Amazon FBA Reimbursements Now Pay Manufacturing Cost, Not Retail Price: A 2026 Seller's Guide to Recovering Lost and Damaged Inventory

If Amazon loses a unit of your inventory this year, the check you get back will look nothing like the ones from last year. A product you sell for $50 that cost you $12 to source now generates a $12 reimbursement — and if you never told Amazon what that unit cost you, you might get $6 instead. Worse, you now have about 60 days to notice the loss happened at all, down from 18 months.

Two policy changes, both fully in force, rewrote the economics of FBA reimbursements: payouts shifted from selling price to manufacturing cost in March 2025, and the claim window shrank to roughly 60 days back in October 2024. Sellers who updated their cost documentation and built a monthly reconciliation habit are recovering what they are owed. Sellers who did not are leaving thousands of dollars on the table — permanently, because Amazon does not reopen expired claims.

Here is how the current system works, what to file, and how to book it all correctly.

What Changed (and What Didn't)​

Change 1: Pre-order losses now pay manufacturing cost​

Effective March 10, 2025, inventory lost or damaged before a customer places an order — in storage, during inbound receiving, during internal transfers, or during removal — is reimbursed at your manufacturing cost, not the selling price. Sellers report payouts dropping 50 to 75 percent on average, with the pain concentrated in high-margin private-label products where the gap between cost and retail is widest.

Amazon defines manufacturing cost narrowly: your per-unit cost to source the product from a manufacturer, wholesaler, or reseller — or your per-unit production cost if you make it yourself. It explicitly excludes inbound freight, prep and handling, customs duties, and import fees. So a unit with a $10 factory price, $3 in ocean freight, and $1 in duties has a true landed cost of $14 but a reimbursement basis of $10. That $4 gap is unrecoverable through the reimbursement system, full stop.

Change 2: The claim window is now about 60 days​

Effective October 23, 2024, the filing window for most claim types collapsed from 18 months to roughly 60 days. The exact boundary varies by case type — inbound shipment discrepancies generally run from day 15 to day 60 after delivery, customer-return claims from day 60 to day 120 after the refund, removal shipments lost in transit from day 15 to day 75 — but the principle is uniform: if you are not reviewing your reimbursement reports monthly, valid claims are expiring silently.

What did not change​

Inventory lost or damaged after a customer places an order — during picking, packing, or shipment to the buyer — is still reimbursed at the sale price minus applicable Amazon fees. The manufacturing-cost math applies only to pre-order losses.

Set Your Manufacturing Cost Before You Need It​

This is the single highest-leverage action in the entire system. If you do not submit your own per-unit costs, Amazon values your claim using its own estimate built from comparable catalog products and wholesale-channel data — and that estimate is consistently lower than sellers' actual costs. A $12 unit with no submitted cost data might reimburse at $6 to $8. Empty or zeroed cost fields can default to near-zero in some cases.

Where to enter costs​

In Seller Central, go to Reports, then Fulfillment, then Inventory Defect and Reimbursement, and open the Manage Your Manufacturing Cost page. Enter the per-unit manufacturing cost for each active ASIN — manually for a small catalog, or via bulk upload for a large one. Prioritize your highest-volume and highest-cost ASINs first, then work through everything else. Do this now, before claims arise, because the cost on file is what an automated reimbursement will use.

Keep supplier invoices ready​

Amazon may ask for documentation to verify the costs you submit. What counts is a supplier invoice showing the per-unit purchase price from the manufacturer, wholesaler, or reseller, identifying the product by name, model number, or UPC. If your invoice shows a bulk lot price, convert it to a per-unit figure before submitting. File this paperwork within the claim window — without it, Amazon falls back to its internal estimate.

A practical habit: store a current supplier invoice per ASIN in a folder that mirrors your catalog, and refresh it whenever a supplier reprices. When a claim needs documentation, you attach rather than hunt.

The Nine Claim Categories Worth Auditing​

Amazon's policy covers nine distinct reimbursement categories. Most sellers only ever think about the first two, which is exactly why money goes unclaimed in the other seven:

1. Lost inventory in fulfillment centers. Units Amazon cannot locate after a search period. The most common category and the one most affected by the manufacturing-cost change. Many cases reimburse automatically — but not all.
2. Damaged inventory during storage or handling. Damage from warehouse staff, equipment, internal transfers, or pick-and-pack operations before shipment.
3. Fee overcharges. Storage, fulfillment, referral, or other fees that do not match your product's actual size tier and weight. These require comparing charged fees against expected fees — nobody finds them without looking.
4. Refund errors. Amazon refunded the buyer without receiving the return, or refunded more than the purchase price, and you absorbed the difference.
5. Inbound shipment discrepancies. Units you shipped that Amazon never recorded as received. Claims need shipment documentation showing quantity sent versus quantity received.
6. Canceled shipments. Canceled FBA shipments that still produced charges or inventory losses. Rare, but recoverable with documentation.
7. Lost in transit to the buyer. Confirmed losses shipping from the fulfillment center to the customer. Uses the post-order calculation: sale price minus fees.
8. Customer return problems. Returns that were never restocked, went missing after return, or were misclassified as unsellable. Catch these by reconciling return reports against restock confirmations.
9. Multi-Channel Fulfillment order issues. Lost or damaged inventory on non-Amazon orders fulfilled through Amazon's network, subject to marketplace-specific reimbursement caps.

