Amazon quietly retired the old Fulfillment Inbound API v0 in early 2025. If you were still calling it, your inbound pipeline probably felt it — hard.
Here’s the plot twist: on October 17, 2025, Amazon also upgraded v2024-03-20. Shipment placement got faster and smarter out of the box. Translation: less guesswork, better options, fewer nasty surprises in fees and lead times.
If you ship FBA inventory, this isn’t some nice-to-have feature. It’s the lane change that keeps your trucks moving today. You’ll get multiple placement options per plan, clearer tradeoffs, and more predictable routing. And yes — you can migrate without nuking ops or sleep.
Let’s make your inbound flow boring, in the best way, and fast.
If you’ve been juggling seasonality, ad pushes, and supplier slippage, this is leverage. It’s not just technical, it’s operational leverage you’ll feel every week. Cleaner inputs and steady placement mean fewer late-night messages about weird FCs. That buys time to focus on revenue, not chaos in Seller Central.
Give yourself a week to map models, and a day to canary. Take two weeks to tune option rules, then lock them in. By the end, you’ll know fees before you commit to anything. Your team won’t be playing detective in Seller Central anymore.
Amazon officially deprecated Fulfillment Inbound API v0, with a window through January 21, 2025. After that date, the old endpoints were just unsupported. If your tools still pointed at v0, you saw failures or placement blind spots. Sometimes nothing happened at all, which is even worse.
What you need to know now is simple. The supported and improved path is v2024-03-20 under SP-API today. It’s where Amazon ships placement logic, tight validation, and steady usability updates.
“Sellers and developers must migrate to the new API version v2024-03-20 as soon as possible to ensure continued service.” — Amazon Developer Changelog
In practice, unsupported shows up as brittle retries and opaque errors. Or a plan that never moves to a clean placement decision. Your team maybe worked around it, doing manual label downloads and tweaks. Changing ship-from details and nudging plans in the UI, over and over. That’s not durable or sane for ops at any scale. The current version keeps those choices in the API, where they belong. The machine handles the routine work, your team handles real exceptions.
If you paused migration because of risk, that risk flipped already. Staying put now costs more in fees and time, plain and simple. You’ll see higher fee variance and longer lead times from rework. Plus dead hours debugging flows that won’t get fixed upstream. Move to v2024-03-20 to get back to stable and scalable. Also, easier to observe and explain when things go weird.
On October 17, 2025, Amazon rolled out changes to v2024-03-20. They aimed to improve shipment placement efficiency without breaking core behavior. It still supports multiple placement options for a single inbound plan.
These updates matter because placement decides your FBA cost and speed. Multiple options per plan help you pick routing for budget and SLA. In practice, teams see fewer reworks and more predictable FC assignments. That happens after you validate inbound data cleanly up front.
Put simply, the system got better at turning good inputs into outcomes. That doesn’t mean you can skip validation, not even close. If your SKUs, prep flags, and addresses are clean, options become consistent. You’ll also see reliable fees and ETAs you can trust. Use that predictability to standardize rules, not reinvent the wheel per plan.
The standout feature is multiple placement options for the same inbound plan. Instead of one take-it-or-leave-it choice, you get structured tradeoffs. Commonly a cheaper multi-node split, or a pricier single-node consolidation. The latter is faster for inbound availability when speed actually matters.
That choice is gold, and it’s now in your hands. If cash is tight, pick multi-node to cut placement service fees. If a seasonal spike looms, pick single-node to get buyable days sooner. The API moves this choice upstream, where you can measure first. You choose before you commit, with eyes open on tradeoffs.
To scale it, treat option selection like ad bidding or repricing. Define inputs like margin, demand, and stockout risk, then score options. Pick the winner based on the score, every single time. If two options tie, use a small threshold to break ties. Default to lower fees or faster ETA, based on your goal.
Say you’re sending 2,000 units across three ASINs:
If you’re in a price war, Option A protects margin. If influencer demand peaks next week, Option B is worth it. The point is simple: you’re not guessing, you’re choosing. And with v2024-03-20, that choice is API-first and automatable. Drive it by SKU speed, seasonality, or contribution margin rules.
Basic math to guide you:
You don’t need a PhD model for this to work. Start simple with a clear rule for faster option picks. Use it when the extra fee per unit is below X percent. Also when stockout risk forecasts above Y percent for that SKU. You can refine the rule later as you learn more.
Start with a simple diff of your old and new calls. Plan creation, prep flags, and shipment confirm now live under SP-API. Schemas and validation changed, so expect a few sharp edges.
The biggest shifts you’ll handle:
Treat mapping like a contract rewrite you really care about. Update request bodies and check every required field twice. Codify parsing for the options array, then write solid tests. Keep a JSON schema harness so changes don’t break serialization.
Create a simple compat layer, an adapter around your internal plan. It should output a clean v2024-03-20 request every time. Future API tweaks hit the adapter, not your business rules. Lock it down with contract tests for good and bad paths. Let CI catch drift long before anything reaches prod.
If you run many services, centralize Amazon creds and signing logic. Do it behind a tiny gateway or a shared lib, your pick. You want one place to rotate keys and configure retries. Also one place to log request IDs for fast debugging.
