Amazon sellers watch as inventory vanishes into pending-order purgatory

Amazon sellers in the UK are experiencing inventory issues as a surge of orders remains in pending status, preventing legitimate customers from purchasing the affected items. On September 20, reports began surfacing on Amazon's Seller Central forums, with vendors often dealing with high-value products priced at £100 or more. These pending orders, which typically clear after verification, are now being blocked, causing considerable concern among small businesses and individual sellers.

Amazon classifies an order as pending while it processes and verifies the purchase, deducting the quantity ordered from the seller's available inventory. The sellers cannot cancel these transactions themselves. Amazon explains that orders remain pending when it cannot authorize the buyer's credit card or, for business purchases, while they wait for the customer's approval.

Some merchants suspect deliberate inventory locking, where bogus orders reserve stock without completing payment, hindering genuine customers from purchasing the items. They liken this to a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, though there is no definitive evidence that the activity is malicious.

Sellers report activity far beyond their usual patterns, with some instances seeing double or triple their typical weekly order volume. One seller experienced 30 pending orders in just 52 hours, with 15 of those tied to just seven delivery postcodes. Another seller encountered 72 pending orders worth £25,000 over three days, raising suspicions of competitors using cards without sufficient funds to disrupt their inventory.

Many sellers have found multiple forum threads describing the same problem, expressing frustration that Amazon's Seller Support treated their concerns as normal and claimed no other merchants had reported it.

Upon receiving complaints, a forum message indicated that the issue had been escalated to Amazon's partner teams for investigation. However, by the time of publication, Amazon had not issued an official statement addressing the pending orders.