Whether you’ve just sent your first shipment to Amazon, or you’ve been sending shipments for years, you’ll eventually have a shipment where some of the units have gone missing. You can tell because the Shipped and Received unit numbers won’t match:
Amazon isn’t perfect, so even if you haven’t experienced this yet, eventually you’ll have a shipment where Amazon receives fewer units than you sent them.
When that happens, you can ask Amazon to research the missing units, which (usually) results in being reimbursed for the lost units. To get reimbursed, you need 2 things:
- Proof you purchased the quantity you sent them, in the form of an invoice from your distributor or whomever you bought the product from
- Upload a screenshot of this invoice through the “Reconcile” tab of the shipment that is missing the units.
Below is a step by step walk through to initiate the research/reimbursement process. If you do this correctly, Amazon will reimburse you for your lost inventory.
- Navigate to the “Manage FBA Shipments” page from the Inventory menu in your Seller Central account.
- From the list of shipments in the “Shipping Queue” page, find the shipment with the missing units, and click on the name of the shipment to open it. Tip: if you click on the “Status” drop-down menu and choose “Closed”, only closed shipments will be shown, which is helpful if you have a lot of shipments to look through.
- Next, click on the “Reconcile” menu.
- You are now on the “View discrepancies and request research” page for this shipment. Click on the drop-down menu on the far right, and choose “Missing – Please Research”.
- The next step is to upload proof that you purchased the number of units you sent to Amazon. You need to send a screenshot of the invoice that shows the product in question. Amazon guidelines state you should remove pricing information from the invoice you send. See my example invoice below for how my invoices look when I upload them.
- Now that you have an invoice ready to send, you need to browse to the file location, select the screenshot you took, and upload the screenshot.
Hint: You know you’ve completed this step correctly if it shows the name of an uploaded attachment like the example here “invoice proof.png”:
- Next, you provide any additional information, if necessary. I usually leave this box blank.
- Then click on the “Preview your request” button…
…and finally click on the “Submit your request” button to submit to Amazon.
A few minutes after submitting your request, you’ll get an automated email from Amazon support, explaining they are currently investigating your shipment.
After 1 to 3 days, you’ll get another email from Amazon, saying they weren’t able to find the missing units, and are initiating a reimbursement for the lost units.
I’ve personally submitted hundreds of these investigation/reimbursement requests, and I’ve gotten reimbursed every time they couldn’t find the missing units.
One important point to emphasize is as your Amazon business grows, and you send more and more shipments, you should regularly review your shipping queue for missing units to avoid losing money on lost inventory. Amazon will not notify you of missing units from a shipment, so you have to proactively review your shipments yourself to make sure you don’t miss out on any reimbursements owed to you.
Interested to learn about the origin of my Amazon FBA business? Read about it here.
Wondering if you have the necessary tools to start selling yourself? Check out this page.