Every FBA seller we onboard is owed money by Amazon. Not because Amazon is careless — at a trillion-dollar logistics scale, a 0.1% error rate is thousands of lost units a day — but because almost nobody audits for it. Here's the checklist we run on every new account, and what it typically finds.
The five claims most sellers never file
- Inventory lost in the fulfillment center. Units that scan in but never scan out. Amazon's own reports will show them; nobody claims them for you.
- Damaged in fulfillment. Units destroyed by handling — often sitting in "unfulfillable" inventory with no reimbursement until you ask.
- Wrongly disposed of. Units marked "unsellable" and disposed despite being returnable to you or eligible for reimbursement.
- Customer refund never returned. Buyer refunded, item never made it back to sellable — the gap between "refunded" and "received back" is money.
- Fee overcharges. Wrong dimensional weight, misclassified size tiers, incorrect fulfillment fees. Small errors, recurring monthly, forever.
The one-hour audit you should run quarterly
- Reconcile shipment reconciliation reports against what actually became sellable. Discrepancies are claim #1.
- Review removed and disposed inventory reports. Question every disposal of a unit you'd have wanted back.
- Match reimbursement reports against lost/damaged events — Amazon sometimes reimburses automatically, but at used-value, not your true loss.
- Spot-check FBA fees on your top 20 SKUs against their size tier and actual dimensions.
- Check customer returns for units refunded but never received back.
What a typical audit finds
On accounts doing $50K+/month, a first-pass audit regularly surfaces four to five figures in eligible claims — often covering months of management fees by itself. On smaller accounts the absolute numbers shrink, but so does the effort: the same reports, an hour of your time.
The honest caveat: filing is the easy part. Documentation quality determines whether you get paid — case IDs, proof of ownership, invoices, and unit-level evidence. That's exactly what we manage for clients under Cases & Reimbursements, audited monthly so nothing ages past its window.