What is a good inventory turnover ratio by industry?
As rough rules of thumb, fast-moving consumer goods and consumables often turn upward of 10 to 15 times a year, general merchandise and home goods commonly land in the mid single digits, and durable or high-consideration products can turn just a few times a year. These are broad orientation ranges, not precise or Amazon-specific figures, so use them to sanity-check rather than as a fixed target.
Why does inventory turnover vary so much between industries?
It tracks how fast the product sells and how long it takes to replace. Low-cost, frequently-purchased goods sell quickly and are reordered often, so they turn many times a year. Expensive, considered, or seasonal products sell slowly and are held longer, so they turn fewer times. Margin plays in too: high-margin goods can afford to turn slower and still perform.
T. Brian Jones is co-founder and CTO of Inventory Hero. He leads the engineering behind its Amazon data pipeline, demand forecasting, and the AI platform that lets sellers talk to their live inventory, sales, and supplier data in plain language.
Start from your replenishment cycle rather than a category average. Your minimum turns to stay in stock is roughly 365 divided by your lead time plus your safety-stock days. Set your floor there, treat anything well below it as overstock, and compare each SKU against its own history and the direction of its category rather than a single benchmark.
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Inventory turnover benchmarks vary widely by industry, and that variation is the whole point: a number that means "overstocked" for a fast-moving consumable can mean "perfectly healthy" for a durable good. The short version: published category averages are rough orientation, not precise or Amazon-specific figures, and the target that actually matters is the one set by your own lead time and margin. Below are the broad ranges, why they differ, and how to set your own.
These are broad rules of thumb, not measured or Amazon-specific figures.1 Use them to sanity-check, not to set a hard goal:
Category
Rough annual turnover
Why
FBA angle
Consumables and FMCG
~10 to 15+
Cheap, frequently repurchased, reordered often
Fast turns dodge the aged surcharge almost automatically
Health, beauty, personal care
~6 to 12
Steady demand, moderate repurchase
Watch the slow tail; some SKUs drift past 90 days
General merchandise, home goods
~4 to 8
Mixed demand, larger basket of SKUs
Monitor at 90+ days, where the surcharge clock starts
Apparel and seasonal
~3 to 6
Seasonal cycles, markdown risk
Plan exits before season end to avoid aged fees
Durable and high-consideration goods
~2 to 4
Expensive, considered, held longer
Low turns are normal; judge on GMROI, not turnover
If your SKU sits far outside its category's rough range, that is worth a look, but it is a prompt to investigate, not evidence of a problem on its own.
How fast the product sells. Low-cost, frequently-purchased goods sell quickly, so they turn many times a year. Expensive or considered purchases sell slowly and are held longer, so they turn fewer times.
How long it takes to replace. A SKU with a two-week domestic lead time can run lean and turn fast; one with a 90-day overseas lead time has to hold more stock, which lowers turnover by design.
Margin is the quiet third factor. A high-margin product can afford to turn slowly and still return well on the cash tied up in it, which is exactly what GMROI captures. That is why turnover should never be read alone: a low number on a fat-margin SKU can be perfectly fine.
The trouble with managing to a category average is that your catalog is not the category. You carry a specific mix of SKUs, each with its own lead time, margin, and demand pattern. A blended target flattens all of that. Two more reasons to be cautious:
The averages measure different things. Some use sales in the numerator, some use COGS; some are annual, some are point-in-time. Comparing your COGS-based turnover to a sales-based industry figure is apples to oranges.
FBA changes the economics. Storage fees, the aged-inventory surcharge, and the low-inventory-level fee all push your ideal turnover around in ways a generic retail benchmark never accounts for.
Start from your replenishment cycle, not a category chart:
Minimum turns to stay in stock = 365 / (lead time in days + safety-stock days)
Work it in a category. An apparel seller with a 45-day lead time and 15 days of safety stock needs at least 365 / 60 ≈ 6 turns just to keep product flowing, which lands at the top of the apparel range in the table above, a sign that apparel's markdown-driven pace leaves little slack. Run your own in the inventory turnover calculator. From that floor:
Compare each SKU against its own history. A SKU trending from 6 turns down to 3 is telling you something a category average never could. Pull lead time from your purchase-order shipment history and average inventory value from the FBA inventory snapshot at the start and end of the period.
Watch the direction of your category. If your niche is speeding up (shorter product cycles, faster repurchase), your target should rise with it.
Read turnover with GMROI and days of supply. Speed only matters if the cash is working and you are staying in stock.
Inventory turnover benchmarks by industry are useful for orientation: fast consumables turn many times a year, durable goods only a few, and knowing roughly where your category sits is a helpful sanity check. But they are rough, inconsistent, and not FBA-specific, so the target you manage to should come from your own lead time and margin. For the formula and how to read the number, see inventory turnover ratio; for the wider metric set, the inventory KPIs that matter.
The turnover ranges shown are broad rules of thumb synthesized from general retail and inventory-management references, not measured statistics or Amazon figures. They vary by source and definition; use them only for rough orientation and set your own target from your lead time and margin. ↩