Closed is not complete: compare shipped and received on every FBA shipment
When an FBA shipment reaches the status Closed, it is easy to read that as "done, everything arrived". It only means Amazon has finished receiving it. How many units it actually counted, and under which product, is a separate question, and you have to look at it yourself.
We looked at closed shipments on real seller accounts. More than half did not match what the seller had sent. And the shipment total hid part of the problem.
The numbers below come from the inbound shipment data of 10 seller accounts: 58 shipments with the status Closed, 50 to Germany, 7 to the US and 1 to the UK. The oldest is from early 2024, the newest from September 2026, and the state is as of October 16, 2026. Each shipment lists, for every product, the units shipped (what the seller declared in the shipment) and the units received (what Amazon counted). In total 16,704 units were shipped and 14,483 received, in 258 product lines.
How often the counts differ
Of the 58 closed shipments:
- 26 matched exactly.
- 7 were short by 1 to 3 units.
- 18 were short by more than 3 units. In 7 of them more than half of the units were missing.
- 7 had more units received than shipped.
So 32 of 58 shipments ended with a different count than the seller sent. Small differences of one or two units are common, and many sellers let them go. The larger ones are worth a look one by one.
The total can match while the products do not
At the product level the picture changes. Of the 258 product lines, 58 were received short and 32 with extra units. In 19 shipments the same shipment had both: one product short, another with extra units.
An example: one shipment of 850 units with 13 products. The total was off by a single unit, 851 received against 850 shipped. Product by product:
- one product: 50 shipped, 3 received
- another: 100 shipped, 33 received
- a third: 50 shipped, 99 received
- a fourth: 100 shipped, 169 received
Across the 13 products, 118 units were missing and 119 were extra. If you only look at the shipment total, this shipment looks almost perfect, off by one unit. Most likely more than a hundred units were booked under a different product than the one they belong to. For the products that came in short, Amazon shows lower stock than you expect, and they can run out earlier than planned while the other product has too much.
In the 19 mixed shipments, 2,015 units were short on some products and 662 extra on others. Not every extra unit is a swap, but where a short product and an extra product look alike (two sizes, two colors), a wrong label or a mixed box is the first thing to check.
What we could not see
The shipped number is what the seller entered, not proof of what left the warehouse. So a large shortfall can mean units lost on the way, but also boxes that were never sent. All 7 shipments with more than half missing were created between January 2024 and June 2025, and the data does not tell which of the two happened. We did not see carrier records, so we cannot say how many of the short units a seller could prove. We also did not check whether a reimbursement was paid for these shipments: that is in a different report (see below). The swap explanation fits the pattern, but we only had product codes, not product names, so we did not confirm that the swapped products looked alike.
Check your shipments in 15 minutes
- In Seller Central, open your shipments and filter for Closed shipments from the last few months.
- For each one, compare units shipped and units received product by product, not only the total.
- Mark the shipments where one product is short and another has extra units. Check whether the two products look alike, and how they were labeled and packed. If the units were received under the wrong product, your stock per product is wrong even if the total is right.
- For real shortfalls, check your own records first: how many boxes were sent, and is there a delivery confirmation from the carrier?
- If units are missing and you can prove you sent them, request a reconciliation for the shipment in Seller Central. Amazon sets a deadline for this, so check the current one in the Seller Central help before you wait.
- Afterwards, look in the Reimbursements report for a Lost_Inbound row for that shipment. If there is none, the case is still open.
A closed shipment is the moment to check, not the end of the story. A few minutes per shipment is cheap compared to stock you paid for and never get to sell.