Amazon UK sellers are more than a week into a wave of unexplained pending orders. At least one has now been told their account is under review as part of Amazon’s investigation.

The seller posted Amazon’s reply on the Seller Central forums at the weekend. It said the surge was being investigated and that the account was “also undergoing an additional review”.

The orders began arriving around 19th to 20th September. They cluster on higher-priced listings, usually anything over £100, and they never move on to dispatch.

Pending is the state Amazon holds an order in while it checks the buyer’s payment. The units in that order are ring-fenced for as long as it sits there, and only Amazon can cancel it.

For the sellers affected, that has meant key lines showing as out of stock or dropping to inactive. One said roughly 40% of their stock was tied up.

One account had 77 pending orders, each over £100. A single product took 30 of them over roughly two days, and 15 of those were addressed to the same seven postcodes.

Another seller put its total at 72 orders, together worth around £25,000, all placed within three days. A third had 181 pending across FBA and its own fulfilment, when it would normally expect about three at any one time.

According to several posts, Seller Support’s first answer was that these were genuine orders and the seller should sit tight. One seller was told they were the only account to have raised it.

Nobody outside Amazon yet knows whether this is a system fault or someone abusing the checkout. Some sellers suspect rivals are placing orders with cards that will be declined, just to keep competing stock off sale. Others point to a bug, and one said a freshly relisted item went pending within an hour.

Last week, an Amazon moderator replied on one of the threads to say the problem had been passed to its partner teams, along with sellers’ case IDs.