Reimbursements
How to audit FBA reimbursements without paying 25% commission
Most reimbursement services charge 15–25% of every dollar they recover. Here's how to find and file the same claims yourself in under an hour a month.
If you run an Amazon FBA business, Amazon is almost certainly holding money that belongs to you. Lost units. Damaged units. Customer-return discrepancies. Fee miscalculations on inbound shipments. Storage charges on items that were never actually in storage. The list is long, and Amazon does not refund it automatically.
The standard solution is to sign up with a reimbursement service. They scan your reports, find what’s owed, file the cases, and take 15 to 25 percent of every dollar they recover. For an established seller doing $1M ARR, that’s typically $5,000–$15,000 per year handed over for work you could do yourself in well under an hour a month.
This article walks through exactly what to audit, where to find the evidence, and how to file claims that get approved. You can do this manually with Seller Central reports and a spreadsheet. You can also use software (including SellerPulse) to automate the detection — but the software should charge a flat fee, not a commission.
The five categories of recoverable money
Every FBA reimbursement falls into one of these five buckets. Each has its own evidence trail and its own case template.
1. Lost units in Amazon’s warehouse
When you ship inventory in, Amazon scans it at receiving. If their scanned quantity is less than what you sent, those units are “lost.” Amazon’s policy says they reimburse you for lost units after a 30-day investigation window.
Where to find evidence:
- Seller Central → Reports → Fulfillment → Inventory Adjustments Report (filter for adjustment reason codes M (manual) and the various “lost” subcodes)
- Compare against your FBA Inbound Shipment records to find the gap
What to look for: any adjustment with a negative quantity where the reason code starts with M- or includes the word “lost,” and where 30+ days have passed since the receiving event.
2. Damaged units
Same category as lost, but the unit physically exists in damaged condition and Amazon either disposed of it without your authorization or held it without reimbursing. Amazon’s own warehouse handling is usually the cause.
Where to find evidence:
- Inventory Adjustments Report with reason codes starting with
D- - Cross-reference against the Removal Order Detail Report to confirm whether you ever requested disposal
Common gap: units marked damaged that were never moved to “Customer Damaged” status and never reimbursed. The 30-day window applies here too.
3. Customer returns Amazon never refunded you for
This is the largest category for most sellers, and the one reimbursement services profit from most.
When a customer returns a unit, Amazon processes the return, refunds the customer, and (separately) is supposed to either return the unit to your sellable inventory or reimburse you. The mismatch happens when Amazon refunds the customer but never reimburses you and never returns the unit to inventory.
Where to find evidence:
- Seller Central → Reports → Fulfillment → Customer Returns Report
- Cross-reference against the Reimbursements Report to find returns that were processed but never reimbursed and never restocked
How to file: Help → Get Support → Customer returns → “Customer returned an item but I was not reimbursed.” Provide the order ID, ASIN, return reason, and date.
4. Inbound shipment discrepancies
When you create an FBA shipment, you tell Amazon how many units of each SKU to expect. When the box arrives, Amazon scans the contents. Discrepancies happen in both directions:
- Amazon scans fewer than you sent — they should reimburse the difference
- Amazon scans more than you sent (rare but real) — they should credit you for “found” inventory
Where to find evidence:
- FBA Inbound Shipment Items report for what you said you sent
- Inventory Event Detail report for what Amazon says they received
- The delta is what you’re owed (or what you should refuse, in the rare overscan case)
How to file: Inside the specific shipment in Seller Central → “Reconcile shipment” → submit the discrepancy. Amazon investigates and reimburses if they cannot account for the missing units.
5. Fee overcharges
Amazon’s fee calculations are usually correct, but there are systematic categories where they over-charge:
- Dimension/weight changes: when Amazon’s measurement of your product changed (sometimes incorrectly), causing a higher FBA fee tier
- Storage fees on units that weren’t actually stored: units that were lost or damaged before the storage billing date but still appeared on the invoice
- Long-term storage fees on units in transit: rare but documented; units in inbound or removal status billed at LTS rates
Where to find evidence:
- Monthly storage fee invoice vs the inventory snapshot for the same period
- FBA fee changelog for any SKU whose fee tier jumped without a product change
How to file: Each fee category has its own case template under Help → Get Support → Fees. Provide the invoice date and the specific charge.
