How to Get Amazon FBA Reimbursements in 2026 (Claim Windows, Steps)

Most of what ranks for this topic was written for a set of rules that no longer exists. Until late 2024 you had 18 months to claim for inventory Amazon lost in its warehouses, and lost units were paid out near their selling price. Both of those are gone. The main window is now 60 days, and units lost before a customer order are reimbursed at what they cost you to buy, not what they sell for.

We run a private-label Amazon store with a bit over $3M in lifetime sales, and we track every reimbursement line. This guide covers the current claim windows, the reports that show you what you are owed, how to file and what to attach, and what a year of reimbursements actually looked like for us.

What Amazon reimburses

There are five buckets worth knowing. They behave differently, and only some of them pay out without you lifting a finger.

Type	What happens	Usually automatic?
Lost or damaged in the warehouse	A unit goes missing or gets broken inside a fulfillment center	Mostly, yes
Inbound shipment discrepancies	Amazon receives fewer units than you shipped	No, you file from the shipment
Customer returns	Buyer is refunded and the item never comes back, or comes back damaged or as the wrong item	Mostly, yes
Fee overcharges	FBA fees charged on the wrong size or weight tier	No, you request a remeasure
Removal orders	Units lost or damaged on the way back to you	No

Amazon said in 2024 that almost all warehouse lost, warehouse damaged, and customer return cases would be reimbursed proactively. In our account that has broadly held. The manual work is inbound shipments, fees, and the automatic payments that never arrive.

The current claim windows

These are the US windows for claims you file yourself. They have applied since late 2024, and Amazon’s FBA reimbursement policy page in Seller Central is the final word for your account.

Claim type	Window
Lost or damaged in a fulfillment center	Within 60 days of the date the unit was reported lost or damaged in your inventory reports
Customer return not received	Between 60 and 120 days after the refund or replacement
Inbound shipment missing units	Once the shipment shows as eligible for investigation, and no later than nine months after the verified delivery date
Removal order lost in transit	15 to 75 days after the removal shipment was created
Other removal problems	Within 60 days of the shipment being delivered back to you
Fee overcharge from wrong dimensions	Within 90 days of the fee being charged

Two caveats. First, sources disagree on inbound shipments. Several seller guides still quote 15 to 60 days after delivery, while Amazon’s own supply chain reimbursement page and recent seller forum threads say nine months from verified delivery. We file inbound claims as soon as a shipment closes short, which makes the disagreement irrelevant. Second, the 60-day warehouse clock starts when Amazon records the loss, not when you notice it. If you check once a quarter, you will lose claims.

How Amazon values a reimbursement now

Since spring 2025, Amazon reimburses inventory lost or damaged before a customer order at its manufacturing cost. Amazon defines that as your cost to source the product from a manufacturer, wholesaler, or reseller, or your cost to make it if you are the manufacturer. Shipping, handling, and customs duties are excluded.

If you never tell Amazon your cost, it estimates one from comparable products. That estimate can be well below your real cost, especially for a private-label product with no direct twin. The fix is the Manage Your Sourcing Cost page inside the Inventory Defect and Reimbursement portal, where you can enter costs per product. Have supplier invoices ready, because Amazon can ask you to prove them.

Inventory lost or damaged after a customer order works differently: Amazon says it still pays the sale price on the original order minus applicable fees.

What this means in practice: a lost unit now pays back your factory cost, not your profit. Warehouse losses are smaller checks than they used to be, and a service taking a percentage of them is taking a percentage of a smaller number.

What a year of reimbursements looked like for us

This is one store’s year, not a benchmark. Your mix depends on your volume, your return rate, and how many shipments you send.

Over the last 12 months our US account recovered a little over $3,000 in reimbursements, plus a few hundred dollars in Canada. That came through roughly 250 separate reimbursement lines.

• About three-quarters arrived automatically, with no case filed. The biggest single bucket by far was customer refunds where the item never came back: Amazon refunds the buyer, waits for the return, and when it does not arrive, reimburses us.
• About one-quarter needed a case, and almost all of it came from three inbound shipments that Amazon received short.
• Lost-in-warehouse reimbursements were dozens of small lines that added up to a few hundred dollars. Most were a unit or two each.

Two lessons from that year. The automatic system does most of the work, so your real job is checking it rather than replacing it. And the money that needed a case was concentrated in a handful of events. Three short shipments were worth more than all the warehouse losses put together. Watching every inbound shipment until it closes is the highest-value habit in this whole topic.

We track all of it in the Sellerise reimbursement dashboard, which is how we know those numbers without building a spreadsheet.

The reports to pull

You can do all of this from Seller Central without any software. These are the reports that matter.

Inventory Ledger. The master record of every unit movement, with adjustment codes for lost, found, damaged, and disposed. Use it to confirm the date and reason for any loss before filing. The 60-day warehouse clock runs from the dates you see here.

Reimbursements report. Every reimbursement Amazon has paid, with the reason, the quantity, and the amount. This is how you confirm that an automatic payment actually happened, and it is where you will see reversals: if Amazon finds a unit it already paid you for, it takes the money back.

FBA customer returns report. Every return and its condition. Match it against refunded orders older than about 45 days, which is how long Amazon waits for a return before reimbursing. A refund with no return and no reimbursement after that point is a claim.

Inventory Defect and Reimbursement portal. Amazon’s own screen that pulls warehouse lost, warehouse damaged, and customer return defects into one place, with a status of Eligible for Claim, In Progress, or Resolved. It does not include inbound shipments, removals, or disposals, so it is a starting point rather than a full audit.

