You refunded the buyer and the item never came back: when Amazon pays you for it

When a buyer gets a refund on an FBA order, the item should come back to Amazon's warehouse. If it does not, Amazon pays you for the item, but not always. You see this in the Reimbursements report with the reason CustomerReturn. The questions are when that money comes, how much it is, and what happens if it does not come.

We looked at 67 FBA orders on 8 seller accounts where the buyer got a refund between 16 January and 10 September 2026. 41 items came back to the warehouse. 15 did not come back, and for those Amazon paid 32-41 days after the refund. For 11 orders, after 70-139 days there was neither a return nor a payment.

This article is about the item that does not come back. What the refund itself costs you is in our article on customer refunds.

The data

For every order we checked three things by order ID: the customer refund in the settlement, the item arriving back in the Returns report, and a payment with the reason CustomerReturn in the Reimbursements report. We only counted refunds that came after the seller's first recorded return, because before that our returns data is incomplete.

The Dental Rituals US orders were on the US marketplace, one Going Forward order on the Irish one, and all the others on the German one.

If it does not come back: about five weeks

For the 15 items that did not come back, the payment came 32 to 41 days after the refund, with a median of 35 days. None of these payments had a case ID: Amazon paid on its own. In 14 cases it paid in cash, in one case it credited a unit back to the inventory.

The money is not the full price. For the 14 cash payments, buyers got 509.92 euros back in total, and Amazon paid the sellers 375.02 euros, which is 73.5%. Per order it ranged from 56% to 90%.

One trap: the payment does not always come on the same SKU as the order. At Bohema Games two payments came on a SKU called FBA15JRBZF95.missing1, while the order and the refund were on the regular SKU. If you match by SKU, you will not find these two payments. Match by order ID.

If it comes back: only carrier damage is paid

Of the 41 items that came back, the warehouse marked 4 as damaged in transit (CARRIER_DAMAGED), and Amazon paid for all 4. It did not pay for the others: 23 came back damaged by the customer (CUSTOMER_DAMAGED), 5 defective (DEFECTIVE), and 9 were sellable (SELLABLE) and went back into stock.

Across all our returns the picture is the same: 5 of the 5 returns damaged by the carrier were paid, none of the other 91. An item damaged by the customer or a defective one is your loss. What the warehouse finds is in our article on return reasons and dispositions.

Where nothing happened

For 11 orders the buyer got the money back, the item did not come back, and no payment came either. 9 at Going Forward, 1 at Bohema Games, 1 at the Dental Rituals US account. That is 142.85 euros and 29.99 dollars that buyers got back. Our latest reimbursement data is from 27 October 2026. By then these refunds were 70-139 days old, well past the 41 days within which the other payments arrived.

We checked in two sources that they really did not come back: the Returns report and the Inventory Ledger. For 10 orders the Inventory Ledger had no customer return between 10 days before and 60 days after the refund that did not belong to another, known return. For the Dental Rituals US order the Inventory Ledger had no rows at all for that product, so there we could only check the Returns report. We also checked whether the two sources agree: of the 97 returned lines in the Returns report, 90 were also in the Inventory Ledger. (The 97 lines are 96 orders: in one order two different products came back.)

It is odd that in the same period Amazon paid Going Forward for 4 items that did not come back, and not for 9. Our data does not show why. These are worth asking about.

What to do

1. Match your refunds by order ID every month. For every customer refund, look for a return in the Returns report or a CustomerReturn payment in the Reimbursements report.
2. If after 45 days there is neither, open a case. In our data every payment Amazon made on its own came within 41 days. Give the order ID and the refund date in the case.
3. Do not count on the full price. In our data the cash payments added up to 73.5% of the refunded amount.
4. Check what the warehouse found. A return damaged by the carrier is paid, one damaged by the customer or a defective one is not.
5. Where to find it: Seller Central, Reports menu, Fulfillment. The Returns report is in the Customer Concessions group, the Reimbursements report in the Payments group.

Why the numbers are not exact

• We looked at 67 orders on 8 seller accounts, most of them on the German marketplace. On other marketplaces and with other products the numbers may differ.
• Our returns data is complete from a different day for each seller, so we only counted refunds after the seller's first recorded return.
• We only looked at FBA orders. In two orders the buyer got back only part of the order value; we counted these too.
• We do not see it if Amazon took the money back from the buyer because the item did not come back. If that happened, it may be in the "Nothing" column.
• We compared the Returns report and the Inventory Ledger by FNSKU, because the SKU can differ between the two. At Bohema Games it did.

Of 67 refunded FBA orders, 15 items did not come back, and for these Amazon paid on its own after 32-41 days: 14 in cash, 73.5% of the refunded amount in total, and one with a unit credited to the inventory. For 11 orders, though, neither the item nor the money came after 70-139 days. You only find these if you match by order ID.