When you use Amazon FBA (Fulfilment by Amazon) you send your products as a consignment to an Amazon warehouse or fulfilment centre and there Amazon FBA holds and handles the goods at their own and fulfils your orders using its systems.
It’s a nifty system, that comes at a price, but it’s an excellent solution for the right sellers and the right products. Needless to say, as is inevitable in any warehouse, sometimes stock gets damaged or lost. (Or even in a rare case at an Amazon warehouse, stolen.)
That’s not a big problem with Amazon because obviously they will refund you for any of your stock that’s lost or damaged. What you must remember though is that you have to run a report manually and then request a refund. Amazon doesn’t do it automatically and you have 90 days to make a request. it makes sense to bake this into your routine and set a, say, monthly alert to go on to Amazon and run the report.
Here’s how to run the relevant report and make a refund request in Seller Central from RepricerExpress. This handy guide gives you step by step instructions on the online process on how to get a and Amazon FBA refund for lost, damaged or destroyed goods.
Obviously it would be preferable if Amazon made this specific little chore automatic and you simply received an alert each month with the damage report and what you’ve been refunded but that’s not expected any time soon. In the meantime, it’s well worth making a monthly request for a refund. It could be well worth your while.
It would also be interesting to hear from sellers who have made such an application and whether it has been successful. Have you received a tidy sum? Indeed, if you haven’t done it before, do report back and let us know how it went for you.
3 Responses
I just ran through this exercise using refund genie from helium10. It said I was eligible for $4700.
It took over a month to drop feed the requests through (Amazon do not like big reports) but in the end I got back £3750 last week.
They only allow you to claim the last 18 months so maybe an annual exercise
Customer damaged items is started to really wind me up. So much so I am going to blow a gasket with them, tax dodgers making us PAY for their refunds policy so some wee idiot from Italy can destroy our goods and just return them and we have to PAY again to get them back or destroy them. Something very wrong when Amazon get away with this.
I wrote about several ways to get help with getting maximum refunds from Amazon in this recent blog post: https://jordanmalik.com/blog/amazon-seller-fee-refunds-damaged-lost-inventory/