For any slow SKU sitting in FBA in September, the question is which of four moves returns the most cash from here forward: hold it at today's price, discount it, liquidate it, or remove it. The cost you paid for the units does not enter the comparison. That money left the bank months ago and no option brings it back. The four differ on future storage fees, future selling fees, the price each unit fetches, and how fast the units leave. Run those four columns on one SKU and the answer is usually obvious. Run them on 200 SKUs and you need help.
Amazon charges FBA inventory two ways, and both get worse in Q4.
The first is the monthly inventory storage fee, billed on the daily average cubic feet your units occupy. Per Amazon's Seller Central help page on monthly inventory storage fees, the standard-size base rate for 2026 is $0.78 per cubic foot from January through September and $2.40 per cubic foot from October through December. Oversize runs $0.56 and $1.40 on the same schedule. Sellers with a high storage utilization ratio pay a surcharge on top, which the same page explains.
The second is the aged inventory surcharge, which Amazon used to call the long-term storage fee. Amazon's help page on the surcharge says it applies to units that have sat in the fulfillment network for 181 days or longer, assessed on a snapshot taken the fifteenth of each month, and charged in addition to the monthly fee. The rate climbs with age. For the schedule effective January 16, 2026, the page lists $0.50 per cubic foot at 181 to 210 days, $1.00 at 211 to 240, $1.50 at 241 to 270, then a jump to $5.45 at 271 to 300 days, $5.70 at 301 to 330, $5.90 at 331 to 365, and $6.90 per cubic foot or $0.30 per unit (whichever is greater) at 366 to 455 days. Amazon ages inventory on a first-in, first-out basis across the whole network, so selling newer units does not protect older ones.
Two operational details from the same page matter for the arithmetic: a removal or disposal order submitted by 11:59 p.m. Pacific on the fourteenth of the month exempts that inventory from that month's surcharge, and Amazon's removal fee page says removals typically take 14 business days to process, or 30 or more during the holiday peak.
Illustrative numbers. Take a seller with a silicone baking mat set in Home and Kitchen, where sell.amazon.com lists the referral fee at 15 percent. Six hundred units arrived at FBA on March 20. Each packaged unit is 0.15 cubic feet and ships at 1.2 pounds, which puts it in Amazon's large standard tier. The seller paid $6.40 per unit landed, $3,840 in total, in February. Current price is $24.99, selling 60 units a month. The seller is deciding on September 30 with a four-month horizon, October through January.
Fulfillment fee: $5.34 per unit, the large standard 1 to 1.25 pound rate for products priced $10 to $50 on Amazon's 2026 peak rate card (October 15 to January 14), before the 3.5 percent fuel and logistics surcharge Amazon added in April 2026.
Hold at $24.99, 60 units a month.
Discount to $18.99, velocity rises to 150 units a month.
Liquidate through Amazon's program.
Amazon's FBA page names FBA Liquidations as one of its inventory tools. Recovery rates vary by product and are not published as a schedule, so use an illustrative $3.00 per unit net of program fees. 600 units times $3.00 equals $1,800.00. No storage, no fulfillment fee, no surcharge. Cash: $1,800.00.
Remove to your own warehouse.
Amazon's removal fee page lists $2.27 per unit for standard-size items in the 1 to 2 pound band in 2026. 600 units times $2.27 equals $1,362.00 out, plus whatever it costs to receive and store them yourself, plus the four to six weeks the units spend in transit during peak. Cash: negative $1,362.00 today, recovered only if you have another channel that sells baking mats at a price worth the trouble.
Ranking: discount $5,856; hold $2,666 plus 360 units carrying an escalating surcharge; liquidate $1,800; remove negative $1,362. The discount wins by more than double, and it wins before you count the surcharge on the units hold leaves behind.
At $18.99 the accounting margin per unit is $18.99 minus $2.85 minus $5.34 minus $6.40 COGS, or $4.40. Still positive, so the books do not object here. Push the price to $15.99 and the margin goes to $1.85. At liquidation, the P&L records a $3.40 loss per unit against the $6.40 cost. That loss is real and belongs on the income statement. It does not belong in the decision. The $6.40 was spent in February regardless of what you do in October, and the only figures that change with your choice are the ones in the four columns above. Sellers who refuse to sell below cost because "we would lose money" are protecting a number that cannot be protected, and paying $5.70 per cubic foot a month for the privilege. The aging inventory guide walks through how that spiral starts.
The arithmetic above took one SKU and about 40 lines. A seller with 200 SKUs in FBA has 200 of these, each with a different arrival date, cubic footage, velocity, and price elasticity, and the surcharge tiers move every month. The Q4 inventory readiness checklist has the sequence for doing it by hand. Most sellers do the top twenty and guess at the rest.
Crunch, the analytics AI inside ConnectBooks, runs the same comparison on request. Ask it whether to liquidate, remove, or hold inventory ahead of Q4 storage fees and it treats already-paid COGS as sunk, then weighs future storage fees, long-term and aged inventory fees, expected sell-through, selling fees, sales velocity, expected cash recovery, and incremental cash contribution for each SKU, and ranks them as hold, discount, liquidate, or remove. The inputs come from reconciled books: the FIFO cost layers, the per-unit fulfillment and storage fees Amazon charged on prior settlements, and the inventory aging report by warehouse.
It does not know what price lifts velocity from 60 to 150 units a month. That elasticity is an assumption, yours or a test's, and the ranking is only as good as it. Run the discount at two or three price points before you trust one.
It does not know that a liquidator will pay $3.00. Amazon's liquidation recovery is quoted per lot, not published as a rate, and the AI can only carry the figure you give it.
It cannot see a channel it is not connected to. If the units would sell at $22 on your own site with $6 shipping, that column is missing unless the site is synced.
It will not submit the removal order by the fourteenth. The deadline is on Amazon's help page. The calendar reminder is on you.
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