How I actually use an FBA cheat sheet instead of just saving and forgetting it
The spreadsheet approach to Amazon FBA breaks most people because they treat it like a static document. It isn't. I learned this after spending six months wrestling with IPI scores, stranded inventory reports, and restock limits that seemed to change overnight. The cheat sheet I use now started as a messy Google Doc and evolved into something more structured. It's still not perfect, and I'll get to that. Here's the structure I actually use. You don't need software. You need a single file with five tabs, each one mapping directly to a report Amazon dumps on you weekly or monthly. Tab one covers product selection criteria. I track three numbers per SKU: gross margin percentage after all fees, sell-through rate, and days of inventory. If a product sits below 28 percent margin or above 60 days of inventory, it's flagged yellow. Red means under 15 percent margin or over 90 days. This keeps me from falling in love with anything that looks good on paper but bleeds cash once fees hit.
Tab two is the fee calculator. Amazon's revenue calculator is decent but it doesn't account for storage overage penalties until they actually hit you. I built a separate column that pulls the monthly inventory level and multiplies it by the current per-cubic-foot rate for the season. This catches storage fees before they surprise me. It usually adds about 3 to 5 percent to my effective cost per unit during peak months, which completely changes whether a product is worth buying. Tab three handles inbound shipment tracking. I log every shipment I send: ASIN, quantity, carrier, expected arrival, and the actual arrival date. The difference between expected and actual tells me whether my suppliers are slipping or whether I'm underestimating freight time. Over two years this tab revealed that my top supplier was consistently 8 days late during Chinese New Year. I now build that lag into my reorder point automatically. Tab four is IPI score maintenance. I track fulfillability rate, excess inventory percentage, and stranded inventory value. Amazon changed their IPI calculation in 2024 to weight excess inventory more heavily, so old advice about just keeping sell-through high is no longer enough. You have to actively liquidate or discount slow movers. I set a rule: if a SKU hits the excess inventory threshold for two consecutive weeks, I run it through a outlet deal or remove it within 48 hours.
Tab five is the removal and liquidation log. This is the part nobody includes in these guides because it's depressing. I log every item I've had to discount, remove, or destroy. The number I track most is the total cost of bad decisions divided by total revenue. When that ratio crossed 12 percent in a single quarter, I stopped scaling new products and focused entirely on clearing dead stock. It brought my profit back from negative to about 14 percent net within three months. I ran into a specific edge case last year that exposed a flaw in this system. Amazon started merging two SKUs under a single ASIN without updating the inventory report immediately. My sell-through rate looked great because it was combining a hot seller with a dead one. The combined metric masked the fact that the dead SKU was sitting at 120 days of inventory. I caught it only because I cross-referenced the FBA Inventory report with the Manage Inventory page and noticed the unit count didn't match the ASIN-level summary. The workaround is to pull both reports simultaneously and flag any discrepancy larger than 5 percent for manual review. One thing most people miss about FBA fee structures: the size tier threshold at 18 inches is where costs spike dramatically. A product that's 17.5 inches falls into standard oversized. At 18.1 inches it jumps to the next tier and your fulfillment fee can increase by $2 to $4 per unit. I've seen sellers lose profitability on products that were technically one inch too long. Measure everything against the actual box, not the product itself, because packaging adds at least 0.5 inches per dimension on most items.
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Another counter-intuitive reality: higher daily sales velocity doesn't always improve your restock limit. Amazon's algorithm weighs your historical sell-through over 90 days, not your current run rate. If you had a slow quarter last summer, your restock limit may still be suppressed this winter even if you're moving product faster than ever. The fix is to maintain minimum inventory levels during slow periods rather than letting stock run to zero. A partial stockout resets the 90-day average downward and the recovery takes months. The main limitation of any cheat sheet like this is that it can't predict policy changes. Amazon modified their FBA fees in January 2025, changing how they calculate dimensional weight for lightweight bulky items. My spreadsheet was off by $1.80 per unit for three SKUs until I updated the formula. No cheat sheet is immune to this. The only reliable approach is to audit your fee assumptions against a live order report every quarter, even if nothing seems wrong. It usually takes about 45 minutes and will catch at least one pricing error. If you want something to start from, the structure above is what I use. I keep it in a shared Google Sheet so my VA can update the inbound tab without touching the rest. The file isn't special. The discipline of checking it weekly is.
