Amazon sellers watch as inventory vanishes into pending-order purgatory

Traders on Amazon's UK marketplace say a wave of "abnormal" orders stuck in pending status is tying up their inventory and preventing legitimate customers from buying the affected items. Vendors on Amazon's Seller Central forums report unusually high numbers of pending orders in their accounts, often involving products priced at 100 ($132) or more. Reports began appearing on September 20. Within days, some sellers - often individuals or small businesses - said their entire stock of certain high-value products had become trapped in pending orders that were not clearing. Amazon marks an order as pending while it processes and verifies the purchase. The quantity ordered is meanwhile deducted from the seller's available inventory, and sellers cannot cancel the transaction themselves. Amazon says orders commonly remain pending when it cannot authorize the buyer's credit card or, for business purchases, while they await the customer's approval. Some merchants suspect deliberate inventory locking: bogus orders reserve stock without completing payment, preventing genuine customers from buying it. They have compared the apparent tactic to a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, although there is no evidence yet that the activity is malicious rather than an Amazon glitch. Sellers describe activity far outside their usual patterns, in some cases double or triple their typical weekly order volume. One seller said a product received 30 pending orders in about 52 hours. Among them were 15 orders associated with just seven delivery postcodes. Another seller reported 72 pending orders worth about 25,000 in three days and wondered whether competitors were using cards without sufficient funds to interfere with its inventory. Others said Seller Support treated the activity as normal and claimed no other merchants had reported it. That answer frustrated vendors who had found multiple forum threads describing the same problem. We raised the issue with Amazon after a reader alerted us to the complaints. A forum message posted several hours after we contacted Amazon said the issue had been escalated to the company's "partner teams" for investigation. The timing may, of course, have been coincidental. We asked Amazon what was causing the pending orders and whether it regarded the activity as malicious. The company had not responded with an official statement by the time of publication. (R)