Amazon reimbursements: how to recover money for lost and damaged FBA inventory

An Amazon reimbursement is money Amazon pays back to a seller when stock goes missing, gets damaged or is billed incorrectly inside the FBA network. There are six situations where you are owed something: inventory lost or damaged in a fulfilment centre, units missing from an inbound shipment, a customer return that never comes back to your stock, a return that arrives but never makes it back to sellable stock, removals and return shipments lost or damaged on the way to you, and FBA fees charged against the wrong weight or dimensions. Three foundations moved in the last two years and they decide how much you actually recover: Amazon now issues some reimbursements on its own, claim windows are counted in days rather than months, and stock lost before a customer order is valued at your sourcing cost rather than the sales price. The practical consequence is simple: recovery stopped being an annual audit and became a control routine with dates in the calendar.

Amazon policy position as of 8 August 2026. This article is based on the policy pages inside Seller Central (the FBA inventory reimbursement policy and the pages for individual claim types), on Amazon's announcements to sellers in the European stores, and on the SP-API documentation; every claim carries its source. This is not legal or tax advice. Windows and valuation rules do get updated and some of them differ by region: European stores run different numbers from the US stores. The version that binds your account is the one visible in your own Seller Central, so confirm the figures for your marketplaces there before you build a process around them.

What changed, and why older guides mislead

Search this topic and you will find articles quoting an 18-month claim window and reimbursement at the item's selling price. Both are out of date. Three changes, with the dates that apply to European stores:

• Automatic reimbursements for units lost in a fulfilment centre. Amazon announced that from 15 January 2025 it issues the reimbursement itself as soon as a fulfilment centre reports a unit as lost, and the payment shows up in the Reimbursements report (Amazon announcement for European sellers).
• Shorter claim windows. From 9 January 2025 the eligibility windows are counted in days from the event, separately for each claim type. The 18-month rule is gone. That update did not cover claims for units missing from inbound shipments, which run on their own clock.
• A different valuation base. From 31 March 2025 inventory lost or damaged before a customer order is reimbursed at the product's sourcing cost. The date was originally set for 10 March and Amazon pushed it back to give sellers time to submit their own costs (announcement of the new effective date).

The combination is awkward for sellers: reimbursements are smaller and they expire faster. That is our conclusion rather than Amazon's position, but it follows from the arithmetic. If you review reimbursements once a quarter, most of your claims have already lapsed by the time you open the spreadsheet.

Six situations where Amazon owes you money

Here is the map: where each event shows up, how long you have and what Amazon expects as evidence. The windows below are the European ones. Several of them read differently in the US stores, and it is the US numbers that circulate most widely in seller guides.

Sources for the windows: the Amazon announcement for European sellers and the policy pages FBA inventory reimbursement policy, Customer return claims, Removals claims, Shipment to Amazon claims and FBA fees reimbursement policy: Weight and dimensions. The policy pages open once you are signed in to Seller Central.

Lost or damaged in a fulfilment centre

The most common category and the only one that is genuinely automated. The events sit in the Inventory Ledger detailed view, which shows receipts, removals, adjustments, losses and finds per SKU. Your job comes down to one comparison: the sum of loss and damage events against what actually landed in the Reimbursements report for the same period.

Two things tend to surprise sellers on their first pass. First, a reimbursement can arrive in kind, meaning the unit is added back to your inventory instead of cash reaching your account. Second, a paid reimbursement can be reversed when the unit turns up or when Amazon decides it was issued in error; the policy allows 60 days from the reimbursement to dispute that. If you cannot read both of those in the report, your reconciliation will never balance.

Units missing from an inbound shipment

You send a hundred units, Amazon closes the shipment at ninety-four. This category carries the highest evidence bar: without an invoice, a packing list and proof of delivery, Amazon has no way to establish what actually entered the building, so the claim goes nowhere.

It is also the one category where the sources disagree, and that is worth saying plainly. The Shipment to Amazon claims policy page states 9 months from the verified delivery date, while an earlier Amazon announcement for European sellers set a window of 15 to 60 days from delivery. The January 2025 update to the windows explicitly left this category out, so confirm the deadline for your marketplace in the policy version inside your own panel before you build a process on it.

The practical conclusion holds either way: reconcile at shipment closure, not when somebody notices a hole in the stock figures. Carrier paperwork ages faster than any claim window.

Customer returns: the refund went out, the unit did not come back

The customer is refunded immediately; the unit is only supposed to travel back afterwards. Sometimes it never does. That is why Amazon does not let you claim straight away: in the European stores the window opens 45 days after the refund and closes at 105 days. File too early and the claim is rejected, which wastes the one attempt you had.

Watch where your numbers come from. The US version of the policy runs 60 to 120 days, and those are the figures repeated by most guides, including those published by companies selling reimbursement recovery as a service. Check which version your account is actually governed by before you wire the dates into a process.

Returned, but never back on sale

The unit physically arrived, it just never made it back to sellable stock: it was graded as damaged, lost during check-in or disposed of. One decision drives everything here: who is responsible for its condition. If Amazon or the carrier caused the damage, you are reimbursed and the unit is not added back. If the customer caused it, there is no reimbursement.

