Every FBA seller we onboard asks some version of the same question during their first audit call: "Wait, Amazon owes us money?" Usually, yes. And usually more than they expect.
Fulfillment by Amazon moves an enormous volume of inventory through warehouses, cross-docks, and last-mile carriers every day, and errors are a mathematical certainty at that scale. Units get lost in transit between fulfillment centers. Returns get marked "customer damaged" when the box arrives untouched. Inbound shipments get short-received because a warehouse worker miscounted a case pack. None of this is malicious — it's just the cost of running a logistics network that large — but it becomes your problem the moment nobody catches it.
What actually qualifies for reimbursement
Not every inventory discrepancy is reimbursable, and the sellers who get frustrated with the process are usually the ones filing claims for the wrong things. In practice, the claims that hold up are:
- Lost inbound units — you shipped 500 units to a fulfillment center, Amazon's receiving report shows 480 received, and no discrepancy reason is documented.
- Warehouse-damaged inventory — units marked unsellable due to warehouse handling, not a manufacturing defect.
- Lost or destroyed units during removal or disposal orders — this one gets missed constantly because sellers assume a removal order is the end of the story.
- Customer returns that were never actually returned — a refund was issued, but the unit never came back to inventory and was never reimbursed either.
- Overcharged FBA fees — dimensional weight or category miscalculated, so you were billed for a larger tier than your product actually falls into.
What doesn't qualify: units you shipped in defective, inventory you simply can't locate in your own records, or claims filed after Amazon's audit window closes.
The clock that most sellers don't know is running
This is the part that costs sellers the most money. Amazon's reimbursement policy gives you roughly 18 months from the date of loss or damage to file a claim, but the data you need to prove the claim — specifically the inventory adjustment reports and reimbursement reports in Seller Central — becomes harder to reconstruct the longer you wait. Sellers who run a reimbursement audit once a year, rather than once ever, consistently recover more, because they're catching discrepancies while the paper trail is still intact.
We run these audits by reconciling three reports against each other — the Inventory Ledger, the Reimbursements report, and the Fee Preview report — looking specifically for units that disappear from inventory without a corresponding reimbursement or a legitimate explanation. It's tedious, spreadsheet-heavy work, which is exactly why most sellers never do it themselves and why most of the money sits unclaimed.
Why "just use a reimbursement app" isn't the same thing
Automated reimbursement tools are useful for catching the obvious, high-volume discrepancies, and we don't discourage sellers from running one. But they miss the claims that require actual case-by-case judgment — a removal order with a partial loss, a mismatched SKU that only shows up when you cross-reference two reports manually, or a fee overcharge that only becomes visible when you compare your product's actual dimensions against what Amazon has on file. The apps catch the low-hanging fruit. The manual audit catches the rest, which in our experience is usually where the larger dollar amounts are hiding.
What this actually looks like in a client account
A typical mid-sized FBA seller moving a few thousand units a month, who has never run a dedicated audit, tends to have somewhere between 1% and 3% of their FBA-related revenue sitting in unclaimed reimbursements. That's not a rounding error — for a seller doing $600,000 a year through FBA, that range is $6,000 to $18,000 that Amazon already agrees it owes you, once someone puts together the case.
If you handle inventory and FBA logistics yourself and just haven't had the time to dig into reimbursements, that's the most common starting point we see. We handle FBA reimbursement audits as a standalone engagement or as part of ongoing account management — either way, the audit itself tells you within a week or two whether there's meaningful money to recover before you commit to anything further.
Want a second set of eyes on your reimbursement history? Book a free consultation and we'll tell you honestly whether it's worth pursuing.