How does AmmoSquared manage an ammo shortage?

During an uneven ammo market (when some calibers are available but others aren't) or an actual shortage situation like we saw in 2020, we have a number of different levers we use to help keep ammunition flowing to our customers in a timely and orderly manner:

Our primary lever is our Allocation System. This is the heart of our process and something you won’t even notice in normal times. Once things get a little choppy, however, our allocation system kicks in. This is like traction control for a car. In a nutshell it just means that Autobuys will continue to run for your ammo selections but now they’ll spend more time in “Pending”. This gives us time to make sure we have the ammo in the warehouse before we put it in your account. During 2020 we had some calibers that spent months pending because we just couldn’t get new inventory for hard to find rounds. Currently we’re seeing allocations spending a few days in Pending as we confirm the inventory and move it over to our customers’ accounts.

Another lever we have is our Ammo Exchange. During normal times it is no problem to exchange from one caliber to another because supply is plentiful. When the market gets choppy and some calibers become hard to find, guess what everyone wants to do? Yep, exchange easy to find ammo into the hard to find ammo. That ammo then goes into the Allocation System and clogs the whole thing up. If you have an Autobuy set for something then we have forecasted how much we’ll need into the future. If we have hundreds of people exchanging ammo into hard to find calibers then we can have issues, so we will temporarily turn off some calibers.

Yet another lever we have is the ability for our customers to Buy More ammo in their account outside of an Autobuy, or to a lesser extent, automatically Round Up incomplete boxes when shipping. Both of these introduce more stress on our inventory system since they are unexpected and additional purchases not planned for, so those features can get toggled on and off as conditions change.

Lastly, we might put entire SKU’s on a temporary “Allocations Paused” status. This means that Autobuys for these SKUs will be paused and those funds will go into credits and can be used on other calibers. We’ll try to keep these to a minimum when we’re seeing an imbalance in the ammo market for hard to find SKUs that we don’t want sitting in the Allocation System for a long time. We’ll use this when our purchasing need exceeds the market supply on certain SKUs - it is our way of encouraging customers to redirect that purchasing power into other more available SKUs.