If you’re an Amazon Seller, you may have heard about FBA Reimbursement. How do you get your money back? In this blog post, we’ll explain everything you need to know about this service including how to file a claim and what to expect. Then, stay tuned for more tips and advice from Eva’s Amazon reimbursement team!
Table of Contents
Why FBA Reimbursement Is So Important?
Amazon processes hundreds of thousands of orders in a single day through its fulfillment centers. Unfortunately, mistakes are inevitable despite the best efforts when hundreds of machines and Amazon employees are added to the equation.
However, most sellers do not realize that they can recover revenue through FBA reimbursements. Moreover, many sellers are surprised to find out how much money they miss out on these reimbursements.
The thing is, Amazon does not automatically compensate for its mistakes. Amazon sellers have to keep up with the reimbursement process and apply for them manually. If you are not frequently monitoring your Seller Central Account, you throw away money.
The 7 Ways to Claim Amazon FBA Reimbursement
“What is FBA Reimbursement?” you might ask; A reimbursement claim is the amount of money that Amazon owes you due to inventory issues and errors. To help you better understand when you can receive a refund from Amazon, we have listed seven different reimbursement claims.
Inbound Shipment Issues: If you sell products by using the FBA program, Amazon manages the logistics mostly on your behalf. The first step of this process is to ship the inventory from your destination to one of Amazon’s fulfillment centers. Naturally, you expect it to be received and processed without any problems, but this is not always the case.
The first errors may occur during the inbound shipment stage, even before your products are available for sale. The issues may be:
Missing Items – For whatever reason, Amazon FBA employees could not scan all the units. Meaning if you sent 40 items, you might see only 35 of them checked in.
Damaged or Lost Items – The inbound courier might damage by accident, lose or misplace your items during the shipment.
Since the Amazon team is responsible for your inventory, you are entitled to reimbursement for any units that you send under Amazon’s FBA reimbursement policy. But the refund amount is the average sales price of the item, not the current listing price.
1- Lost and Missing Inventory
Amazon warehouses are huge complexes that process massive volumes of orders and items. Although automation reduces the possibility of errors, Amazon may still lose some of its inventory after receiving it without problems. Most likely, the employees accidentally placed your products in another seller’s inventory or moved them.
If you want to get a more detailed answer on how Amazon lost it, you can take a look at the inventory report on Seller Central. Whatever the reason, the lost items are an inconvenience for your Amazon business. Without an inventory, you can’t sell or restock when the items are at the warehouse but just misplaced.
Because of the massive scale of Amazon’s operations, it’s typical for almost every seller to have a few lost units each month. In these types of situations, you can claim an FBA reimbursement case accordingly. The same applies if your product has been missing in fulfillment centers for the past 30 days.
2- Damaged Inventory During Shipment
Accidents may happen when the Amazon FBA team fulfills your orders quickly and efficiently. The shipping process involves many steps, from picking and packing the item to the delivery before it reaches the buyer. Between any steps of the process, one of the employees may damage the product by accident.
Although Amazon is quite good at catching faulty products before they reach the customer, in a hurry, some of them manage to slip through or get lost or damaged after leaving the warehouse. That’s why you may sometimes receive a customer complaint about a damaged product.
The courier might damage the product that the customer returned to the warehouse in other instances. Whatever the reason is for the damage, you can request a claim for FBA reimbursement.
3- Amazon Destroys Item Without Permission
Occasionally, there are situations when Amazon destroys certain items in the inventory without the seller’s knowledge or consent. However, intelligent service such as Eva’s Amazon Reimbursement alerts the seller when Amazon destroys inventory without permission.
Typically, items are destroyed when the customer returns a damaged item, and Amazon deems it unfit for sale. Amazon should usually refund the value, but sometimes sellers never receive the reimbursement. Therefore, you need to monitor that Amazon carefully processes all the FBA reimbursements.
4- Customer Return Issues
If you are already an Amazon seller, you can probably guess the most common reason for refunds. Out of all the FBA reimbursement claims, the most common one is customers returning their orders. Amazon is very eager to immediately refund the customer, which undeniably has positive effects on customer satisfaction. However, occasionally the customer might get a refund or replacement even without returning the item.
Undoubtedly, these situations are very unfortunate from the seller’s perspective. However, as Amazon handles FBA customer returns and refunds for FBA sellers, here are some of the reasons to make a reimbursement claim:
- Customer is refunded the wrong amount – The customer can be paid the incorrect price for the item they purchased. Sometimes even double the indented amount.
- The customer received a refund but did not return the original item. Customers have the right to return the product if they are dissatisfied or if the item is damaged. However, sometimes Amazon refunds them the full amount when they do not return the product.
