Amazon IPI Score: How to Improve It in 2026

1. What the IPI Score Actually Is

The Inventory Performance Index is a score Amazon assigns every FBA seller, updated weekly. It sits between 0 and 1,000. If your score drops below 400, Amazon caps your storage limits. That means you physically cannot send in as much inventory as sellers above the threshold.

Most new sellers ignore it until they get an email saying they're restricted. By then you've already lost the storage you needed for Q4 or a big restock. Don't be that person.

The score lives in Seller Central under Inventory - Inventory Performance. Check it every Sunday. Takes 30 seconds and it'll save you from a nasty surprise.

2. Why Amazon Cares About Your Inventory Health

Amazon runs the biggest fulfillment network on the planet. Every cubic foot of warehouse space has a dollar value. When your dead stock sits in their warehouse for 180 days, that's their shelf space tied up for zero revenue.

The IPI score is how Amazon enforces good behavior at scale. Think of it as a landlord scoring every tenant. High score: you get a bigger apartment. Low score: they cut your square footage. It's that transactional.

"At its core, online arbitrage is buying a product at a lower price than what it actually sells on Amazon to resell that product on Amazon profitably. Of course we can add layers of complexity, but at its core, this is what online arbitrage is." Chris Mangunza - Amazon FBA: 10 Common Online Arbitrage Questions Answered

The same logic applies to IPI. At its core, the score rewards sellers who turn inventory fast and penalizes sellers who park slow product at FBA. Keep that frame in your head and the whole system makes sense.

3. The Four Factors That Move Your Score

Amazon hasn't published an exact formula, but they tell you the four levers right in Seller Central. Every factor is weighted, and that weighting shifts based on your account's data. Here's how to think about each one.

1. Excess Inventory Percentage

This is units Amazon flags as having more than 90 days of supply on hand based on your sell-through rate. High excess percentage is the fastest way to crater your IPI. Fix it first.

2. Sell-Through Rate

Units sold and shipped in the last 90 days divided by the average units on hand over the same period. Amazon wants this as high as possible. Slow movers drag this number down hard.

3. Stranded Inventory Percentage

Units sitting in a warehouse with no active listing. Suppressed listings, closed listings, listing errors. These are costing you storage fees and killing your IPI at the same time. Fix stranded inventory weekly - it takes five minutes.

4. In-Stock Rate

This one is the opposite problem. Amazon also docks you for running out of stock on products that historically sell well. Staying in stock on your top ASINs protects this metric.

4. What Score You Actually Need and What Happens Below It

The hard cutoff is 400. Above 400: unlimited storage (subject to your category and account size). Below 400: Amazon assigns you a quarterly storage limit measured in cubic feet. The lower your score, the tighter that limit gets.

If you're running online arbitrage and sending in frequent smaller shipments, a storage cap isn't always catastrophic. But if you're scaling into Q4 or trying to capture a spike in demand, hitting the cap at the wrong moment costs real money.

Sellers in the 400-450 range are in the danger zone. One bad week of slow sales and you can slide under. Target 500+ and you have a real buffer. I personally try to stay above 550.

5. How to Fix Excess Inventory Fast

Excess inventory is almost always the biggest drag. Here's the actual playbook to fix it, in order of what works fastest.

Run a Sale or Coupon

Drop the price 10-15% and watch your sell-through rate jump. This is the fastest lever. Even if you eat a little margin short-term, clearing the excess protects your storage limits and avoids long-term storage fees. Do the math before you price cut - sometimes $11.20 net on a clearance sale beats $0 net on dead stock that keeps accruing fees.

Create a Lightning Deal or Prime Exclusive Discount

If you have the account standing to run Lightning Deals, use them for your slowest movers. Prime Exclusive Discounts are easier to set up and can move volume quickly on competitive listings.

Remove Inventory

Removal orders cost money (usually $0.97 per unit for standard size). But paying $0.97 to remove something that would cost you $3.00+ in long-term storage fees is a good trade. Pull the trigger when the math works.

