouses.
So instead of coordinating multiple steps across different providers, you’re working with one partner that handles both storage and Amazon-related operations. And most importantly, you decide how much stock goes into Amazon, when it gets replenished and how much inventory stays outside the FBA system - or how long it stays there.
So if your FBA storage fees have been creeping up — and it’s getting harder to keep them under control — it might be time to look at how your inventory is set up, not just how it’s performing. At FLEX Logistics, we work with Amazon sellers who are in exactly this situation, helping them move part of their inventory outside FBA and reduce unnecessary storage costs. If that sounds familiar, feel free to book a call with our team — we can take a look at your setup and show you where those extra costs are coming from and how to bring them down.
What actually reduces long-term storage costs
Long-term storage costs don’t come from one decision. They build up when inventory stays in Amazon longer than your sales can clear it. That’s why most of the actions covered in this article come down to one thing: keeping your inventory within a realistic sell-through window. If your current stock takes 5–6 months to sell, part of it will eventually cross into 181+ days. If you bring that window down to 2–4 months, most units will sell before they ever reach that point.
And that’s the shift that makes the difference.
In practice, that means:
spotting when your stock won’t clear in time
adjusting sales or removing only the excess
and controlling how much inventory enters Amazon in the first place
Once you start looking at your inventory in terms of time, not just units, those decisions become much easier to make. Because at the end of the day, reducing long-term storage costs isn’t about a single tactic. It’s about making sure your inventory doesn’t stay in Amazon longer than it needs to.