Shipment contents. For each inbound shipment, compare units shipped to units received once the shipment closes. Shortfalls show up here first.

How to file a claim, step by step

1. Confirm it is not already paid. Search the Reimbursements report for the FNSKU and date. Filing for something Amazon already reimbursed wastes a case and slows the next one.
2. Confirm you are inside the window. Use the dates from the Inventory Ledger or the shipment, not the date you found the problem.
3. File from the right place. Warehouse losses and customer returns: start from the Eligible for Claim list in the Inventory Defect and Reimbursement portal. Inbound shortfalls: open the closed shipment in Manage FBA Shipments, find the short SKU in the contents, and choose to research the missing units. Fee overcharges: request a remeasure of the product, and if the fee was wrong, Amazon reimburses the difference. Everything else goes through Seller Support under Fulfillment by Amazon.
4. Attach evidence. See the table below.
5. Keep it to one issue per case. One shipment, or one batch of similar warehouse losses. Mixed cases get partial answers.
6. Check the payout. When a case is approved, find the line in the Reimbursements report and check the quantity and amount. If the amount looks wrong, reply on the same case rather than opening a new one.

Claim type	Evidence to attach
Inbound shortfall	Final supplier invoice dated before the shipment, with matching quantities; proof of delivery (signed bill of lading for freight, carrier tracking for small parcel); the shipment ID
Warehouse lost or damaged	Proof of your manufacturing cost if Amazon asks; the FNSKU and the date of the adjustment from the Inventory Ledger
Customer return not received	Order ID, refund date, and the return status showing nothing came back
Fee overcharge	Your measured dimensions and weight, ideally with photos of the packed unit on a scale and against a ruler
Removal problem	Removal order ID, tracking, the units and quantities, and photos of what arrived

Use PDFs or images, not spreadsheets, and highlight the invoice lines that match the shipment. A pro forma invoice is not proof of purchase. Inbound claims with a clean commercial invoice and a signed delivery receipt are the ones that get approved on the first reply.

DIY, software, or a service

You have three ways to handle this. The right one depends on your volume and how much your time is worth.

Approach	Cost	What you still do
DIY in Seller Central	Nothing	Pull the reports, match them, file every case
Sellerise, Growing plan	$39.99/mo, no percentage of recoveries	Review its findings and submit the claims it prepares
Helium 10 Refund Genie	Part of the paid suite, no commission on recoveries	Copy its case details into Seller Central; inbound shipments are not covered
Helium 10 Managed Refund Service	18% of recoveries on Platinum, 15% on Diamond	Nothing, it files for you
Seller Investigators	25% of recoveries, free audit	Nothing, its team files for you

DIY is fine for a small account with a few shipments a month. Our year was about 250 lines, but only a handful needed a case, and those came from three shipments. An hour a month covers it.

Software earns its place when the matching becomes tedious. Sellerise finds the items, estimates what each is worth, and prepares claims in small batches, and it takes nothing from what you recover. sellerboard has a lighter “money back” report that flags lost and damaged inventory on every plan.

A service makes sense if you have real volume and nobody on your team who wants to learn the process. Seller Investigators is the best-known name. Its site still runs under the Seller Investigators brand, describes itself as part of the Carbon6 family, and charges 25% only after Amazon pays. Some review sites say the old domain now redirects to SPS Commerce’s Revenue Recovery product; when we checked, it did not. Ownership is worth knowing, though. SPS Commerce bought Carbon6 in early 2025, then sold its third-party seller recovery business in mid-2026 to a buyer it did not name. If you sign up, confirm which company holds your data and your contract.

Whichever service you use, ask one question before signing: does the percentage apply only to cases they filed, or to every reimbursement in the report, including the ones Amazon pays automatically? On an account like ours, where three-quarters arrives on its own, that answer changes the real cost more than the headline rate does.

What is worth chasing and what is not

Always chase:

• Short inbound shipments. Bigger amounts, a long window, and a clear paper trail.
• Refunds with no return and no reimbursement after the waiting period. Individually small, but they add up and they are easy to prove.
• Fee tiers that are plainly wrong. A product bumped into a larger size tier overpays on every single order until you fix it.

Usually not worth a case:

• A single lost unit that may still turn up. Amazon often finds units and reverses the reimbursement anyway.
• Anything outside the window. Amazon will decline it, and arguing costs you the time you could spend on claims that are still open.
• Losses on a product whose cost Amazon already has right. At manufacturing cost, a single unit is often a few dollars.

Do once, then forget: enter your real sourcing costs on Amazon’s cost page. It improves every future warehouse reimbursement without filing anything.

A monthly checklist

1. Open the Reimbursements report for the last 30 days and skim for anything unusual, including reversals.
2. Check every inbound shipment that closed this month: units shipped against units received. File immediately on any shortfall.
3. Open the Eligible for Claim list in the Inventory Defect and Reimbursement portal and file anything approaching its 60-day limit.
4. Match refunds older than 45 days against returns and reimbursements. Anything with neither is a claim.
5. Spot-check FBA fees on your top products against the size tier you expect.
6. Check that sourcing costs are entered for any new product.
7. Note what came in, by type. After three months you will know whether software or a service pays for itself on your account.

If you would rather not build that habit by hand, the Sellerise review explains how we run it inside the tool, and our best Amazon FBA tools roundup shows where reimbursements fit in a full seller stack.