Running Out of Stock on Amazon

One of Amazon's best features, from the standpoint of the customer, is that they tell you whether or not a book is in stock and give you an estimated shipping time. Granted, the actual shipping time is greatly affected by whether or not you are paying for expedited shipping, but still, it beats the bad old days of mail-order retail where "allow 6 to 8 weeks" for deliver was common. Amazon also has a feature, not as old as the shipping estimate, in which they tell the customer how many copies are left in stock, but this only works under some circumstances, and then only when the total stock count is five copies or fewer. Back in my rank reverse engineering days, I used to use the stock number count-down - 5,4,3,2,1 - to fine tune my reading in short spans of time for strong sellers.

As a publisher who use Lightning Source to handle my printing and distribution, I'm used to seeing title in the US occasionally count down to 1 this year but never go out of stock. Instead of hitting zero and getting assigned a slower shipping time, they go from "1 left in stock -- order soon (more on the way)" to displaying no stock information at all. My assumption is that when the stock is actually exhausted, Amazon just starts drop shipping books from Ingram, who can never run out of stock since they are across the street from Lightning Source and can get books in under 24 hours, whether they are physically stocked or not. Amazon also reorders for physical stock, and probably has even before this point is reached, to give themselves more options for shipping method and to keep a bigger slice of the gross sale.

Amazon UK has been a different story. I don't remember seeing Lightning Source titles there showing an "X copies left in stock" message until the recent update. That doesn't mean it didn't happened, just that I don't have a great memory. Since the big software update there, it seems like the majority of Lightning Source titles I check on Amazon UK either show a number of copies left in stock (always five or less) or are actually out of stock, not available for 24 hour shipping. Once the Lightning Source titles run out of stock on Amazon UK, they are dropping initially to "Usually dispatched within 1 to 2 days" and then "Usually dispatched within 1 to 2 days" if stock doesn't arrive fairly quickly.

I'm not sure if this is a result of Amazon UK cutting way back on the number of LSI titles they stock, even for popular titles, or whether they aren't doing anything different but the software is now reporting the stock and shipping estimates properly. I do know I had a month or two a while back with almost no Lightning Source UK sales, despite decent Amazon UK sales, which indicates they had overstocked. It also implies that Amazon UK doesn't have a fall-back drop-shipping system from a distributor or Lightning Source there, which would have implications mainly for UK based publishers trying to make a big splash.