FBM is easy: the order comes in, you pick it, it leaves your warehouse and Odoo sees everything. With FBA you see nothing. The goods live in an Amazon warehouse, Amazon moves them between centres when it suits, sells them, takes returns, loses them and sometimes reimburses you. If Odoo knows nothing about that warehouse, your inventory is a work of fiction.
The FBA warehouse has to be a real warehouse in Odoo
Not a field, not a tag: a location with its own moves. When you send goods to Amazon, that is a transfer from your warehouse to theirs, and while in transit the units are in neither place. Modelling it this way answers three questions that otherwise have no answer: how much you own in total, how much is sellable right now and how much capital is tied up.
With pan-European FBA, Amazon moves your goods to warehouses in other countries without asking. That has tax consequences: it obliges you to register wherever it holds stock. Explained in selling on several Amazons from one Odoo.
Returns are the real hole
In FBA a return does not come back to you: it goes back to the Amazon warehouse, where somebody decides whether it is resellable. That decision changes your stock without you doing anything. If your integration only imports orders, every return skews inventory a little more, and after a quarter nobody can explain the gap. What you must import is not just orders: it is returns, adjustments and reimbursements.
Reimbursements are money lost by not looking
Amazon loses and damages goods, and compensates for it. But the reimbursement shows up in the settlement, mixed with fees and charges, and if nobody reconciles it against what is actually missing, you do not know whether you were underpaid. Bringing settlements into Odoo and matching them line by line is not accounting luxury: it is the only way to know that money arrived.
And the stock you publish is not the stock you own
If you also sell FBM, on your own site or on other marketplaces, a unit sitting at Amazon cannot be offered elsewhere. This is the classic master-stock problem and it is solved by allocating per location, not by subtracting from memory. Developed in several marketplaces in one Odoo.
What our connector does
The Amazon connector for Odoo creates an FBA location and an in-transit location for each account. When Amazon marks your FBA inbound plan as shipped, it moves the units from your warehouse to in-transit, and when it syncs Amazon's official stock it moves them into the FBA location (applying stock to locations is switched on per account). It imports FBA and FBM orders, returns (including the FBA customer returns report), FBA inventory losses, damages and found units, and settlements, and it cross-checks per SKU what Amazon lost or damaged against what it reimbursed. For FBM it sends tracking to Amazon when you validate the delivery. It runs on Odoo 17, 18 and 19, and Odoo 20 when it ships. If yours is Vendor Central rather than Seller, the flow is different and it is in Vendor Central and Odoo.
Frequently asked questions
Can FBA and FBM run in the same Odoo?
Yes, and it is the norm. The connector flags each order as FBA or FBM: FBM orders ship with their delivery from your warehouse; for FBA orders it cancels the outgoing delivery, because the goods are already at Amazon, and deducts from the FBA location if that option is on. Catalog and customer are the same.
How often does FBA stock sync?
The connector's scheduled job reads official FBA stock every 30 minutes by default: it uses Amazon's inventory report and, if that does not come through, the FBA Inventory API. If you switch the option on, it applies that quantity to the FBA location in Odoo. Even so, what Amazon reports is not instantaneous: expect some lag.
Do I need an Amazon developer account?
No. By default you connect in one click through the Amazon application FlexigoTech has already published: you authorise it from your Seller Central, with no developer account and no LWA credentials to create. If you prefer your own application, the connector also accepts your Login with Amazon client id and secret.
Useful links inside FlexigoTech
What we do about this
Stock in FBA and your inventory does not add up?
Tell us which countries you sell in, whether you use pan-European FBA and since when it stopped adding up. We will check whether the problem is returns, reimbursements or stock allocation. Write to comercial@flexigobe.com or book a call.