One downside of Amazon's new Send to Amazon workflow is the long wait for MSKU (merchant SKU) validation. This takes place any time you add an item to your batch in the Find It step. While an MSKU is validating, you'll see the message "Pending Offer Creation."

When you submit a new MSKU to Amazon, Amazon has to validate it. That means confirming that you've provided a unique and acceptable MSKU.

If the item is intended for sale through FBA, Amazon must also convert the MSKU into a fulfillment network SKU (FNSKU).

Both of these steps are necessary for Amazon to generate your offer for the product. That's why you'll see "Pending Offer Creation" at this time.

MSKU validation took such a short time in Amazon's old workflow that most sellers barely noticed it. However, it takes much longer in the new Send to Amazon workflow. On average, the wait time is 10 to 12 minutes, but it can be 30 to 60 minutes at peak times. In rare cases, it may take up to 2 hours.

We've pointed out to Amazon that such long waits are unacceptable to sellers and asked them to address this issue.

You shouldn't notice any additional wait time if you're adding items one by one in Find It. Essentially, the timer resets each time you add another MSKU to a batch. You'll need to wait the 10 minutes to 2 hours after you submit the last item.

This is good news. If the wait time added up instead of restarting, we'd have to worry about waiting up to 10 hours for just 5 items!

If you add a lot of MSKUs at the same time, such as by importing a buy list, each MSKU may add about a minute to your wait time. Because of this and other potential issues, we recommend that you do not submit more than 200 unique MSKUs in a single Buy List.

No. MSKU validation takes equally long whether you submit your MSKUs in Seller Central or InventoryLab.

You can try clicking "Revalidate Item" next to the "Pending Offer Creation" message at any time. This will manually check if your item has finished validating, even if the API hasn't sent an update yet.

In the unlikely event that doesn't help after you've waited for over two hours, it's almost certainly been validated by now and something's gone wrong. Remove the item from your batch by clicking the kebab menu on the item's right, then choosing Remove Item.

Then, add it back.

Note that we only recommend this remove-and-add-back solution if you've waited two hours already. It almost always solves the problem if the MSKU has successfully validated. However, if it turns out the MSKU hasn't finished validating, it will restart the process.

Once your MSKUs have all been validated, you can print your FNSKU labels and move on to Box It!