- The customer receives a replacement item but does not return the original item – The customer receives a replacement product but does not return the original item.
- The returned product is unsellable – If the product comes back, but in an unsellable condition.
- Returned product not added to your inventory – When the customer returns the item, but for some reason, Amazon did not add it back to your inventory.
- Uncredited restocking fee – Amazon charges the customer a 20% restocking fee for certain products. They first deduct the fee from your account and refund you after restocking the item. However, sometimes Amazon forgets to refund that fee back to you.
5-Wrong Order Quantity
Sometimes customers notice that they have received the item three times instead of the ordered two. They consider themselves lucky, but the sellers suffer from sending one extra unit without receiving payment for it.
When this happens, Amazon does not discover the error on its own. Therefore, it significantly harms your Amazon business if you don’t detect discrepancies in your inventory and order details. In such cases, you should keep monitoring your inventory and check them against the orders to file a claim for FBA reimbursement as soon as you notice the discrepancy.
6-Amazon FBA Fee Errors
Selling on Amazon is not free, and especially the perks of using the FBA program come with a cost. The fees you have to pay to depend on multiple factors. For instance, the fees are based on different item categories, the time your inventory is stored in the Amazon warehouse, or the shipment size and weight.
Sometimes Amazon calculates the fees wrong and overcharges the required amount. For example, due to Amazon weighing or mismeasuring your item, the product’s shipping fees can be for cargo twice as heavy. Often sellers can not keep up with all the fee changes, but Eva’s Sales Analytics reveals the hidden FBA fees and presents them clearly.
Because FBA fees can remain incorrect for weeks or even months, you might add up to a significant sum of money from approving your cases of Amazon reimbursement.
See Also: 10 Amazon FBA Errors You Can Get Reimbursement For
How to Claim FBA Reimbursement?
Amazon automatically initiates the case and refunds your money in some reimbursement cases. However, you have to pay attention that Amazon reimburses you when required most of the time. In other words, you need to check and monitor your seller account and file a claim to process your FBA reimbursement.
Now, there are a few ways to reduce the amount of manual work. If you are not up for doing the work yourself, outsourcing is one option. You can rely on FBA reimbursement services that help you add new cases and track the progress from start to finish.
Let’s go through the options.
Outsourcing FBA Reimbursement
It’s a very smart and efficient decision to outsource the work to someone else. Moreover, it is up to you how much of the manual work you want to trust the service. They can handle tasks from downloading reimbursement reports to making claims in Seller Central. A good Amazon reimbursement service saves you a great deal of time, money, and effort.
Eva offers the best service for FBA reimbursement in the market, handled by an in-house dedicated team of best-around experts to constantly analyze your inventory to discover new potential cases, submit them and keep following up on them until you get refunded by Amazon.
Do It Yourself
If you don’t have a large budget or your store is small, the cheapest method is to claim reimbursement yourself. Unfortunately, essential tools such as Excel and Google Sheets are barely enough to handle all the processes of Amazon reimbursement. Moreover, it is often so time-consuming and requires a lot of effort if you don’t have much experience in data management.
But do you spend endless hours on your reports gathering data for the FBA refunding claims? No? In that case, we might have just the method for you.
The Best Way to Claim FBA Reimbursement
Constantly keeping track of broken or lost goods can be a bit tedious. Suppose you feel like using your valuable time for something more productive. In that case, an Amazon reimbursement tool combined with years of store management experience is for you.
Amazon FBA reimbursement service such as Eva offers you an effortless hands-off solution to get your money back. It automatically finds, collects, and combines all lost or missing products based on reimbursement policies. After that, the Amazon experts manage the reimbursement claim process to get approval and refund your money. As for all efforts and reimbursement processes displayed transparently, you can enjoy a fast process by claiming all your FBA reimbursements in bulk as a seller.
Conclusion
Amazon handles and ships hundreds of thousands of packages each day. Despite the number of employees and machines working to fulfill customer orders, sometimes Amazon can’t prevent accidents. No matter how careful they are, unexpected events may lead to your item being lost, stolen, or damaged. In these situations, Amazon owes you money.
Claiming FBA reimbursement is crucial to recover lost revenue and get more funds back to your Amazon business. Even though Amazon FBA will automatically refund you for some issues, their system is not perfectly accurate. There is a chance you might be losing thousands of dollars without even knowing. That’s why you need an FBA reimbursement service to track the inventory for you.
Eva’s reimbursement service is run by a dedicated in-house team to constantly monitor your Amazon store, discover the potential cases, submit them and keep following up on them until getting them approved!
