FBA Reimbursements: How to Recover Money Amazon Owes | Inventory Hero
·5 min readFBA Fees
FBA Reimbursements: How to Recover Money Amazon Owes
FBA reimbursements: how to recover money Amazon owes for lost and damaged inventory. The discrepancy types to audit, the claim windows, and how to file.
FBA reimbursements are credits Amazon owes you when something goes wrong with your inventory in its care: units lost in a fulfillment center, damaged by Amazon or a carrier, not returned to you after a customer return, or charged the wrong fee. Amazon reimburses some of these automatically, but the automatic credits do not catch everything, so auditing recovers the rest.
How do I get reimbursed by Amazon?
Audit your inventory and transaction reports for discrepancies (lost or damaged units, missing returns, fee overcharges), confirm Amazon has not already reimbursed them, then file a claim through Seller Central with the supporting report data. File within the current claim window, since eligible claims expire if you wait too long.
Andrew Erickson is the founder of Inventory Hero. He has spent years working with Amazon FBA sellers on demand forecasting, restock planning, and the cash flow side of running a private-label brand. Inventory Hero exists because every spreadsheet-based inventory system he tried eventually broke — usually right before Q4.
For most sellers above a few hundred thousand in revenue, yes. A small percentage of inventory routinely gets lost, damaged, or mishandled, and the reimbursements add up to real money that Amazon will not always credit automatically. The effort is modest relative to the recovery, especially with a tool that flags discrepancies for you.
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FBA reimbursements are money Amazon owes you when it loses or damages your inventory, fails to return units after a customer return, or charges you the wrong fee while handling your stock. The short version: Amazon reimburses some of these automatically, but not all, so auditing your reports for what slipped through is real cash you would otherwise leave on the table. Below are the discrepancy types to audit, the claim windows, and how to file.
When you hand inventory to Amazon, a small percentage of it routinely goes wrong: units get lost in a fulfillment center, damaged in handling or transit, or never make it back to you after a customer return. Amazon's policy is to reimburse you for inventory it loses or damages in its care.1 The catch is that the automatic reimbursements do not catch every case, so the difference between what Amazon owes and what it has paid is yours to claim.
A rough sense of scale: across a catalog, on the order of one to three percent of units can be affected by some discrepancy over time, which on a large catalog is a meaningful amount of recoverable value. A quick worked example: say a single inbound shipped 600 units and the Inventory Adjustments report shows 9 adjusted as lost. At a 14 dollar landed cost, that is potentially 126 dollars (9 x 14) to claim, once you confirm Amazon has not already auto-credited it. Estimate your own exposure in the FBA reimbursement calculator.
Lost inventory. Units that disappear in the fulfillment network, during inbound, or in a warehouse transfer.
Damaged inventory. Units Amazon or a carrier damages while the stock is in Amazon's care.
Customer returns not returned to you. A customer is refunded but the unit is never returned to your sellable inventory, or comes back damaged.
Returns refunded incorrectly. A customer is refunded more than they should be, or outside the return window.
Fee and weight overcharges. Being charged a fulfillment fee for the wrong size tier, often from a mis-measured dimension, is a reimbursable overcharge.
Each type shows up in a different report, which is why a systematic audit beats spot-checking.
Find the discrepancy. Pull the relevant report: the Inventory Adjustments report for lost and damaged units, the FBA Customer Returns report for returns that never went back into your sellable stock, and the fee-event or transaction reports for fee and weight overcharges.
Confirm it was not already reimbursed. Check the Reimbursements report so you are not claiming something Amazon has already credited.
File the claim. Open a case in Seller Central with the report data that supports it.
The important constraint is timing. A 2024 policy change compressed many reimbursement claim windows to about 60 days from the relevant event, down from the old 18 months, and Amazon now auto-reimburses more cases than it used to, so the manual opportunity is both smaller and far more time-sensitive than it was a few years ago. Audit on a regular cadence (monthly is sensible) rather than once a year, because eligible claims expire fast once the window closes. Confirm the exact current windows in Seller Central, since Amazon can keep adjusting them.
If you would rather not audit by hand, third-party reimbursement services will do it for a cut of what they recover, commonly 15 to 25 percent. Doing it yourself, or with a tool that flags the discrepancies for you, keeps that percentage in your pocket.
A practical note on the fee-overcharge type: a mis-measured dimension that bumps a unit into a higher size tier overcharges you on every unit until corrected, so catching it both recovers past overcharges and stops the bleeding going forward.
FBA reimbursements are credits Amazon owes you for inventory it loses, damages, or mishandles, and for fees it overcharges, and the automatic reimbursements do not catch everything. Audit your reports on a regular cadence for the main discrepancy types, confirm what has not already been credited, and file within the current claim windows before they expire. It is one of the few line items in this fee cluster that puts money back in your pocket. For the full fee picture, see Amazon FBA fees 2026, and for the costs to minimize on the other side of the ledger, storage fees.