Fulfillment
What is Stranded Inventory?
Units sitting in a fulfillment center that cannot be sold because the listing they belong to is inactive or broken. The stock is fine, the connection to it is not, and you keep paying storage until it is fixed.
Why it matters in practice
Stranded inventory is one of the quietest ways to lose money on a marketplace, because nothing looks broken. The warehouse shows stock, the account shows no errors that anyone is watching, and the product simply stops selling. The usual causes are ordinary listing problems: a listing gets suppressed or deactivated, a required piece of compliance information goes missing, or a product page is merged or changed so the units no longer point anywhere sellable. The operator habit that catches it is a standing weekly check rather than a reaction to a sales dip, because a sales dip on one product inside a large catalog is easy to miss for a month. The cost is double. You are paying storage the whole time, and you are losing sales rank on a listing that would otherwise still be selling, so the recovery takes longer than the outage did.
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