Amazon Reimbursement Policy Changes: Manufacturing Cost, 60-Day Windows, Auto-Reimbursement

Change one: the windows got much shorter

Amazon tightened its FBA inventory reimbursement windows effective 23 October 2024. Where sellers used to have something close to a year and a half to notice a loss and file, the windows now run by claim type: fulfillment-center losses and other removal shortfalls get 60 days from the loss or delivery date, removals lost in transit get 15 to 75 days from shipment creation, and customer returns that never physically came back get a 60-to-120-day window measured from the refund date. None of these overlap cleanly, which is the whole reason a page built around “one deadline” is wrong for most readers.

The practical shift is that a reimbursement process built around an annual or quarterly review is now structurally too slow for at least one claim category. A loss that happened in January and wasn't checked until an April quarterly review can already be outside its window, depending on which type of loss it was.

Change two: valuation moved from sale price to sourcing cost

Effective 31 March 2025, Amazon changed how it values pre-order losses — inventory lost or damaged before it ever reached a customer. Instead of reimbursing at the price the item would have sold for, Amazon pays your documented sourcing cost: what you can show you actually paid your manufacturer or wholesaler, excluding shipping and duties. If you don't supply that documentation, Amazon substitutes its own estimate, and it can decline a submission outright if the documents are, in its own wording, “forged, tampered with, or illegible.”

This is the fact we see get quoted wrong most often, including in our own earlier copy before it was corrected: reimbursement is not a sale-price payout anymore. A $30 item that cost $6 to manufacture is now reimbursed around $6, not $30, when it's lost before a customer ever touches it. Post-order losses — a return that vanishes mid-transit back to Amazon — are different: those pay the refund amount minus applicable fees, closer to what sellers assume “reimbursement” means. Conflating the two is the single most common error we see in claim expectations.

Change three: some losses now get paid without a claim at all

Since 1 November 2024, Amazon proactively reimburses items it can confirm were lost inside a fulfillment center — the reimbursement lands on your account without you filing anything. This is the change that shrank the easiest part of the category. Reimbursement services that built their pitch around “we find the losses Amazon owes you” were built for a world where a seller had to notice every one of those losses manually; a meaningful share of them now get caught and paid by Amazon's own systems first.

That doesn't make the category smaller in dollar terms so much as it moves where the money is. What Amazon's automation doesn't catch — customer returns that never came back, fee and dimension measurement errors, removal shortfalls, and cases its own system mis-valued — is what's left to actually work. A service, or an internal process, that still spends its time chasing simple FC losses is competing with Amazon's own automation for the easiest 10% of the pie and missing the harder 90%.

A worked example that shows all three changes at once

Take a unit that costs $7.20 to manufacture and sells for $24.99, lost inside a fulfillment center on 5 January 2026. Under the old rules, that loss would sit open for up to 18 months and reimburse near sale price. Under the current rules: Amazon's automation should catch and pay it without a claim (change three); if it doesn't and you have to file, the window is 60 days from the report date, closing 6 March (change one); and the payout is your documented $7.20 sourcing cost, not the $24.99 sale price (change two). Three separate policy changes, one unit, and a payout roughly 71% smaller in dollar terms than the pre-2025 sale-price basis would have produced — even though nothing about what actually happened to the item changed.

What to do when a claim from before these dates gets rejected

If you're filing now against a loss that happened months ago, under the old assumption that you had 18 months, the rejection you'll get cites the current window — Amazon applies today's rules to today's filing, not the rules that existed when the loss occurred. There's no appeal path that reinstates an expired window. The only real fix is procedural: move claim-checking from an annual habit to a standing one, because a loss reported in month one and not checked until month eight is now checked well outside every window except the very longest.

If a sourcing-cost submission gets declined for insufficient documentation, the fix is supply-chain paperwork, not a resubmission with the same invoice. Amazon wants a document that traces the unit's cost to your manufacturer or wholesaler — a general P&L export or an estimated landed cost isn't the same thing, and it's a common reason a legitimate claim comes back declined.

There's a third failure mode worth naming separately: a claim filed correctly, on time, with clean documentation, that still comes back lower than expected because the seller assumed sale-price valuation without checking which of the two bases — pre-order or post-order — actually applied. That's not a rejection to appeal; it's the policy working as designed. The fix there is expectation-setting before the claim is filed, not a dispute after.

Why this pattern of change matters beyond reimbursement

All three changes point the same direction: Amazon is automating the easy cases and tightening the deadlines on everything else, which is a pattern that shows up across fee disputes and listing casework too, not just reimbursements. Full Circle has managed more than $500M in Amazon spend across 100+ brands, and net of $170,047 in reversals, $803,457 has come back across 53 of those accounts since 10 February 2026 — a number we state net because the reversal right is real and a gross figure overstates what actually lands. Dr. Shield runs case filing against these current windows and the current sourcing-cost basis specifically, priced on the call as a contingency against what's recovered, because a service still quoting the 2023 rules is arguing a policy that no longer exists.