Amazon FBA Shipment Reconciliation: How To Find The Money Amazon Owes You

$1,784.36. That is what our team recovered for an apparel seller in the US, and not one cent of it came from selling anything. It came from Amazon FBA shipment reconciliation, going back through inbound shipments that had already closed, finding the units that were sent and never located, and building the cases to claim them.

Nothing dramatic had happened. The boxes left, the carrier delivered them, the shipments moved to closed, and a slice of the inventory never appeared in the count. That stock was already paid for at the factory, so it sat in the account as a loss that looked like nothing at all.

We understand how that happens, because reconciliation is the least interesting job in the business and it competes with a listing that is down or an ad budget running hot. It is also arithmetic rather than persuasion, so it depends mostly on whether anybody does it.

Where the money actually goes missing

Two different things get called reconciliation, and they carry different rules, evidence and deadlines. Separating them is most of the job.

The first is inbound. You send a shipment, Amazon receives it carton by carton across shifts and sometimes across more than one building, and the units located at the end do not match the units expected. That is a shipment discrepancy, resolved through the shipment itself rather than a case opened from scratch.

The second is everything after the units are safely in the network: inventory lost or damaged inside a fulfillment center, a return refunded and never restocked, a removal order that never arrives. Those are reimbursement claims, and each carries its own window.

Most sellers who tell us they have reconciled have done the first one only, and only where the gap was obvious.

How to tell whether this is you

1. Compare units sent against units received across every closed shipment from the last year. Not just the ones you remember. Small gaps are what nobody investigates, and what adds up.
2. Look for shipments that closed clean but never became sellable. A line can show as located while the units never reached available inventory, and the shipment view will look fine.
3. Read your reimbursement report for credits you cannot explain. Amazon reimburses some losses automatically, so an unexplained credit usually means a loss nobody logged, and rarely the only one.
4. Count removal orders sent against removal orders that arrived complete. This is the category we see skipped most, because those units have left your mind by the time they go missing.

What to check before you open anything

There is a strong urge to fire off cases the moment a gap appears, and it is worth resisting for a day, because a request filed before Amazon finishes receiving is the most common reason a genuine discrepancy comes back denied.

1. Confirm the shipment status is closed. Amazon's guidance is that shipments still processing, not yet delivered, or already reconciled are not eligible for a research request.
2. Read the status on each line rather than the total. The Contents tab marks rows as receiving, action required, or units located with no action needed, and only the middle one waits on you.
3. Find the proof of ownership first. Amazon asks for an invoice, receipt or packing slip showing purchase date, product names and quantities, and a document missing one of the three tends to stall the case.
4. Find the proof of delivery. For small parcel that is carrier tracking. For LTL or FTL it is the bill of lading with the box count and weight recorded at pickup, the strongest document here because somebody other than you wrote it.
5. Check the date against the window, because that decides whether the rest matters.

The windows, which are the whole game

Amazon shortened most of these deadlines on 23 October 2024. Claims that used to sit inside an eighteen month window now expire in weeks, and plenty of sellers are still working to the old assumption.

Sources: Amazon's announcement in the Seller Central forums, primary, 2024, with the same windows published by eComEngine and Carbon6, third party, 2025. Inbound claims were the one category left out of that shortening, and the nine month figure appears in Seller Central's own discussion of it. On Amazon UK, from 9 January 2025, customer returns run 45 to 105 days instead, per SPS Commerce and Carbon6, 2025 and 2026.

Two other changes decide what you get paid. Since 1 November 2024 Amazon proactively reimburses items reported lost inside a fulfillment center, which also means the automatic credit may be the only credit.

And from 31 March 2025, a date Amazon moved back from 10 March, lost and damaged inventory is valued on manufacturing cost rather than selling price, using the figure on the Manage Your Sourcing Cost page in the Inventory Defect and Reimbursement portal. Source: Seller Central, primary, 2024. Where no sourcing cost has been entered, Amazon estimates one, and that estimate is what your claim pays against.

How our team builds a reconciliation case

The route for an inbound gap runs through the shipment. The path is Shipments, then Track shipment, then the Contents tab.

1. Read the units located messages first, because they say whether a line was received, already reconciled or already reimbursed, which saves opening a case for units Amazon has paid for.
2. Compare units expected against units located line by line. The discrepancy column does the arithmetic, and the SKUs worth attention are the ones where the gap is real rather than a prep issue you know about.
3. Answer the action required rows honestly. The dropdown separates units you did not ship from units you did ship and want researched, and the wrong choice turns a short case into a long one.
4. Attach ownership and delivery together. The invoice establishes the units were yours, the tracking or bill of lading establishes they reached the building, and a case with one but not the other goes quiet.
5. Write the context in plain numbers: shipment ID, carton count, box contents, FNSKU, units expected, units located, carrier weight against your carton weights. Nothing rhetorical, because the reader is matching figures.
6. Screenshot the shipment before and after every submission. Almost everyone skips this, and it wins the second round, because when a case reopens weeks later the screen no longer shows what it did on the day.
7. Log case ID, date, SKU and amount claimed in one sheet. Cases get closed with template replies that do not address what was asked, and the answer is going again with the same evidence and the original reference.
8. Follow up on a schedule rather than a feeling. Amazon's guidance describes reconciliation taking 2 to 60 days depending on complexity, so a fortnight of silence is normal and six weeks is not. Source: Amazon's step by step guide, primary, posted by an Amazon moderator.

We cannot promise every claim gets paid, because some genuinely do not. The ones that fail in our experience fail on evidence and timing rather than merit. If this is the work nobody has time for, our Amazon reimbursement service is built around it, and inventory management is what stops the gaps reopening.

Turning this into a weekly habit instead of an annual dig

On that apparel account the more useful outcome was not the recovery. It was the weekly shipment audit set up afterwards, which surfaced the next gap while the window was still open.

1. Audit weekly, not quarterly. Sixty days sounds generous until a shipment closes in week one and nobody looks until week eleven.
2. Record units sent as the boxes go out. Your own number is the baseline, and without it the conversation becomes an argument about what was in the carton.
3. File supplier invoices by shipment, not by month, because proof of ownership only helps if it can be produced in a minute.
4. Enter sourcing costs before you need them, since reimbursement is valued on manufacturing cost and an empty field is a number Amazon picks.
5. Reconcile removal orders too. They carry the tightest window and almost nobody has a process for them.

What we would do first if this were our account

Pull every shipment closed in the last nine months into one sheet and compare units sent against units located. That view usually answers within an hour whether there is money here. Then check the last 60 days for anything lost, damaged or returned and never restocked, because that window closes fastest and waiting is the loss.

If it is a pattern rather than a one off, the fix is a process rather than a batch of cases, which is what made the weekly audit worth more to that apparel seller than the $1,784.36 was.

We cannot tell you in advance what your account is owed, and we would be wary of anyone who does. What we can tell you before you spend anything is whether the gaps exist and which windows are still open. That is part of what the free, no-obligation audit covers, and if your shipments are clean, we will say so.

Related guides

• The 2026 fee changes and the end of FBA prep
• Recovering rank after a stockout
• The ODR, LSR and VTR metrics behind most warnings

Common questions about FBA shipment reconciliation