Amazon FBA reimbursements: how to claim lost and damaged inventory

Does Amazon reimburse lost FBA inventory automatically?

Yes, in most cases Amazon reimburses lost FBA inventory automatically. Since November 1, 2024, Amazon automatically reimburses you for most lost and damaged inventory in warehouses and customer returns, so you don’t have to submit a claim for these cases. You can see your payments in the Reimbursements report, under the appropriate case type.

There are three different scenarios where nothing happens until you file the claim yourself. The first is a case Amazon simply missed. The second is a removal order, where units are lost or damaged after you ask Amazon to send them back. The third is an inbound shipment where Amazon received fewer units than you sent.

How much does Amazon pay for a lost unit?

Before you start chasing the missing units, it’s helpful to know what they are worth to you. Since March 10, 2025, Amazon reimburses you for the sourcing cost (what you paid your supplier to make or buy the unit) for units that are lost before a customer order. This is for warehouse, inbound and removal losses.

This reimbursement comes with a cap, though: Amazon pays up to $5,000 per unit.

Customer return claims, on the other hand, are a bit different. In this case, Amazon will pay you the amount of the refund or replacement that the customer received, minus any applicable fees.

If you haven’t done so yet, you should go to the reimbursement portal in Seller Central, or as Amazon calls it, the Inventory Defect and Reimbursement portal, and there you can enter the sourcing cost of your top products.

You should keep your supplier invoices close by, because you will need to prove that number.

What counts as a reimbursable FBA case?

The best way to discover what counts as a reimbursable case is by opening Amazon’s Reimbursements report, and there you will find all the payments that Amazon has made to you, which are broken down by category.

Here are the ones that you will see most frequently:

• Lost Warehouse and Damage Warehouse lines: These are the units that went missing or got damaged in the fulfillment center.
• Customer Return lines: These are the units for which a customer has received a refund, but the unit was never returned to Amazon, or it was returned damaged.
• Lost Inbound: This situation is when Amazon got fewer units than you actually shipped.
• Removal orders: These are the units that were damaged or lost after you requested Amazon to send them back to you.
• Fee Correction: This issue occurs when you are charged fees for the wrong size or weight.

There is a clock on fee claims, too. In an August case, Amazon told one of our clients that a refund for a fee charged due to a wrong re-measurement must be requested within 90 days of the charge.

Each FNSKU can also get no more than two re-measurement requests in 60 days. That is why we check every new SKU for size and weight errors during its first month.

If you somehow expected to see a case in the report, but it’s not there, it usually means that Amazon hasn’t caught it yet, and that is where your own claims come in.

What are Amazon's FBA reimbursement claim windows?

On October 15, 2025, Amazon updated its claim windows, so if you are still reading a guide that says 60 to 120 days for customer returns, it was written before the update.

Here is how the windows look right now:

Most of those work like a regular deadline, so the trick is to file before the time runs out. The exception, and the one we see sellers get wrong the most, is the customer return window.

It doesn't open the day of the refund, like other claim types. There is a start date and an end date, so it's a period when it's just too early to file.

For example, if a customer receives a refund on March 1 and does not return the unit, you will not be able to file a claim until the window opens. You can't file until April 15, which is day 45. You then have until June 14 to submit the claim. If you file on day 30, Amazon will inform you it’s too soon. File on day 106 and the window has already closed.

That’s why we have two dates on the calendar for every open return case: one for when the window opens and one for when it closes.

Amazon has changed its rules for shipment reconciliation more than once already, and there are rules for inbound shipment claims as well. Don't use a number from an old guide; verify the deadline shown on the shipment itself in Send to Amazon and send it as soon as receiving closes.

How do you find cases Amazon missed?

The three places that you really need to look at are the Inventory Ledger, the reimbursement portal and the Reimbursements report. The whole idea is to cross-check them against each other.

If you haven’t done it before, here is how we do it for all the accounts that we manage:

• Pull the Inventory Ledger. Pull the last 60 days, since this matches the lost and damaged window.
• Visit the reimbursement portal. Once you are there, note down all the cases you see with their reported date, because that date starts the 60-day clock.
• Run the Reimbursements report. You should run it for the same 60 days, and you will see all the ones that Amazon paid, which are sorted by case type.
• Match every lost or damaged unit to a payment. Go one by one and see if you can identify a matching payment. If there is no payment next to a unit, it is a claim candidate.
• Look for lines that are labeled as Reimbursement_Reversal. While in the Reimbursements report, search for these, which come in when Amazon takes back money that they already sent you.

When we first do a report on a new account, the first three things that we look at are units that are marked as lost with no payment, customer returns that were refunded but were never returned, and shipments where Amazon has received fewer units than were sent.

Once a month, we run a full match, and then we look at the ledger every week.

