Every year, we get a wave of panicked calls in October from sellers who are about to stock out during the highest-revenue weeks of the year, asking if there's anything that can be done fast. Sometimes there is — expedited air freight, a domestic reallocation between fulfillment centers, a price increase to slow velocity and stretch remaining inventory. All of it is more expensive and less reliable than just planning the timeline correctly starting in the summer, which is what we run with every client managing meaningful Q4 volume.
16 weeks out (early/mid July): the forecast
Pull the last two years of daily sales data for the October through December period specifically, not annual averages — Q4 velocity for most categories does not resemble the rest of the year, and a forecast built on annual average sales will underorder badly. Layer in any planned promotions, price changes, or new competitor activity you're aware of. This is also the point to finalize which ASINs are worth a Q4 push at all — chasing volume on a low-margin SKU during the most expensive fulfillment weeks of the year is rarely worth it.
14 weeks out: place production or reorder
Manufacturing lead times, especially overseas, routinely run 30 to 60 days before the product is even ready to ship, and that's before transit time. Placing the order this early feels aggressive if you've historically ordered closer to the season, but this is the step most delayed Q4 plans actually break at — not the shipping, the manufacturing queue itself, which gets backed up industry-wide as every other seller has the same idea at the same time.
10-12 weeks out: book ocean freight, not air
This is the highest-leverage timing decision in the whole plan. Ocean freight booked with enough lead time costs a fraction of air freight and, once you account for realistic transit and customs clearance time, isn't actually that much slower if you started early enough. Sellers who wait until 6 weeks out are choosing between air freight at several times the cost or missing the season, and neither of those was a choice they needed to make if the booking happened a month earlier.
8 weeks out: inbound to FBA begins
Send inventory in over multiple shipments rather than one large shipment landing all at once, both to smooth receiving time at the fulfillment center and to avoid a single shipment triggering inventory storage limits if your account is subject to IPI-based restrictions. Confirm which fulfillment centers you're being routed to and whether that changes your transit time expectations.
4 weeks out: reconcile receiving against what you shipped
This is also, not coincidentally, the audit point that catches the discrepancies covered in our FBA reimbursement piece — short-received units, damaged-in-transit inventory. Catching it now, while the shipment is fresh, makes the claim faster and more likely to succeed than trying to reconstruct it in January.
Throughout: watch storage fees, not just stock levels
Aged inventory surcharges and Q4 storage fee tiers are higher than the rest of the year, which means overordering has a real cost too, not just underordering. The goal isn't maximum stock — it's stock levels that cover projected velocity through early January with a reasonable buffer, not six months of safety stock sitting in a fulfillment center accumulating storage fees through the most expensive weeks to store anything.
We build and manage this exact timeline for clients as part of FBA inventory and logistics management, starting the forecast conversation in early summer specifically because by the time Q4 feels urgent, the cheapest and most reliable options are already gone.
If you're not sure where your current inventory plan stands against this timeline, book a free consultation, the earlier in the year we have this conversation, the more options you still have.