Amazon Lost My FBA Inventory and Never Reimbursed Me

If Amazon lost my FBA inventory and never reimbursed me is the search you just made, the problem is usually not your claim. It is the clock, and it started running on a date you never saw.

Since November 1, 2024 Amazon reimburses most units lost inside a fulfillment center on its own, with no case from you. The announcement of reimbursement automation is explicit about the limit of that promise: "Almost all reimbursement claims related to warehouse lost and damaged and customer returns cases will now be proactively reimbursed. However, if you do not receive an automatic reimbursement and you believe that your inventory has been lost or damaged, you will need to file a manual claim. Additionally, all removal claims will still need to be filed manually."

So there are two buckets. The one Amazon handles, and the one nobody handles unless you do.

Why the reimbursement never arrived

Three causes cover almost every case.

The automation skipped the event. Amazon says almost all warehouse losses are proactive. Almost is not all. When the automatic credit does not appear in the Reimbursements report, nothing else happens by itself.

The 60 day window closed while you were not looking. The same announcement sets the eligibility windows in force since October 23, 2024: "A fulfillment center operations claim for an item that is lost or damaged in the fulfillment center must be submitted no later than 60 days after the item was reported lost or damaged." Read that again. The count starts when the warehouse reported the loss, not when you noticed it in a reconciliation you run every quarter.

It was a removal, not a warehouse loss. Removal claims are never automatic. The same policy update gives them their own deadlines: transit removals 15 to 75 days from the shipment creation date, and "all other removal claims must be filed within 60 days of the shipment being delivered back to you."

The fix, step by step

1. Open the right report. Reports, then Fulfillment, then the Inventory Ledger report. Amazon replaced six older reports with it on January 31, 2023, including Inventory Adjustments and Inventory Reconciliation, so any process still pointing at those is pointing at nothing. Switch from Summary view to Detailed view: Summary refreshes daily, weekly or monthly, Detailed view updates in near real time. That is where a lost event carries its date.

2. Pull the Reimbursements report next to it. Every automatic credit lands there. Line up lost and damaged events from the ledger against credits in the Reimbursements report and you get the only list that matters: losses Amazon recorded and never paid.

3. Count the days from Amazon's date, not yours. Take the date of the lost event in the ledger. Add 60. That is your deadline for a fulfillment center operations claim. If the date has passed, the FBA inventory reimbursement policy no longer gives you a window, and no amount of documentation reopens one.

4. File the claim with the event, not with the story. Open the case from Help and Get Support, route it to the FBA issue for inventory lost in warehouse, and attach the ledger lines with the FNSKU, the quantity and the event date. Sellers on the forums report that cases get denied for "unexpected FNSKU or mismatch FNSKU" when the claim names a shipment instead of the loss event, so quote the ledger row.

5. Check what you were paid, not just that you were paid. A credit can arrive and still be short. Amazon values a lost unit at a cost it estimates unless you have corrected it, which is a separate fight with its own window: see how to submit your own sourcing cost to Amazon.

Which lost units never came back?

See my losses

What sellers report, and what Amazon confirms

This is worth separating carefully. Amazon's own text says automation was added. Sellers on the forums read the same change as a burden that moved onto them, because the clock now runs from a date the warehouse sets. One thread puts it plainly: "You will have to file the claim yourself within 60 days if you notice. In case if you didn't notice the lost/damage event, you will not be eligible for any reimbursement after 60 days."

Both things are true at once. The automation is real and it is Amazon's stated policy. The residue it leaves is real too, and it is on a 60 day fuse.

What is not confirmed anywhere official is the share of losses the automation misses. Third parties publish numbers on that. Treat them as marketing until Amazon publishes its own.

How to stop it from happening again

Make the ledger a monthly job, not a quarterly one. A 60 day window survives a monthly check. It does not survive a quarterly one.

Watch removals separately. They are never automatic, and their deadline runs from delivery back to you, so a box that arrives short in November is dead by January.

Do it before Q4, not during. Standard-size storage goes from $0.78 per cubic foot to $2.40 per cubic foot from October to December, which is exactly when sellers remove stock in volume. More removals means more removal claims, all of them manual, all of them on a 60 day clock. Our guide to Q4 FBA storage cost covers the fee side of that decision.

Know the neighbouring windows. Customer returns run on 60 to 120 days after the refund date, not on 60. Inbound shipments have their own closure rules, covered in what happens when an FBA shipment closes with missing units. And a credit that appears and then vanishes is a different mechanism, explained in why Amazon reverses an FBA credit.

The uncomfortable version of all this: the money is not lost when the unit is lost. It is lost 60 days later, quietly, in a report nobody opened.

“You will have to file the claim yourself within 60 days if you notice. In case if you didn't notice the lost/damage event, you will not be eligible for any reimbursement after 60 days.”

— Seller on Amazon Seller Forums ↗

#reimbursements#FBA#Seller Central#inventory

👋Hey! I'm Amara

Press at SellerKey.co

☕ Espresso. Never a latte macchiato.

I cover Amazon fee and policy changes: what changed, when it applies and where Amazon published it.

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