Where do inventory losses actually start?

Claims are about getting a refund after a loss has occurred. Usually, the bigger losses in the accounts we manage are due to recurring setup problems that persist until someone identifies the root cause. We’ve come across a few of those in the last couple of months.

A barcode on the wrong box

A home goods brand we work with sent 300 units in two colors to Amazon. Amazon logged 200 of one color and none of the other.

The supplier had made an error. Amazon thought the second color boxes contained the wrong product because they had the barcode of the first color. A claim alone doesn’t resolve the situation.

We had to get the supplier to send an invoice for what was actually shipped and then do a stock correction through Seller Support.

Two barcodes on one listing

One color of a Dreamfarm product, a brand of kitchen tools, had two unrelated barcodes on the same ASIN, or Amazon product listing number. Amazon required us to send pictures of the packaging with the correct barcode before they would correct the listing.

Until Amazon resolves such a conflict, it may apply units to the wrong record. When you notice the same product has gaps month after month, your first step should be to check the barcodes.

A removal nobody asked for

We are working with a pet care brand that had 34 units returned from Amazon labeled as "overstock." Not one person on their team requested a removal, so we opened a case to see what happened.

The case showed the 34 units were part of an automated removal of 297 stranded units across 13 fulfillment centers. The cause was a system-generated SKU that was not linked to any active listing.

Amazon deemed the stock stranded and sent it back at the brand’s expense.

If you open the stranded inventory page in Seller Central and see SKUs that you don't recognize, it may be worth linking or merging them before the next removal is scheduled by Amazon.

Slow stock that keeps paying storage

Amazon does not reimburse storage fees, but they show up in the same reports, so we review them together. We worked with a brand that was paying about $2,000 a month in storage fees for one slow-moving product and we liquidated that inventory with an Outlet deal. It’s also a good idea to look at storage fees for each product during your monthly review.

How do you file an FBA reimbursement claim?

Once you know which units are missing and still unpaid, filing the claim does not take long. Let’s walk through it step by step.

First, check the gap. You should already have this from matching the Inventory Ledger, the reimbursement portal and the Reimbursement report. So you know the units are missing and Amazon hasn't paid for them.

Then check the window to see how many days have passed since the beginning date of that case type. If it is a customer return that is still under day 45, you will have to wait. If your case is within 10 days of the due date, please file it today.

Then get your evidence. That means most claims are supported by the supplier invoice for your sourcing cost, plus the shipment ID, order ID, or removal order ID, depending on the case.

Now you can file the claim. You can do it in the reimbursement portal or in Seller Central and if it needs some explaining, open a case with Seller Support as well. If you haven’t done it before, our guide on how to open a case in Amazon takes you through the form.

Next, review the reimbursement report weekly until the payment appears. If you disagree with the amount, you can ask Amazon to review it within 90 days of the original claim.

Frequently asked questions

Can I still file a claim after the window closes?

Usually not. Once the claim window for a case type has closed, Amazon won’t usually accept the claim, so it’s safest to consider that money lost.

What you can do is find out why the case fell through, if no one checked the reports that week, or no one on the team was responsible for pulling them, and fix that so the next case gets filed on time.

Why did Amazon pay less than the unit cost me?

If you didn’t enter your sourcing cost in the reimbursement portal, Amazon will use similar products to estimate it.

The number on your invoice isn’t always what you actually paid your supplier, so the easiest way to get paid the right amount is to enter the real number for your top products (with the invoices ready to back you up).

Is a reimbursement tool or service worth paying for?

For large catalogs, tools that scan your reports for missed cases can save you a lot of time because it would take hours each month to check every line by hand.

They will not fix a barcode error, an unlinked SKU, or a product measured at the wrong size, and these are the problems that are behind most of the repeat losses that we see.

Final thoughts

While it’s a huge help that Amazon pays for the majority of cases on its own, not every lost unit gets paid automatically. You still have to deal with the cases it misses, the removal orders and the inbound shipments that arrive short, and the windows for filing those are short enough that a few busy weeks can cost you real money.

If you want a place to start this week, enter the sourcing cost of your top products, run the three-report match, and file anything that is still within its window. Add two calendar dates (day 45 and day 105) for each open customer return case. Check the stranded inventory page for SKUs you don't recognize. When you find holes in the same product for two months running, check the barcodes first.

Checking these reports every month is part of how we runAmazon account management for established brands. Today, we manage $100M+ in annual client revenue across 50+ brands, and if you want to see everything that work covers, ourAmazon account management guide goes through it in detail. We also back our work with a 60-day guarantee, so if we do not improve your performance, you do not pay.

If you don't know how many lost or damaged units are lying unclaimed in your account, get your free marketing plan, and Olifant Digital will scan your account and show you where the money is slipping away before you pay anything.