Amazon FBA Reimbursements: How to Audit and Claim Lost, Damaged and Overcharged Inventory

Somewhere in your FBA reports right now there is probably a unit Amazon lost, damaged or measured wrong, and a fee or a missing product you were never repaid for. Some reimbursements are issued automatically. A large share are only paid when a seller spots the discrepancy, assembles the evidence, and files the claim. This guide shows you where those discrepancies hide and how to run the audit in under an hour a month.

The Five Ways Amazon Ends Up Owing You

1. Lost inventory. Units that were checked in and then lost inside the fulfilment network: miscounted at receiving, misplaced between centres, or recorded as transferred and never seen again. Amazon's systems record these movements in your inventory ledger, which is why the audit below starts there.

2. Damaged inventory. When Amazon's handling damages your stock, the unit becomes unsellable and the loss is Amazon's to make good under its FBA policies. Keep this separate in your mind from customer-damaged returns, which are a different category with different rules and are not automatically Amazon's cost.

3. Disposed or destroyed inventory. Units Amazon disposes of, sometimes legitimately under its policies for unsellable stock, sometimes without the authorisation or notice the policy requires. Disposal entries in the ledger with no matching reimbursement are worth a second look, because a mistaken disposal of sellable stock is a claim, not a cost of doing business.

4. Overcharged fees. The quietest category, because no unit goes missing; the charge is simply wrong. The most common version is a referral fee applied at the wrong category rate, or fees charged on an order that was later refunded where the reversal never fully landed. These are found by sampling your transaction records, not your inventory, and they sit inside the wider fee stack we break down in our Amazon FBA fees guide.

5. Wrong weight or dimensions. FBA fulfilment fees are tiered by a product's size and weight, using the measurements Amazon has on file. If Amazon's recorded dimensions put your product in a higher tier than its real size, you are overcharged on every single order, indefinitely, until someone asks for a re-measure. On a fast-selling product this is often the largest single claim type, and the easiest to prove: your product, a tape measure, a scale, and photographs.

One more that belongs on the watch list even though it is technically an inbound issue: shipments Amazon closed with fewer units received than you sent, where no adjustment or reimbursement ever appeared. Reconciling shipped-versus-received quantities is part of the routine below.

Where the Discrepancies Hide: Report by Report

You do not find reimbursement money by browsing Seller Central at random. You find it by cross-checking four sources against each other:

• Inventory Ledger report (Reports → Fulfilment). This is the master record of every unit movement: receipts, shipments, adjustments, removals, disposals. The adjustment entries are the audit trail. Look for units adjusted out as lost or damaged, then check whether a matching reimbursement ever arrived.
• Reimbursements report (same Fulfilment reports area). Everything Amazon has already paid you, by case and reason. This report exists in the audit for one reason: so you never claim twice for the same unit, which wastes your time and muddies legitimate cases.
• Shipment contents versus received quantities. For each closed inbound shipment, compare what your shipment plan said was in the boxes against what Amazon recorded as received. Differences that were never reconciled are inbound claims waiting for evidence.
• Transaction and fee records. Sample your best-selling SKUs and compare the fulfilment fee actually charged against the fee the product's real size tier should produce, and check that refunded orders had their fees handled correctly. Dimension problems show up here as a fee that is consistently a tier too high.

The pattern to understand: no single report announces "we owe you money". The money appears in the gaps between reports, where one system recorded a loss and no other system recorded a payment. That is what an audit actually is.

The Evidence Amazon Asks For

Claims fail on evidence far more often than they fail on merit. What Amazon typically wants, by claim type:

• Inbound shortfalls: the shipment ID, your supplier invoice showing the quantities you bought or shipped, and proof of delivery to Amazon (carrier tracking or a signed bill of lading). The invoice matters because it proves the units existed; keep purchase invoices filed per shipment from the day you order, not reconstructed later.
• Lost and damaged units: the ledger entry itself is the core evidence; your job is to reference the specific adjustment, its date and quantity, and show no matching line in the reimbursements report.
• Dimension and weight disputes: photographs of the product on a scale and measured with a ruler or tape, plus the product's packaging as sold. Clear, dated photos beat paragraphs of argument.
• Fee errors: the order IDs, the fee charged, and the fee that should apply, stated plainly.

A warning on timing: claim windows differ by claim type, and Amazon has shortened several of them in recent policy updates, so older guidance about how far back you can claim may no longer hold. Check the current window on the FBA reimbursement policy page in Seller Central for the specific claim you are filing, and treat "audit monthly" as your protection: discrepancies found within weeks of happening sit comfortably inside any window.

A Monthly Audit Routine That Takes Under an Hour

Run on the same day each month, the audit looks like this:

1. Download the four sources (10 minutes). Inventory Ledger for the month, the Reimbursements report, the month's closed inbound shipments, and the transaction records for your top SKUs.
2. Reconcile inbound shipments (15 minutes). Shipped versus received, line by line. Flag every shortfall with no adjustment recorded.
3. Scan the ledger adjustments (15 minutes). Every lost or damaged adjustment from the month, checked against the reimbursements report. Unmatched entries become claims. Disposal entries get the same check.
4. Check fees on your top sellers (10 minutes). One or two SKUs per month, rotated: charged fulfilment fee versus the correct tier for the product's real dimensions, and a quick sample of refunded orders.
5. File and log (10 minutes). Open the cases with evidence attached, and log each one: date, claim type, quantity or amount, case ID, status. The log is what turns a monthly routine into a system, because next month you start by chasing last month's open cases.

File claims through Seller Central's support cases, under the fulfilment/inventory area, one issue per case, with the evidence attached up front. A case that opens with the shipment ID, the ledger reference and the documents attached gets a different quality of attention than "you lost my stock, please check".

When a Claim Is Denied: What to Do Next

Denials are usually one of three things, and each has a different answer. Already reimbursed: check the reimbursements report again; if Amazon is right, close it and fix your log. Insufficient evidence: the fix is better evidence, not a louder message. Reopen the case with the missing document, the clearer photo, the invoice page you skipped the first time. Window expired: if the discrepancy is genuinely outside the current claim window, that one is gone, and the correct response is to tighten the routine so the next one is caught in time.

What not to do: do not open duplicate new cases for the same issue, which fragments the history and slows everything down; reopen or reply within the original case so the full trail sits in one place. And know when to stop. A four-unit discrepancy from eight months ago with thin paperwork will eat more of your time than it returns. The audit's real value is not rescuing every historical penny; it is making sure that from this month forward, losses stop leaking silently.

Do It Yourself or Hand It Over?

For a handful of SKUs and a few shipments a month, the routine above is genuinely an hour of work, and doing it yourself teaches you how your inventory actually moves. Hand it over, or bring in tooling, when the arithmetic changes: dozens of SKUs, weekly inbound shipments, and adjustments arriving faster than you review them. At that point the question is not whether discrepancies exist, it is whether anyone is looking.

A reimbursement check is one of the standard items in the account audits our Amazon account management team runs, because it is measurable: money recovered is money recovered. If you would like a second pair of eyes on your own reports before you build the habit, start with a free audit and we will flag what your last few months of ledger entries are showing. Either way, start the routine. Amazon's warehouses are very good. They are not perfect, and the difference between the two is sitting in your reports.