Auditing FBA Reimbursements: What Amazon Owes You

Grounded by Amazon Agent Atlas, the fba-reimbursement-audit Skill is what actually answers "how much in FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) loss and damage reimbursements has Amazon already paid us, and how much are we missing," because Amazon's own Inventory Defect and Reimbursement portal can't: it lists individual defect events across its Eligible, In Progress, and Resolved tabs, but it never classifies an event into a claim type, checks it against that type's own window, or applies the correct valuation rule. I went looking for this number after our reconciliation spreadsheet fell three months behind the portal. Once I asked our agent to pull every eligible event through Selling Partner MCP, classify it, and check it against Amazon's actual policy, the picture changed: real money sitting unclaimed, and real deadlines closing on it.

Before building anything, I asked ChatGPT and Claude the same question. Both hit the same three walls: no access to your data (they've never seen our Inventory Defect and Reimbursement portal or Ledger report), no way to take action (they can't file a claim or submit a sourcing cost), and generic knowledge, not Amazon's specific rules (they default to textbook reimbursement logic, not FBA policy). The answer stayed a guess. MCP supplies the data and the tools to act, Atlas supplies the cited rule book, the Skill runs the workflow safely.

A loss or damage event isn't one claim, it's three claim types with three different windows

Every lost or damaged unit Amazon owes us for falls into one of three claim types, and each type carries its own deadline, not a shared one. Shipment to Amazon claims (units lost or damaged in transit to a fulfillment center or third-party facility) have to be filed no later than nine months after the verified delivery date. Fulfillment Center Operations claims (units lost or damaged inside Amazon's own operations) have to be filed no later than sixty days after the item was reported lost or damaged in the Inventory Defect and Reimbursement portal or the Inventory Ledger report. Customer Return claims are the one most sellers get wrong: file no sooner than sixty days and no later than 120 days after the refund or replacement, a window with a floor as well as a ceiling.

Classifying comes first. The Skill sorts every raw defect and return event by type, then computes each one's window status, open, closing soon, or expired, as a flagged field in the audit report. That's the step the portal skips: it'll show an event happened, but it won't say which of the three clocks is running on it, let alone how many days are left.

{
  "event_id": "EVT-00113",
  "classified_claim_type": "fulfillment_center_operations",
  "reported_date": "2026-06-12",
  "window": { "end": "2026-08-11", "status": "closing_soon", "days_remaining": 4 }
}

Eligibility isn't a spectrum, it's seven gates that all have to hold

Amazon doesn't reimburse partial eligibility. A unit has to be FBA-registered at the time of loss, compliant with FBA restrictions, shipped in the exact quantities on the shipping plan, part of a shipment that wasn't canceled or deleted, not pending or actioned for disposal, not customer-damaged or defective, and tied to an account that stays in normal status all the way through the claim and any appeal. Seven gates, and every single one has to be true. Fail one and the claim is void, no matter what the item was worth.

The Skill checks all seven gates automatically before an event counts toward the "recoverable" total, splitting the result into eligible-and-unclaimed versus ineligible, and naming the specific gate that failed on each ineligible event instead of just marking it "no." That distinction matters when we're deciding whether to spend appeal time on a claim that was never going to qualify.

Valuation depends on when the loss happened, not what the item is worth

Pre-order events pay differently than post-order ones, and that split runs through every lost unit on the sheet. Shipment-to-Amazon losses, removals, and fulfillment center operations events pay our sourcing cost: what we paid to source the unit, not what we'd have sold it for. Customer return events pay the refund or replacement amount minus applicable fees instead. Either way, $5,000 per unit is the ceiling: Amazon caps a single unit's reimbursement at that amount regardless of which of the two rules set the value. Most sellers, including me before I looked closely, mentally price every lost unit at retail. The policy doesn't work that way, and the gap between the two numbers is where the missed money hides.

Inside the Skill, the valuation engine applies the correct rule per event based on its classified claim type, and for every pre-order event it checks whether we've actually submitted our own sourcing cost or whether Amazon is still defaulting to its own estimate. The audit report shows both numbers side by side, Amazon's likely valuation against our sourcing-cost-corrected valuation, with the $5,000 cap applied wherever it binds.

{
  "artifact_type": "audit_report",
  "skill": "fba-reimbursement-audit",
  "grounded_by": "amazon-agent-atlas",
  "summary": {
    "events_audited": 214,
    "reimbursed_total_usd": 8420.15,
    "eligible_unclaimed_total_usd": 1180.40,
    "at_risk_window_closing_usd": 340.00,
    "disputable_valuation_total_usd": 265.75
  },
  "events": [
    {
      "event_id": "EVT-00113",
      "classified_claim_type": "fulfillment_center_operations",
      "order_relationship": "pre_order",
      "valuation": {
        "rule_applied": "sourcing_cost",
        "sourcing_cost_submitted": false,
        "amazon_estimate_usd": 14.20,
        "unit_cap_usd": 5000
      },
      "status": "eligible_not_filed",
      "flags": ["window_closes_in_4_days", "sourcing_cost_not_submitted"]
    },
    {
      "event_id": "EVT-00087",
      "classified_claim_type": "customer_return",
      "order_relationship": "post_order",
      "valuation": { "rule_applied": "refund_minus_fees", "refund_amount_usd": 42.00, "fees_deducted_usd": 6.30 },
      "reimbursement_actual": { "issued": true, "amount_usd": 30.00, "variance_vs_expected_usd": -5.70 },
      "status": "disputable",
      "flags": ["eligible_for_valuation_dispute"]
    }
  ]
}

Reimbursement isn't a one-shot event, it's a loop most sellers never run

Getting paid once isn't the end of it. There's a recovery loop layered on top of the three windows and seven gates: submitting our own sourcing cost instead of accepting Amazon's estimate, respecting the thirty-day cooldown before resubmitting without new information, disputing a valuation within sixty days of an issued reimbursement, and handling the customer-return special case correctly. If a customer is refunded but never returns the item to a fulfillment center within sixty days, Amazon typically charges the customer and reimburses us. If the item does come back within sixty days and it's sellable, it goes back into inventory and we get no reimbursement. If it comes back unsellable and Amazon caused the damage, we get reimbursed and the item isn't restocked.

Tracking doesn't stop at filing. The Skill follows every event's reimbursement status across its full lifecycle, not just at the moment a claim gets filed, flagging "sourcing cost not yet submitted," "eligible for valuation dispute, window closes in nine days," and "resubmission blocked until August 20th, no new information supplied," so the backlog of things we could still do doesn't quietly age out.

What happens next

Once the audit report is built, it doesn't sit still. We feed it into Amazon Agent Flow, the same data layer that holds Amazon Ads MCP and Selling Partner MCP pulls side by side, so recovered reimbursement dollars sit next to the ad spend they help offset. The Skill schedules the same pass weekly and hands off anything newly flagged: a window closing inside seven days, a sourcing cost still unsubmitted, a dispute that just opened, so it shows up as a task instead of a line buried in a spreadsheet.

Recovery is only half the ledger. The other half, what we pay out rather than what Amazon owes back, is covered in the FBA inventory health guide: storage fees, capacity limits, aged-inventory surcharges. Running both audits is how we see the full ledger instead of half of it.

Same pattern every time: Amazon publishes the rule, leaves the classifying and window-checking to the seller, and pays out only what gets claimed correctly and on time.

Next in the series: what happens when Amazon denies a valid claim outright, and the appeal window most sellers let expire.