How much money is actually on the table
The honest answer: it depends entirely on your business size and how messy your inbound process is.
A rough rule of thumb based on aggregated data from sellers across multiple reimbursement-service case studies:
| Annual revenue | Typical first-audit recovery | Monthly ongoing |
|---|---|---|
| Under $100K | $200–$800 | $30–$80 |
| $100K–$1M | $500–$5,000 | $100–$400 |
| $1M–$5M | $3,000–$25,000 | $400–$2,000 |
| Over $5M | $10,000–$100,000+ | $1,000+ |
The “first-audit recovery” number is large because you’re catching up on months or years of accumulated discrepancies. Once you’re on a regular audit cadence (weekly or biweekly), monthly recoveries settle into a steady-state level proportional to your inbound volume.
Why the manual process is hard
If it’s just downloading reports and filing cases, why does anyone pay 25%?
Three real reasons:
- Volume. A seller with 500 SKUs and 200 monthly orders has hundreds of potential discrepancies per month across the five categories. Catching them all manually is a part-time job.
- Report friction. Amazon’s reports are not designed for reconciliation. The same event appears in three different reports with three different schemas. Cross-referencing requires either spreadsheet jiu-jitsu or software.
- Case-filing UX. Seller Central’s case form is genuinely awful. The dropdowns are wrong, the categories overlap, and Amazon’s first-response rate is high enough that you usually need to escalate. Doing this for 50 cases a month is mind-numbing.
Reimbursement services exist because all three frictions are real. They don't have proprietary knowledge — they have a system that handles the volume.
What we built and why it’s flat-fee
SellerPulse runs the same audit, finds the same discrepancies, generates the same cases — and charges a flat $99/month on the Pro plan instead of taking a commission.
The math is straightforward: even a small seller recovering $200/month gets the whole $200 instead of $150. A $1M seller recovering $1,500/month gets $1,500 instead of $1,200.
We can charge flat because the audit work is automated — once we’ve built it once, it costs us almost nothing per additional customer. The commission model is a holdover from when reimbursement services were genuinely doing manual work; the underlying economics have shifted.
The minimum monthly cadence
If you do nothing else, set a calendar reminder for the first Monday of every month with these five items:
- Run the Inventory Adjustments Report for last month. File cases for lost/damaged units.
- Run the Customer Returns Report. Cross-check against the Reimbursements Report. File cases for any return where Amazon refunded the customer but didn’t reimburse you.
- Open each Reconcile shipment view for shipments closed last month. File for any unreceived units.
- Open the monthly storage fee invoice. Spot-check three random charges against your inventory snapshot. File for any that don’t reconcile.
- Track which cases got approved, which got denied, and why. Amazon’s denial patterns are inconsistent; tracking them tells you which case types you should escalate.
That’s it. 30–60 minutes a month for established sellers, and the recovery typically pays back many multiples of the time invested.
What to ignore
Two pieces of common reimbursement advice that are not worth the time:
The actionable summary
| What | Where | How often |
|---|---|---|
| Audit inventory adjustments | Inventory Adjustments Report | Monthly |
| Audit customer returns | Customer Returns × Reimbursements | Monthly |
| Audit inbound shipments | Reconcile shipment per closed shipment | Monthly |
| Audit storage fees | Storage fee invoice × inventory snapshot | Monthly |
| File approved cases | Seller Central → Help → Get Support | As needed |
| Track approval rate | Spreadsheet or software | Quarterly review |
The whole process is mechanical. Once you’ve done it three times, it takes under an hour a month, and it pays for itself many times over. The 25% you’d otherwise hand to a reimbursement service is yours to keep.
Want this on autopilot?
SellerPulse automates the audit described above and many others — flat $99/mo on the Pro plan, not a commission. Start a 30-day free trial, no credit card required.