QUICK ANSWER An ocean to air restock flies a slice of your inventory, typically two to four weeks of cover for the best sellers, while the bulk of the order stays on the water. Air delivers in 5 to 8 days door to door, Amazon receiving adds 3 to 7 business days, so the switch has to trigger two to three weeks before projected zero, not at zero. Done early, it books at standard rates; done in panic, it flies at the top of the band.
Sales ran ahead of the forecast, or the vessel did not, and suddenly the ocean-to-air restock question stops being theoretical. The playbook below covers what a stockout really costs, which cartons should fly, when to pull the trigger, and how to keep the rescue from being priced like an emergency.
The switch every importer eventually makes
The scenario is always one of three: demand outran the plan, the vessel slipped, or Q4 arrived harder than the spreadsheet said. The wrong response is binary, either riding the ocean schedule into a stockout or flying an entire order at air freight prices. The working answer is a split: enough units fly to bridge the gap, everything else stays on the cheaper mode. Whether a lane should be air or ocean in general is the mode question; this page is about the exception week when the answer temporarily changes.
What a stockout costs against what air costs
The comparison importers get wrong is "air freight vs ocean freight". The real comparison is air freight on a few hundred kilograms vs a stockout on your best product. An out-of-stock listing loses the sales themselves, and on marketplaces it loses position: rank decays, the buy box cools, ad campaigns burn spend against a listing that cannot convert, and recovery takes weeks after restock. Against that, the air premium applies only to the flown slice. Flying 300 kg of a top seller might cost $1,500 more than the same units by sea; three weeks of dead listing on a product doing $2,000 a week costs four times that before the rank damage is counted.
What flies, what stays on the water
The split, SKU by SKU
| Flies | Stays on the water |
|---|---|
| Top sellers about to hit zero | Slow movers with weeks of cover left |
| High-margin products that absorb the premium | Low-margin SKUs the premium erases |
| Light, dense cartons cheap per unit to fly | Bulky, heavy goods punished by chargeable weight |
| New launches with momentum to protect | Replenishment with slack in the calendar |
The chargeable weight math decides more of this table than intuition does: a dense carton of small electronics flies for cents per unit, while bulky home goods can cost more to fly than their margin. Run the per-unit air cost per SKU before deciding, not the per-kilo rate in the abstract.
TAKEAWAY You are flying weeks of cover, not the order. Two to four weeks of the best sellers usually bridges to the vessel; flying more than that pays air rates for inventory the ocean would have delivered in time anyway.
The trigger: when to pull it
Work the clock backwards. Air freight runs 5 to 8 days door to door per our transit tables, and for FBA sellers Amazon's receiving adds 3 to 7 business days before units are sellable again. That is two to three weeks between decision and available inventory, which sets the rule: the trigger fires when projected cover for a SKU drops below three weeks, not when the dashboard reads zero. Amazon's low-inventory fee, which kicks in below 28 days of supply on top ASINs, points at the same arithmetic from the other side.
A restock, day by day
| Day | What happens |
|---|---|
| Day 0 | Trigger: cover projection dips below three weeks |
| Days 1 to 2 | Split decided, air booking placed against the consol cutoff |
| Days 3 to 9 (typical) | Pickup, uplift, arrival, entry, delivery |
| Days 10 to 16 (typical) | FBA receiving; units turn sellable |
| Buffer | The remaining days are your protection, not slack to spend |
Skipping the panic premium
The calendar sets the price more than the cargo does, a point the air freight cost bands make in dollars. An early trigger means the shipment can ride a standard consolidation instead of express uplift, hit a published cutoff instead of begging for the next flight, and skip the premium that same-week space commands in peak season. The difference between deciding at three weeks of cover and deciding at three days is often a third of the air bill, for the identical cartons.
Preventing the next one
Most restock emergencies are lead-time fictions coming due: a reorder point set from the tool's default weeks instead of your real door-to-door history, no safety stock scaled to seasonality, and a Q4 plan built in August. The fix is boring on purpose: reorder points fed with actual lane times and a buffer that grows before the season. That is the difference between using air freight as a scalpel and using it as a habit.
How Platton runs a mid-season switch
The value of having one operator on both modes shows up exactly here, in the week the plan changes.
One instruction to the supplier
Because the ocean order and the air rescue run on the same documents and the same customs setup, the switch is a booking, not an onboarding. The supplier hears one instruction: these cartons to the airport, the rest to the port.
Marketplace-ready out of the gateway
For marketplace sellers, FBA prep happens at the gateway, labeling, cartonization, appointment, so the flown units go from aircraft to receivable shipment without a detour through another vendor.
The split proposed, not just executed
When a restock risk is flagged, the proposal comes back with numbers: which SKUs fly, how many weeks of cover, the per-unit air cost, and what stays on the vessel. You approve a split, not a guess.
Flag a restock risk and get the split priced today
Common Questions About Air Restocks
How fast can air freight get inventory back in stock?
Roughly two weeks realistically: 5 to 8 days door to door for the freight, then 3 to 7 business days of Amazon receiving before units are sellable. Express service compresses the freight to about 3 days when the margin justifies it, but nothing compresses receiving, which is why the trigger timing matters more than the service tier.
Should I fly the whole order when a stockout threatens?
Almost never. The order's job is to be cheap; the rescue's job is to be fast. Flying two to four weeks of cover for the SKUs actually at risk bridges to the vessel at a fraction of the cost of flying everything, and the slower goods lose nothing by arriving on the original schedule.
Can I mix air and ocean on one purchase order?
Routinely, and it is the standard mechanics of a restock: the supplier splits the cargo at origin, one slice to the airport, the rest to the port, each moving on its own document set. The requirement is coordination, one instruction to the supplier and consistent paperwork across both halves, which is exactly what a forwarder running both modes is for.
Does marketplace receiving time cancel out the air speed?
It eats into it, which is why it belongs in the trigger math: 3 to 7 business days from dock to sellable is real, and flying express to then wait a week at receiving is money spent on the wrong stage. Booking the receiving-friendly option, prepped, labeled, appointment made, moves that window to its short end.
Which SKUs should never fly?
Low-margin, heavy, or bulky products where the per-unit air cost approaches or exceeds the margin, and anything with enough cover to survive until the vessel lands. Chargeable weight is the filter: if the volumetric math prices a SKU at multiples of its profit, that SKU rides the water, stockout or not.
When should I trigger the ocean-to-air switch?
When projected cover on an at-risk SKU falls below about three weeks, the sum of air transit and receiving plus a buffer. Waiting past that point does not remove the decision; it just re-prices it at express rates and adds days of empty listing you already could not afford.
Related Air Freight Guides
Air freight transit times: the 5-to-8-day clock the trigger math is built on.
Air freight cost: the bands that separate planned freight from panic freight.
Air vs ocean freight: the mode decision in normal weeks.
Chargeable weight explained: the math that decides which SKUs can afford to fly.
