Amazon have announced that, from the 15th of January 2025, there will be some FBA reimbursement changes which will impact your business. The main changes are:
- Amazon will proactively reimburse you for Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) items that are lost in fulfillment centers
- Amazon will issue the reimbursement as soon as an item is reported as lost by the fulfillment center
- You can track in the Reimbursements report on Seller Central
- For manually submitted claims the eligibility window will be reduced to 60 days
The first of the reimbursement changes – automatically refunding sellers for lost items – is great news. There’s really no reason that you should be spending your time chasing funds for items that have been lost. And it’s worth remembering that items are refunded at your sale price – so a lost item is effectively a free sale – you get the margin with no returns or customer service issues to worry about.
However, we hear that when these reimbursement changes were rolled out in the US that not all claims were picked up in the early days of implementation. Amazon are rapidly getting better at reimbursing, but don’t entirely rely on everything being reported and reimbursed. Lou Casados from Getida reports that at the start of the beta trials in the US Amazon were returning around 20% of lost items although he expects this to rapidly improve.
Here what Lou had to say in an earlier video interview when the reimbursement changes were implemented in the US:
The other change is that the claims window is being reduced from 18 months down to 60 days and that means you need to be on top of your reports and claiming regularly for anything Amazon misses. And it’s worth remembering that there are a ton of claim types other than for lost items – you’ll want to make sure that you are on top of these as well.