Industry analysis suggests 1 to 3 percent of FBA inventory hits a reimbursable issue each year. On $500,000 of FBA inventory at cost, that is $5,000 to $15,000 in annual exposure — worth a monthly reconciliation routine many times over.

How to File a Claim, Step by Step​

1. Find the discrepancy​

Start with the Inventory Adjustments report (Seller Central, then Reports, then Fulfillment, then Inventory Adjustments) and look for adjustments marked Lost or Damaged. Cross-check against the Reimbursements report to confirm Amazon has not already paid the claim automatically — filing a duplicate wastes your time and Seller Support's.

Also review the Eligible for claim, In progress, and Resolved views inside the Inventory Defect and Reimbursement portal, searching by ASIN, shipment ID, or date range.

2. Gather your documentation​

Match the evidence to the category: shipment IDs with carrier proof-of-delivery counts for inbound discrepancies, supplier invoices with per-unit costs for valuation disputes, return IDs and restock records for customer-return claims. Convert every bulk figure to per-unit before you file.

3. File through the right channel​

For most inventory claims, file through Help, then Contact Us, then FBA, then Reimbursement, or directly in the IDR portal where the category supports it. Write the claim in factual, concise language with identifiers, not impressions: "Shipment ID FBA15XYZABC shows 100 units of ASIN B08XYZ123 delivered January 15, but only 85 units appear in the inventory ledger. Request reimbursement for 15 lost units." Support typically responds within 24 to 48 hours, though complex cases take several exchanges.

4. Track the 60-day clock per claim​

The window runs from the date Amazon reported the loss or damage, not from when you discovered it. A claim you find on day 59 still needs documentation assembled and filed before day 60. This is the operational reason monthly reconciliation beats quarterly: a quarterly reviewer routinely finds claims that expired weeks earlier.

5. Dispute underpayments in writing​

If you disagree with Amazon's valuation of a unit, you can dispute it through Contact Us in Seller Central within 60 days, attaching your supplier invoice as evidence of actual manufacturing cost. Keep every case ID, and keep a log of denied claims with their stated reasons — patterns in denials (wrong category filed, missing invoice line item) are usually fixable on the next filing.

Book It Right: Reimbursements Are Not Revenue​

Here is where sellers quietly corrupt their own books. A reimbursement is not a sale, and recording it as revenue overstates sales while leaving a ghost unit on the balance sheet. The correct treatment has two halves:

• The unit is gone. Its cost comes out of inventory and into cost of goods sold (or a dedicated inventory-shrinkage account), because the balance sheet must stop carrying a unit that no longer exists.
• The recovery is other income. When Amazon's payment lands — usually as a credit netted into your settlement — record it as reimbursement or other income, matched against the loss, not against sales.

Under the old retail-price payouts, sloppy booking at least netted out near zero against the inflated revenue. Under manufacturing-cost payouts, the reimbursement will often be less than the unit's fully loaded cost once freight and duties are considered, leaving a real residual loss that belongs on your P&L. If you book reimbursements as revenue with no inventory adjustment, you simultaneously inflate sales, inflate the inventory asset, and hide the true shrinkage rate — the exact combination that surfaces awkwardly during due diligence if you ever sell the business.

A clean monthly routine: reconcile the settlement report to your books line by line, post reimbursements to other income with the case ID in the memo, write the lost units out of inventory in the same period, and review the shrinkage account quarterly. If shrinkage is climbing as a share of COGS, that trend — not any single claim — is the signal to renegotiate prep, change packaging, or split inbound across fulfillment centers.

For sellers keeping their own ledger rather than trusting a black-box dashboard, this is exactly the kind of multi-legged entry that plain-text accounting handles well: the inventory write-down, the claim receivable, and the settlement credit each get their own dated, reviewable transaction. The Beancount documentation walks through inventory and receivables patterns you can adapt to an FBA workflow, and the dashboard views make the shrinkage trend visible at a glance.

A Monthly FBA Reimbursement Checklist​

• Pull the Inventory Adjustments report; flag every Lost or Damaged line without a matching automatic reimbursement.
• Check the IDR portal's Eligible for claim view for anything the reports missed.
• Verify per-unit manufacturing costs are on file for every ASIN with open exposure.
• File manual claims with shipment IDs, supplier invoices, and per-unit math attached.
• Dispute any underpaid valuations inside the 60-day dispute window.
• Post reimbursements to other income and write lost units out of inventory.
• Log denied claims with reasons and fix the filing pattern that caused them.

Amazon's automated system catches a meaningful share of cases — but industry experience puts the miss rate high enough that manual review still pays for itself several times over. Under manufacturing-cost payouts, every unfiled claim is money you spent sourcing a product, paid to ship to a warehouse, and will never see again unless you ask for it inside 60 days.

Keep Your E-Commerce Books Audit-Ready​

Recovering FBA reimbursements is only half the job; the other half is recording each loss and recovery so your margins, inventory, and tax return all tell the same story. Beancount.io provides plain-text accounting that gives you complete transparency and control over your financial data — no black boxes, no vendor lock-in. Get started for free and see why developers and finance professionals are switching to plain-text accounting.