Multi-Channel Fulfillment

Sell the excess on eBay, Walmart, or your own site using Amazon's MCF. Amazon still ships it, you still clear the units, and your IPI improves. The MCF fees are higher than standard FBA but you're selling stuck inventory, not prime listings.

6. Fixing Stranded Inventory in Under 10 Minutes

Go to Inventory - Fix Stranded Inventory in Seller Central. Amazon will list every unit that's sitting in a warehouse with no live listing attached. There are three things that cause this.

First, a listing got suppressed because of a missing required attribute. Amazon will tell you which attribute. Fix it and the listing goes live. Second, you closed the listing manually and forgot to reopen it. Hit "Relist" and you're done. Third, the listing has a pricing error - Amazon suppressed it because your price was too high or too low relative to their thresholds. Adjust the price.

Most stranded inventory fixes take under two minutes per ASIN. Letting it sit is just lazy. A 0% stranded rate is completely achievable if you check weekly.

7. Improving Sell-Through Rate Without Slashing Prices

Price cuts work but they're not the only tool. Here's how to push sell-through without wrecking your margin on every ASIN.

First, check your Buy Box ownership. If you're losing the Buy Box to a competitor at a lower price, your units won't sell no matter how good the listing is. Reprice to compete or set a floor that keeps you in the Buy Box while protecting margin.

Second, run Sponsored Products ads on your slower ASINs. Even $5-10/day in ad spend can meaningfully increase sell-through on a product that's just not getting organic eyeballs. The ad cost is often less than the long-term storage fee you're trying to avoid.

Third, look at your listing. If the main image is bad, the title is wrong, or you're missing bullet points, you're bleeding conversion rate. A better listing converts more traffic into sales without touching the price. This matters more than most OA sellers realize.

For a deeper look at how to systematically scale what's working, read through the full FBA scaling guide - IPI management is one piece of that larger system.

8. The In-Stock Rate Problem Most OA Sellers Have

Online arbitrage sellers run out of stock constantly. You find a deal, you buy what's available, it sells out in three weeks, and you're at zero. Amazon sees that pattern on your best ASINs and it hammers your in-stock rate.

The fix is building a replenishment workflow. When an ASIN hits your reorder threshold, you check the source immediately. If the deal is still there, you buy. If not, you look for an alternative supplier. This sounds obvious but most sellers don't have a systematic process - they restock reactively when they're already at zero.

Set reorder alerts in your inventory management tool (RestockPro, SoStocked, or even a simple Google Sheet with formulas). The alert fires at 14 days of supply remaining. That gives you time to source and ship before you go out of stock.

The in-stock rate factor in IPI only counts products you've sold in the past 60 days. So if you source a one-time arbitrage deal that sells out, it's not going to kill your score long-term. The damage happens on products you're actively selling repeatedly.

9. The Weekly IPI Maintenance Routine

Good IPI isn't something you fix once. It's a weekly maintenance job, same as checking your disbursements or reviewing your ad spend. Here's the full routine - takes about 20 minutes on Sundays.

1. Check your IPI score in Inventory Performance. Note the trend direction.
2. Fix all stranded inventory. Zero tolerance policy here.
3. Review excess inventory alerts. For any ASIN flagged as excess, decide: price drop, removal, or ad push?
4. Check sell-through on your top 20 ASINs. Anything below 2x in 90 days needs attention.
5. Pull your reorder list. Anything under 14 days of supply needs a sourcing check today.

That's it. Twenty minutes. Sellers who skip this routine are the ones emailing me panicked in October asking why their IPI dropped to 320 heading into Q4.

10. What to Do If Your Score Tanks Despite Your Efforts

Sometimes you do everything right and the score still moves in the wrong direction. A few things to check when that happens.

First, look at how many ASINs you currently have. If you've been adding a lot of new inventory that hasn't had time to generate sales data yet, Amazon has less history to work with and your score can be volatile. This is normal for scaling sellers and it normalizes within 60-90 days as the new ASINs build sales history.

