Most sellers assume Amazon’s reimbursement system has their back. When inventory goes missing in a warehouse, a credit eventually shows up. When something breaks in fulfillment, Amazon quietly makes it right. For years, that assumption was roughly safe.
It isn’t anymore.
Over the past couple of years, Amazon has automated more of the reimbursement process and become noticeably more conservative about what it pays out on its own. The automatic credits that used to appear on a steady basis have thinned out — and for many accounts, they’ve stopped almost entirely.
Here’s the part that catches sellers off guard: the inventory didn’t stop getting lost. The automatic recovery stopped. And whatever Amazon no longer catches on your behalf stays unpaid — unless you find it and file the claim yourself.
One Real Account: $800 a Month, Then $0
On a support call, one seller described watching their monthly reimbursements fall from around $800 to zero over the course of a year. Nothing about their business had changed. They weren’t shipping less, losing less, or making fewer mistakes at the warehouse.
What changed was Amazon’s behavior. The proactive payouts dried up, and because the seller assumed the system was still working, months of recoverable money went unclaimed — and eventually expired.
This is the quiet trap. Partial automatic coverage creates false confidence. You see the occasional credit land, assume everything is being caught, and stop checking. Meanwhile, entire categories of owed money are only ever paid when the seller detects the discrepancy and opens a case.
Reimbursements Aren’t One Problem — They’re Four
The single biggest reason claims get rejected is treating “reimbursements” as one thing. They’re not. Money leaks out in at least four distinct ways, each with different Amazon behavior behind it, different evidence required, and a different place to file.
| Leak | What actually happened |
| Lost & Damaged | Amazon lost or damaged your FBA inventory in its network — and never found it or reimbursed it. |
| Returns | A customer got an instant refund and never sent the item back, and you were never made whole. |
| FBA Fee Changes | Amazon re-measured your product incorrectly, so every unit now overpays fulfillment fees. |
| Reimbursement Gap | Amazon did reimburse you — but paid out less than your product’s actual cost of goods. |
A single scary number on your profit statement almost always decomposes into several of these at once. One account’s “lost & damaged” line for a single month broke down, on inspection, into roughly £1,800 missing from inbound shipments, £1,700 in customer returns that never came back, and less than £100 actually lost inside the fulfillment center. Same line item — three completely different problems, each needing its own claim with its own evidence.
The FBA Fee Changes leak deserves special attention because it compounds. When Amazon records the wrong dimensions or weight for a product, it doesn’t overcharge you once — it overcharges every order until it’s corrected. Catching a $0.35 overcharge on a product doing 2,000 units a month is a $700 monthly recovery plus a fix going forward.
The Part Almost Nobody Gets Right: A Reimbursement Is Not Profit
This is where even experienced sellers misread their own numbers, so it’s worth slowing down.
When a reimbursement lands, it is compensation, not profit — Amazon is paying you back for a unit you can no longer sell. In an accurate profit system, that shows up as two entries on the same day: a plus under Amazon fees (labeled by type, like “Warehouse lost” or “Missing from inbound”) and a minus under cost of goods (“Lost/damaged by Amazon”). The payout comes in; the cost of the lost unit gets written off. The net effect on profit is roughly zero.
Two consequences follow, and both trip people up:
Detection is not a transaction. Flagging a potential reimbursement changes nothing in your profit numbers. It’s radar, not a ledger entry. Your P&L only moves on the day the real reimbursement transaction actually arrives from Amazon.
It’s never backdated. Inventory lost in May but reimbursed in July books in July — the month the money arrived — not retroactively in May. That’s exactly why single-day or single-week views of reimbursement activity look strange, and why this data only makes sense over longer periods.
If you’ve ever seen a reimbursement described as “pure profit, nothing gets subtracted,” that framing is wrong, and sharp sellers will notice the double entry. Getting this right is the difference between reading your dashboard accurately and misreading a recovery as a windfall.
The Claim Window Problem
The other reason money expires: the deadlines got shorter.
Amazon tightened its eligibility windows substantially in late 2024, and they’ve stayed tight since. For many fulfillment-center claims, the window is now measured in weeks, not the long lookbacks sellers used to rely on. Customer-return claims have their own timing — you generally have to wait for the return window to close before the claim becomes valid, then file within a limited period after that.
The practical upshot: a quarterly manual audit is no longer frequent enough. By the time you sit down once a quarter to reconcile reports, a chunk of what you find has already aged out of eligibility. Recovery has to be a routine, not an occasional cleanup.
How sellerboard Helps You Actually Recover It
sellerboard’s Money Back section brings all four leaks into one place — Lost & Damaged, Returns, FBA Fee Changes, and the newer Reimbursement Gap report — so you’re not stitching together half a dozen Seller Central reports that never reference each other.
The division of labor is deliberate:
- sellerboard detects. The reports scan your Seller Central data continuously and flag potential reimbursement cases automatically, so nothing depends on you remembering to check.
- sellerboard documents. Each case comes with the transaction IDs, dates, and amounts you need, plus ready-made ticket templates — the evidence Amazon actually asks for.
- You file, and you stay in control. You open the case in Seller Central. Your account, your claim, your decision.
- You keep 100%. sellerboard takes no commission on what you recover. Third-party reimbursement services routinely charge up to 25% of recovered funds.
The Reimbursement Gap report is worth calling out. Since a 2025 change in how Amazon calculates certain reimbursements, sellers are increasingly paid back at a manufacturing-cost basis that can land below their true landed COGS. Individually these shortfalls are small and easy to miss; at volume they add up. The Gap report surfaces exactly these cases so you can document them and request a re-evaluation.
One honest caveat, and it matters: every figure Money Back shows you is an estimate of opportunity, not guaranteed money. Amazon decides each case, and support may reimburse less than estimated or decline a claim outright. The value isn’t a promise of a payout — it’s knowing precisely where to look, with the evidence already assembled, before the window closes.
The Takeaway
Amazon’s automatic reimbursements have quietly become a smaller safety net, not a complete one. The money that used to arrive on its own increasingly doesn’t — and what goes unclaimed doesn’t roll over, it expires.
The sellers who recover it aren’t the ones who audit once a quarter and hope. They’re the ones who treat reimbursements as four distinct problems, watch all four routinely, and file with the right evidence while the claim is still eligible. That’s the entire job — and it’s the job Money Back is built to make routine.
