Amazon lost or damaged your stock. Did it pay you for it? Read the Reimbursements report

Units go missing in FBA. A box arrives with fewer items than you sent, a unit is damaged in the warehouse, a customer is refunded and the product never comes back. Amazon pays for many of these cases, but not always, not always in cash, and not always for good.

You can see all of it in one report. Every claim below points at a column in the Reimbursements report, which you can download from your own account.

Where the report is

Seller Central, Reports, Fulfillment, then in the Payments group the Reimbursements report. Each reimbursement is one row.

These columns matter:

• approval-date. When Amazon approved the reimbursement.
• reimbursement-id. The identifier of this row.
• case-id. The support case the reimbursement belongs to, if there was one.
• amazon-order-id. The order it belongs to, if it is tied to an order.
• reason. Why Amazon paid. More on this below.
• sku, fnsku, asin, product-name. Which product.
• amount-per-unit, amount-total, currency-unit. How much, per unit and in total.
• quantity-reimbursed-cash, quantity-reimbursed-inventory, quantity-reimbursed-total. How many units were paid in money and how many were replaced with a unit in your stock.
• original-reimbursement-id, original-reimbursement-type. On a reversal, which earlier reimbursement it cancels, and what kind that one was.

The reason column tells you who had to act

The values you will see most often:

• Lost_Warehouse and Damaged_Warehouse. The unit was lost or damaged inside the fulfilment centre.
• Lost_Inbound. The unit went missing on the way in: the shipment arrived with fewer units than you sent.
• CustomerReturn. Tied to an order: the customer was refunded, and the return did not end the way it should have.
• Lost_Outbound and CustomerServiceIssue. Rarer cases, tied to a delivery or a customer service decision.
• Reimbursement_Reversal. Not a payment. Amazon takes an earlier one back.

Look at the case-id column next to the reason. In the data we have seen, the warehouse rows arrive without a case: Amazon pays those on its own. The Lost_Inbound rows, on the other hand, all carry a case-id. The money for a short inbound shipment came after someone opened a case. If you have shipments that arrived short and no Lost_Inbound row for them, that is the first place to look.

Cash or a unit back

Two columns decide what you actually got. quantity-reimbursed-cash is the number of units Amazon paid for in money. quantity-reimbursed-inventory is the number of units it replaced in your stock instead. A row with a large quantity and a small amount-total is not necessarily a bad reimbursement. Check which of the two columns the units are in.

For cash rows, compare amount-per-unit with what the product costs you. That is your own number, not Amazon's, and it tells you whether a lost unit is a small annoyance or a real loss.

The reversal row

This is the one that surprises people. A Reimbursement_Reversal row has a negative amount. It cancels an earlier reimbursement, and original-reimbursement-id tells you which one.

The most common pattern: Amazon paid you for a lost unit, then found it. The reversal takes the money back (quantity-reimbursed-cash is negative) and puts the unit back in your stock (quantity-reimbursed-inventory is positive). The total quantity comes out at zero. You did not lose anything. The unit is simply sellable again.

The other pattern has no unit coming back: the cash is taken back and quantity-reimbursed-inventory stays at zero. That one deserves a closer look, because then both the money and the unit are gone. Find the original row by its id, check what kind it was in original-reimbursement-type, and if you cannot see why it was reversed, ask Seller Support.

Two traps

Adding up amount-total overstates what you got. Reversal rows are negative. If you sum only the positive rows, you count money that was later taken back. Sum all rows together, or subtract the reversals separately.

One row is not one event. A lost unit can show up as a payment first and a reversal weeks later. Group the rows by original-reimbursement-id before you decide whether a unit was paid for.

Ten minutes a month

Download the Reimbursements report for the last month. Three checks: does every shipment that arrived short have a Lost_Inbound row, is there any reversal without a unit coming back, and does amount-per-unit cover what the product costs you?

The point is not to trust that Amazon pays. The point is to see, line by line, what it paid, what it took back, and where it did nothing because nobody asked.