Second, check if you have any FBA shipment problems. Lost inventory, damage claims, or delayed shipments can create phantom "stranded" situations that take time for Amazon to reconcile. Open cases for any discrepancies immediately - don't wait for Amazon to find them.

Third, understand that IPI is a trailing indicator. Actions you take today won't show up in your score for 7-14 days. Don't make panic changes and then make more changes because you don't see immediate results. Make a change, wait two weeks, then assess.

"It's some factors put together that will weight a specific score and the person with the highest score is going to win. It is going to look at different factors to attribute a score to you and if you have the higher score you are going to win." Chris Mangunza - Free 20 Hours Amazon FBA Course | Complete NO BS A-Z Blueprint

Chris said that about the Buy Box algorithm, but the logic maps perfectly to IPI. Amazon is running a scoring system. Learn the factors, optimize for them, and you beat the algorithm.

11. IPI and Long-Term Storage Fees: The Double Punishment

Here's something a lot of sellers miss. A low IPI score and long-term storage fees punish you for the same behavior - holding too much slow inventory - but they're two separate costs.

Long-term storage fees kick in at 181 days for any unit sitting in FBA. Amazon charges $6.90 per cubic foot or $0.15 per unit, whichever is greater. Those fees compound fast on bulky or heavy products.

So if you let excess inventory sit, you're paying the long-term storage fee AND you're letting your IPI score fall, which then restricts your storage capacity for new inventory. You lose on both ends simultaneously.

The math almost always favors clearing the inventory early. A removal at $0.97/unit or a clearance sale at thin margin is better than six months of storage fees plus a restricted account. Run the numbers on your specific ASINs and the right choice becomes obvious. For more on how to read these numbers into your overall profitability picture, check out the post on FBA profit margins and managing FBA storage fees.

12. IPI Benchmarks by Account Stage

Your IPI target should be different depending on where you are in building your business.

Just Starting (Under $5K/Month Revenue)

Focus on keeping stranded inventory at zero and sell-through above average. You probably don't have enough ASINs to have a meaningful excess problem yet. Target 400+ and don't overthink it.

Growing (5K-30K/Month)

This is the stage where IPI becomes a real constraint. You're adding inventory faster, you're starting to hold more units, and you'll start seeing excess flags for the first time. Target 500+ and build the weekly maintenance routine now before it becomes a crisis.

Scaling ($30K+/Month)

At this revenue level, a storage cap is a serious problem. You need the capacity to send in volume for peak seasons and to capitalize on deals quickly. Target 550+ consistently. If you're running a coaching program or have a team, assign IPI monitoring to a specific person with a specific routine. The inventory management systems post covers how to delegate this without losing visibility.

If you want the full framework for getting to and beyond that $30K/month mark, the FBA scaling guide is where to start. IPI is one of a dozen systems you need running cleanly at that level. Join the /register training to see how those systems connect live.

13. Next Steps

IPI isn't complicated once you know what moves it. The sellers who struggle are the ones who treat it as a black box and panic when the score changes. You now know the four factors, the exact routine to maintain them, and the playbook for fixing common problems.

Here are five posts to read next, depending on where you want to go deeper:

• How to Scale Amazon FBA: The Full Framework for $10K to $100K/Month - the pillar post that puts IPI in context with every other growth lever.
• Amazon FBA Storage Fees: How to Stop Paying for Dead Inventory - the companion post to this one. Long-term storage fees and IPI are the same problem from two angles.
• Amazon FBA Inventory Management: The Replenishment System That Keeps You In Stock - build the workflow that protects your in-stock rate without tying up capital.
• FBA Profit Margins: What Numbers Actually Matter and How to Track Them - because fixing IPI only helps if you're selling products with real margin to begin with.
• Online Arbitrage Sourcing Guide: How to Find Deals That Actually Work in 2026 - the upstream problem. Better sourcing means better sell-through which means better IPI.