Amazon sellers say 'abnormal' pending orders are locking up their stock

Traders on Amazon's UK marketplace say a wave of "abnormal" orders stuck in pending status is tying up their inventory and keeping legitimate customers from buying the affected products.

Sellers on Amazon's Seller Central forums report unusually high numbers of pending orders. Most of the complaints concern items priced at £100 ($132) or more.

Complaints began on September 20

The reports first appeared on September 20. Within days, some sellers, often individuals or small businesses, said their entire stock of certain high-value products had become trapped in pending orders that were not clearing.

Amazon marks an order as pending while it processes and verifies the purchase. The quantity ordered is deducted from the seller's available inventory in the meantime, and sellers cannot cancel the transaction themselves.

Why orders stay pending

Amazon says orders commonly remain pending when it cannot authorise the buyer's credit card or, for business purchases, while they await the customer's approval.

Some merchants suspect deliberate inventory locking: bogus orders reserve stock without completing payment, preventing genuine customers from buying it. They have compared the apparent tactic to a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, although there is no evidence yet that the activity is malicious rather than an Amazon glitch.

Volumes far above normal

Sellers describe activity far outside their usual patterns, in some cases double or triple their typical weekly order volume. One seller said a product received 30 pending orders in about 52 hours, 15 of them tied to just seven delivery postcodes. Another reported 72 pending orders worth about £25,000 in three days and wondered whether competitors were using cards without sufficient funds to interfere with its inventory.

Others said Seller Support treated the activity as normal and claimed no other merchants had reported it, an answer that frustrated vendors who had found multiple forum threads describing the same problem. The Register raised the issue with Amazon after a reader alerted us. A forum message posted several hours later said the matter had been escalated to the company's partner teams for investigation; Amazon had not issued an official statement by the time of publication.