This is the biggest source of disputes, because the returns report shows the status and the reason but not the responsibility call behind it. For individual units it is rarely worth the fight. For a repeating pattern on one ASIN it is worth asking whether the real problem is packaging or a listing that sets the wrong expectation.

Removals, return-to-seller shipments and disposals

Two different problems in one category. The first is a removal order that never arrived, arrived short or arrived damaged. The second is stock disposed of without your instruction. You find both with a single three-way comparison: Removal Order Detail (what you asked for) against Removal Shipment Detail (what Amazon sent) against your own goods-in record (what turned up).

Removal claims are filed manually; automation does not cover them. The window for a shipment lost in transit only opens 15 days after the shipment was created, to give it a chance to arrive, and closes at 75 days.

FBA fees charged on the wrong weight or dimensions

This one sits under its own policy with its own clock: 90 days from the date the fee was charged to gather documentation and ask Amazon to check the measurement. If Amazon confirms the fee was calculated on inaccurate dimensions or weight, it refunds the difference.

Detection is easier than sellers expect. The FBA Fee Preview report carries the dimensions and the size tier Amazon uses for billing. Compare them with your own measurement of the packed unit on the SKUs that matter. The expensive errors are the ones that push a product into a higher size tier, because then it is not one fee that moves but a whole family of them; we break that structure down in the article on Amazon FBA fees.

How much you get back: the end of sales-price valuation

The valuation base depends on exactly when you lost the unit.

Amazon defines the sourcing cost as what it costs you to source a product from a manufacturer, wholesaler or reseller, or to produce it if you are the manufacturer. The definition excludes shipping, handling, customs duties and other costs (Amazon announcement for European stores).

There are two routes to that number. You can submit your own cost on the "Manage your sourcing cost" page in the Inventory Defect and Reimbursement portal, or you can let Amazon apply its own estimate based on comparable products. Amazon said all sellers would have access to that page by 28 February 2025.

The practical takeaway: a maintained sourcing cost is the only lever you genuinely have over the size of a reimbursement. It is also the easiest place to hurt yourself. An understated figure quietly lowers every future payout, and an overstated one is hard to defend under review. Enter what your purchase invoices support and refresh it when a supplier or a price list changes.

It is worth being clear about what this change really did. The gap between selling price and sourcing cost is your margin, and since 2025 nobody hands that margin back when a unit disappears. A lost unit is no longer neutral to your P&L, which is an argument for counting it alongside every other cost line, the way we do when calculating margin and profitability. The policy also caps the reimbursement per unit (the UK version states GBP 2,000) and points sellers with higher-value goods towards third-party insurance. Check the cap in the policy version for your own store.

The control routine you can run in-house

This is the part that decides the outcome. Below is the rhythm we set up with clients: what to open, what to compare it against and how often. It is our recommendation, not an Amazon requirement. Report names follow the Amazon SP-API documentation, because the labels in the panel are translated differently across marketplaces.

Every week, 15 to 30 minutes:

• Inventory Ledger, detailed view, last 7 days. List loss and damage events per SKU with their dates. That date starts the 60-day clock.
• Reimbursements report for the same week. Match one against the other. Every event without a matching payment is a claim candidate, not something that will "probably sort itself out".
• Shipments closed in the past week. Shipped versus received, per SKU. Raise discrepancies while the carrier paperwork is still fresh.

Every month:

• FBA Returns Report against the Reimbursements report. You are looking for refunds where the unit never came back, and for returns graded unsellable through no fault of the customer.
• Removal Order Detail against Removal Shipment Detail against your goods-in record. Three numbers that should agree and frequently do not on larger removal orders.
• Reversed reimbursements. Scan the report for reversals. If a unit was "found", check the ledger to confirm it really returned to sellable stock, because you have 60 days from the reimbursement to dispute.

Every quarter:

• FBA Fee Preview against your own measurements on your top few dozen SKUs. The window is 90 days from the fee being charged, so a quarterly cycle is the last sensible moment to catch it.
• Sourcing costs refreshed after a change of supplier, price list or purchasing currency.
• A pre-peak review. Q4 multiplies shipments, returns and warehouse movements, so it multiplies the events you need to catch; how to prepare for that period is covered in our article on selling through Q4 and Black Friday.

One organisational rule matters more than the tooling: this review needs a named owner and a fixed slot. Amazon counts days from the event, not from the day you found out about it, so a routine beats a campaign every time. The cheapest way to run it is to bolt it onto the review you already do for FBA inventory management, since the data sources largely overlap.

What Amazon will not reimburse

Knowing where not to spend effort is worth as much as knowing where to claim. The policy either excludes these outright or settles them against the seller:

• Units damaged by the customer. The customer returns policy excludes reimbursement where the customer rendered the item unsellable.
• Claims filed late. A closed window is closed, however well documented the loss is.
• Units already reimbursed. Duplicate claims do not increase the payout, and a recovered unit means the earlier reimbursement is reversed.
• Ancillary costs. Inbound freight, duty and handling are explicitly outside the sourcing cost definition. Lost margin and lost sales are not recoverable at all.
• Losses outside the FBA network. Seller-fulfilled orders run through a separate process (SAFE-T) with its own deadlines. If you operate both models, you need two routines, not one.

