FBA Expiring Products Tracking and Reporting

Background

All topical and consumable products (including nutritional supplements), whether for human or animal consumption, are considered by Amazon to be subject to expiration, even if an expiration date is not explicitly indicated on the packaging. Cleaning products such as disinfectant wipes, cleaning sprays and solutions, and detergents are also considered subject to expiration.

You as the seller, have the final responsibility for having an expiration date on the packaging, providing the expiration date when building the inbound shipment and, if needed, removing products with expired (and near-expired) dates from Amazon FBA warehouses before they are sold to customers. Amazon does not consistently do First-In First-out fulfillment. It is up to you to track products sent to FBA and recall any before they reach the expiration date and issues arise.

With our platform parts of this process can be automated.

  • Identify which items require expiration date labels and details
  • Ensure the remaining time before expiration is within Amazon guidelines
  • Automatically encode the expiration date into the 2D box content labels
  • Print FNSKU labels with expiration dates

Step 1

When creating shipments and packing items on our platform we will indicate the items that require expiration date labels and expiration date information. Items that require expiration dates are called out. You will be prevented from creating an FNSKU label or making a 2D box content barcode if an item requires an expiration date and one is not provided.

Products must have a minimum remaining shelf life greater than 105 days when sent to Amazon FBA. We automatically enforce this when you input expiration dates. You can also increase this setting to a longer period in your account setting if you'd like an additional buffer.

Step 2

Reporting shows you how many items you packed and send to Amazon in the past that are nearing expiration date. Dashboard showing expiring counts

Step 3

Click on the number of items and see the report, showing which items, from which shipments are expiring soon.

Dashboard showing expiring counts

Step 4

Check SellerCentral for what is left in stock from the items identified in the report and create a removal or destruction order for anything that is close to expiring.


Options for tracking expiring inventory at Amazon FBA

The best option that we've seen work well to track specific expiring inventory is creating new SKUs for each shipment of dated products. While simple with a few SKUs, this gets complicated at large SKU counts. We have not identified a simple option for sellers with large variety of date-sensitive SKUs.