At a certain scale, you do not run out of demand. You do not run out of product. You run out of Amazon's permission to send more.
This is the thing that does not show up in any Amazon seller overview or onboarding guide, and it is the thing that separates how mid-size brands operate from how large brands have to operate. FBA supply limits are real, they are binding, and for brands doing serious volume in oversized categories, they become the primary constraint that every other operational decision has to work around.
What supply limits are
Amazon imposes limits on how much inventory a brand can hold at its fulfillment centers. These limits are calculated at the account level and at the product level, and they affect both the amount of inventory you can have stored in FBA at any given time and the amount you can send in a given shipment or planning window.
The system exists because Amazon has finite fulfillment center space and needs to manage utilization across its network. They penalize sellers who hold slow-moving inventory for long periods, which inflates cubic footage usage without generating sales. The limits get calibrated based on your sales velocity, your inventory turnover rate, your historical FBA performance, and a variety of factors that Amazon does not make fully transparent.
For a brand selling moderate volumes with standard-size products, these limits are rarely an issue. You are not generating enough demand or sending enough inventory to bump against them.
For Our Place, they were a weekly constraint from the moment the engagement started.
What the constraint looked like in practice
Our Place sells premium cookware — Wonder Ovens, Dream Cookers, griddle pans — that are oversized and high-velocity. The oversized classification is important: cubic footage caps hit oversized items harder than standard items because each unit consumes significantly more fulfillment center space. A pallet of Wonder Ovens displaces a lot more Amazon warehouse space than a pallet of phone cases.
During Prime Day preparation, Amazon's supply limit system flagged multiple SKUs as "high supply" and blocked shipment creation entirely. The team was trying to stage 10,000 or more units into FBA ahead of the event. Amazon would not accept more than 5,000 units in a single shipment. Beyond the per-shipment cap, the overall account limit was constraining how much total inventory could be in FBA across all SKUs simultaneously.
This is not an edge case or a glitch. It is the system working as designed. Amazon's algorithm had looked at historical sales velocity and storage utilization and decided that 5,000 units per send was what it was willing to accept. The fact that Prime Day demand was going to require dramatically more inventory than that was not Amazon's problem to solve — it was Our Place's problem to work around.
Why this requires a different operations model
Standard Amazon inventory playbooks are built around the question "how much stock do I need to avoid going OOS?" The answer is usually some multiple of your daily sales rate times your lead time, plus a safety buffer.
That model breaks down when FBA will not accept the stock you need to send. You can have the inventory. You can have it in your warehouse ready to go. Amazon still will not receive it if you are above the limit for that SKU or that category. The constraint is not logistics. It is permission.
Operating around this requires a fundamentally different set of processes. You need a SKU-level supply limit tracker that shows current limits, current FBA stock, and headroom available for new sends. You need to file cases with Amazon proactively — before peak events — with missed sales projections to argue for limit increases. You need to plan shipments weeks further in advance because you are limited in how much you can send per week, so filling the FBA bucket requires more time. You need to maintain more 3PL buffer stock than a brand that can replenish FBA freely, because you cannot rely on a quick emergency send to prevent an OOS event.
The team tracking supply limits for Our Place was essentially doing a second layer of inventory planning on top of the normal demand-and-reorder system. The question was not just "when do I need to reorder" but "when do I need to have inventory at the door of Amazon's FC, given that it will take multiple shipment cycles at 5,000 units each to get to my target FBA position."
The Prime Day number
Our Place hit $2.3M in FBA sales in the first hour of Prime Day 2025 against a full-day forecast of $1.2M. The forecast was exceeded in the first 60 minutes.
The supply limits meant that reaching the FBA inventory position to support that performance required months of staged shipments, weekly limit negotiations, and operational planning that most Amazon sellers never have to do. Getting there was not a question of purchasing more product. It was a question of executing a multi-week FBA fill strategy within constraints that Amazon had set, with enough runway to request limit increases through the case system when the math would not work otherwise.
At $200M+ in annual revenue across all channels, Our Place is at the scale where FBA supply limits stop being an occasional nuisance and become a core operational constraint. Building the processes to manage that constraint is what makes the difference between leaving Prime Day revenue on the table and actually capturing it.
