Understanding Amazon listing status and seller-fulfilled inventory management

This guide explains how to manage your Amazon product listings and inventory with the Selling Partner APIs. Understanding listing statuses helps you maintain active, purchasable products and respond quickly to inventory changes.

Listing status

Listings on Amazon have two main states:

• Buyable (Can customers buy it?): Items that are actively on sale and are buyable by customers.
• Discoverable (Can customers find it?): Items that customers can find in the search results but are not necessarily on sale.

There are multiple reasons that could affect a listing in terms of buyability and discoverability. These range from suppression, blocking, missing or expired offers, depleted inventory levels and other reasons. For example, when a listing is search suppressed, it is no longer discoverable. However, this suppressed listing can still maintain its buyability.

In addition to the previous statuses, inventory systems and inventory reports classify listings as Open, Active, Inactive and Cancelled. For more information, refer to the following table:

Manage inventory through reports in bulk

The Selling Partner API offers a range of inventory reports to programmatically maintain listings. Different reports provide different inventory snapshots based on listings status:

Complete listings report

reportType: GET_MERCHANT_LISTINGS_DATA

This report returns all the listings in the seller inventory. This report includes both active, inactive and suppressed listings. Use this report to get a full overview of the seller inventory in bulk.

Active listings report

reportType: GET_MERCHANT_LISTINGS_DATA

This report returns the seller listings which are either purchasable or have zero inventory. Use this report to track listings and trigger restocking operations.

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Note

This report also contains listings with zero (0) inventory quantity, which are considered inactive. This is to allow for not only tracking active items but also for restocking items that turn inactive due to low inventory levels.

Inactive listings report

reportType: GET_MERCHANT_LISTINGS_INACTIVE_DATA

This report includes listings that have zero (0) quantity, listings that are blocked, listings that are suppressed, listings that are not yet opened, and listings that are past their sale end date. Use this report to track all problematic listings in one place: Zero-quantity items, Blocked listings, Suppressed listings.

Suppressed listings report

reportType: GET_MERCHANTS_LISTINGS_FYP_REPORT

This report only includes suppressed listings which can't be retrieved in search results. Use this report to find reasons for the suppressed listings and instructions on how to remove the suppressions.

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Note

Inventory reports are not near real-time. The SLA for stock data freshness is 3 hours. For subsequent report calls from the same merchant account, data is 1 to 6 hours old, depending on inventory size.

Check inventory with the Listings Items API

While the reports are more suitable for bulk retrieval, the Listings Items API operations contain filters, which include identifiers, dates, and statuses, to check for one or multiple items. The Listings Items API operation responses also include additional details for the listings that you request.

Get listings items

You can use the getListingsItem operation to retrieve a listing item if the SKU is known. To customize the response, you can use the includedData attribute with a data set. For example, you can get fulfillment details with the fulfillmentAvailability data set or listing issues with the issues data set. Use this in conjunction with inventory reports to get more details on a specific product.

Search listings items

You can use the searchListingsItems operation to retrieve multiple listings items in batches. To get listings in bulk, call this operation without filters. To get listings for specific conditions, use filters. For example, to retrieve all listings that customers can find but cannot buy, use the withoutStatus filter set to BUYABLE and the withStatus filter set to DISCOVERABLE.

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Note

This operation retrieves listings in batches, but is limited to 1000 listings total across all pages.

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Important

With the above Listings Items API operations, there is a distinction between the latest fulfillment availability data submitted by the selling partner and the actual fulfillment availability data. If you submit an inventory quantity of 1 and sell the item, the fulfillment_availability attribute within the attributes property shows 1 and the fulfillmentAvailability property shows 0 as the live quantity available for purchase and source of truth for actual inventory levels. Use this with inventory reports to get more details on a set of products. Avoid this operation for retrieving a whole, very large inventory.

Monitor listings and inventory with notifications

The Selling Partner API offers a range of notifications over the Notifications API to stay informed in real-time about the standing of a seller inventory.

Monitor listings status

notificationType: LISTINGS_ITEM_STATUS_CHANGE

The LISTINGS_ITEM_STATUS_CHANGE notifies you when the status of a listings item changes. For instance, use this notification to monitor the buyability of a listing.

Stay ahead of listings issues

notificationType: LISTINGS_ITEM_ISSUES_CHANGE

The LISTINGS_ITEM_ISSUES_CHANGE notifies you when the issues data set associated with a listings item changes. Use this notification to know about potential issues as soon as possible and address any quality-related or search-suppressing issues causing the listing to turn inactive or in risk of cancelling.

Real-time stock tracking

notificationType: LISTINGS_ITEM_MFN_QUANTITY_CHANGE

The LISTINGS_ITEM_MFN_QUANTITY_CHANGE notifies you when the available quantity for the seller-fulfilled (FBM) listings item changes. Use this notification to plan ahead based on the inventory levels to meet the demand or synchronize inventory levels of listings items with internal systems and across other sales channels.

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Note

Avoid frequent polling of inventory reports by relying on this notification.

Actions that change listing status

The following actions can change the status of a listing:

Close a listing

Closing a listing item means making it non-purchasable by customers. This can be achieved by removing the purchasable offer or changing the sale period of the current offer so that the listing is past it. For example, an existing listing is on sale but the seller would like to close it.

Open a listing

Opening a listing item means adding a current offer for it. An offer must have a purchasable offer with pricing and a positive fulfillment availability quantity. For example, a listing is submitted with all product facts being complete but no offer is active yet.

Lift suppression on a listing

Suppression can be due to different reasons. You must first inspect issues associated with the listing to retrieve the exact reason. To lift the suppression in this example, the listing must be patched with new required attributes. For example, a listing is search suppressed due to some newly required compliance attributes missing.

Restock an item

Reactivate your out of stock listing by updating its inventory levels. For example, one of your listings stock is depleted and can’t be purchased by customers.

Delete a listing

Deleting a listing completely removes it from the seller inventory. It does not appear in any of the reports or API data. For example, the seller cannot offer the product anymore.