Teams that front-load validation see fewer placement surprises and less rework. Put simply: clean in, clean out, and everyone sleeps better.
Also, consider concurrency before it bites you in prod. If your UI allows many edits, protect plans with version numbers. Or just serialize updates so the last writer always wins. Idempotency blocks dupes, concurrency control blocks silent overwrites.
Finally, build a dry-run mode your ops team will love. Let them simulate plans and view options with estimated fees. Compare results against your rules without committing anything live. It’s great training and a safety valve during peak season.
This is SP-API, so think roles, auth, and tight permissions. Confirm your app has the Fulfillment Inbound scope in every marketplace. Rotate keys safely and verify LWA tokens refresh on schedule. Keep prod and sandbox credentials separate, like church and state.
If you sell across regions, double-check IDs and endpoints each time. Many so-called API issues are just mismatched endpoints or roles. Bake checks into startup health probes to catch auth drift early. Fix it before a morning load hits and everything catches fire.
Respect usage plans, always, even when you’re in a rush. If you burst, backoff with jitter and instrument your retries. For list endpoints, paginate and cap payload sizes per call. Big payloads make small network blips hurt far more.
Log the trifecta on every request by default. That’s request ID, idempotency token, and HTTP status code. Build alerts for these patterns before they nail you.
Go further and tag logs by inbound plan ID and marketplace. Then you can link spikes to a region or catalog change. When support asks for proof, you’ll have IDs ready to go. That turns a long back-and-forth into a short, clean fix.
Start in the SP-API sandbox to verify schemas, auth, and flows. When you hit prod, canary five to ten percent of plans first. Compare results against your legacy process, then promote gradually. Keep a rollback that routes plan creation to last-known-good code. Stay on v2024-03-20, just roll back your implementation, not v0.
During canary, measure fee deltas, receiving ETAs, and exception rates. The goal is not just no errors, it’s better unit economics.
Instrument these KPIs so you know what improved.
Set a fourteen day review after the full rollout finishes. If fees or lead times drift, revisit your option rules fast. The power move is programmatic selection by margin and velocity. Not the lazy rule of always picking the cheapest every time.
Bonus tip, annotate dashboards with major catalog and packaging changes. Also carrier cutoffs and promo periods that shift behavior. When a KPI moves, that context tells you what happened faster. Code issue, bad inputs, or just seasonal noise, you’ll know.
No. Amazon deprecated v0, with support ending January 21, 2025. If anything still points at v0, remove or refactor it now. Production support lives in v2024-03-20 under SP-API only.
Amazon updated v2024-03-20 to improve shipment placement efficiency. It still supports multiple placement options for each inbound plan. You should see clearer options and predictable routing once inputs validate cleanly.
You pick the routing that matches your economics right now. Cheaper multi-node can cut fees, which helps margin. Single-node often speeds receiving, which can boost sales. Tie selection to margin and demand forecasts to avoid leaving money.
Yes. Ensure the Fulfillment Inbound scope is granted per marketplace. Keep LWA token refresh tight and stable in production. Isolate prod and sandbox credentials and verify endpoints and IDs.
Use idempotency tokens on create and update operations always. Persist the token per client action so retries don’t dupe plans. Watch for 409 Conflict responses and handle them gracefully.
Follow the Amazon SP-API Changelog and Deprecation Schedule closely. Subscribe to updates and add checks to quarterly tech reviews. That keeps you from getting caught flat-footed again.
Usually no, you keep the business rules but validate earlier. Confirm prep and labeling at plan creation instead of at the dock. That shift cuts exceptions and surprise fees later.
Yes. Evaluate options and their tradeoffs before you accept. A small UI can show estimated fees and ETAs side-by-side. Then ops can choose, or your rules engine can.
Treat them as separate policy lanes from the start. Validate restrictions upfront and confirm meltable season windows. Avoid mixing special handling SKUs with standard ones in a plan.
1) Inventory your current inbound calls and kill any v0 fallbacks. 2) Map requests/responses to v2024-03-20 schemas; add strict validation. 3) Implement idempotency tokens and structured error handling with retries. 4) Add telemetry: request IDs, tokens, status, placement fees, ETAs. 5) Test in SP-API sandbox; run contract tests on schemas and auth. 6) Canary 5–10% of plans; compare fees, lead times, and exceptions. 7) Roll out gradually; set a 14-day post-migration review and adjust selection rules.
A bit more color:
Here’s the takeaway: your inbound pipeline can be a profit center. When you control placement tradeoffs, money stops leaking out. v2024-03-20 gives you that control, straight from the API. Migrate cleanly and automate selection by SKU economics and velocity. Watch the metrics that move cash, fees and time-to-buyable. Teams who treat inbound like a product ship more and spend less. They also react faster to demand spikes without chaos. That’s the whole game, and you can win it.
Need help instrumenting KPIs and catching SP-API issues early? Check out Requery for centralized observability and alerting.
Want proof of what tight ops can do in the real world? Explore our Case Studies to see teams scale without chaos.