In-house or outsourced

The honest answer depends on the volume of warehouse events, not on the size of your revenue. A few dozen events a month is a spreadsheet job for one person. A few thousand events across several marketplaces is work that will not get done without automation, and there is no point pretending otherwise.

Doing it yourself works when:

• you sell on one or two marketplaces with a contained catalogue;
• somebody owns the routine as part of their job description, rather than "when there is time";
• manually pulled reports still fit in a spreadsheet without inviting mistakes.

Outsourcing works when:

• you run several marketplaces and the volume of movements outgrew manual reconciliation;
• losses only surface at stocktake, which is usually after the windows have closed;
• nobody owns this area by name, which means nobody owns it at all.

Before you sign with a recovery service, check three things:

• Who files the claim. It is submitted from your account and you are answerable for its content, whoever does the clicking.
• What data the provider gets. The scope of account and API access, and what happens to that data when the engagement ends.
• How the fee works. A success fee on recovered amounts looks risk-free, but since the switch to sourcing-cost valuation the amount per unit is lower than in pre-2025 case studies. Model the break-even on your own numbers rather than on somebody else's examples.

There is also a risk these providers rarely lead with. Bulk, duplicated or thinly evidenced claims are not neutral: everything settles through your account, and disputes around reimbursements can attract exactly the kind of internal review you would rather avoid. What that process looks like when it starts is covered in our article on Amazon account suspension and the plan of action.

At Amazonway we run this routine as part of ongoing Amazon account management: reports reviewed on a fixed cadence, claims filed inside their windows, and sourcing costs in the panel kept in line with purchase invoices. We do not promise a recovery figure, because it depends on how much Amazon actually lost and on what your costs look like. What we are accountable for is that no window closes unnoticed.

FAQ: Amazon reimbursements

What is an Amazon reimbursement?

It is compensation Amazon pays a seller for inventory lost or damaged inside the FBA network, for a customer return that never came back to stock, for losses during removals, and for fees charged against inaccurate weight or dimensions. It can arrive as cash or in kind, meaning the unit is added back to your inventory.

How long do I have to file a claim?

In the European stores: 60 days from a unit being reported lost or damaged in a fulfilment centre, 45 to 105 days after a customer refund for return claims, 15 to 75 days from shipment creation for removals lost in transit, and 60 days from delivery for other removal claims. Fee claims for wrong dimensions run 90 days from the charge. Inbound shipments sit on a separate clock and this is where the sources disagree: the policy page states 9 months from the verified delivery date, while an earlier European announcement stated 15 to 60 days. Confirm that figure, and the rest, in the policy version visible in your own Seller Central.

Does Amazon reimburse automatically?

Partly. Since 15 January 2025 in the European stores, Amazon issues the reimbursement itself for units reported lost in a fulfilment centre. Everything else, including all removal claims, is filed manually. Automation shortens the list; it does not replace the check.

How much does Amazon pay for a lost unit?

For stock lost before a customer order: the product's sourcing cost, meaning what you paid to buy or make it, excluding freight, duty and handling. For stock lost after an order: the sales price on that order, less applicable fees. You can submit your own sourcing cost in the Inventory Defect and Reimbursement portal; if you do not, Amazon applies its own estimate.

Why was my reimbursement reversed?

Usually because the missing unit was found and returned to your inventory, or because the reimbursement was issued in error. The policy allows 60 days from the reimbursement to raise a dispute. Check the ledger first to confirm whether the unit really came back to sellable stock, because that is the only argument you can support with data.

Is it worth paying a third party to recover the money?

It depends on scale. At a few dozen events a month an internal routine is usually enough. Across several marketplaces and thousands of movements, automation or an external service makes sense, provided you have checked who files the claims, what data access the provider receives and how the fee is calculated. Responsibility for the content of the claims stays with the account owner.

Sources

• Amazon Seller Central, FBA inventory reimbursement policy (European version; sign-in required)
• Amazon Seller Central, FBA inventory reimbursement policy: Customer return claims
• Amazon Seller Central, FBA inventory reimbursement policy: Removals claims
• Amazon Seller Central, FBA inventory reimbursement policy: Shipment to Amazon claims
• Amazon Seller Central, FBA fees reimbursement policy: Weight and dimensions
• Amazon announcement for European sellers: reimbursement automation from 15 January 2025 and claim windows from 9 January 2025
• Earlier Amazon announcement for European sellers: claim windows in force from 5 September 2024 (the source of the discrepancy on inbound shipments)
• Amazon announcement for European stores: update to the lost and damaged inventory reimbursement policy and the new effective date of 31 March 2025
• Amazon SP-API, FBA report names (Reimbursements, Inventory Ledger, Returns, Removal Order Detail, Removal Shipment Detail, Fee Preview)

Find out how many events are about to expire

Reimbursements are not a lottery. They come down to whether somebody reads the reports on a shorter cycle than Amazon's claim windows. If you do not know how many events from the last two months have no matching payment, start with a single comparison: the inventory ledger against the Reimbursements report.

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