Lost in Transit to Amazon: FBA Claim vs Carrier Claim, and Who Pays

Two meanings of 'lost in transit,' and this page is about one of them

“Lost in transit” gets used for two genuinely different situations, and mixing them up sends sellers to the wrong process. This page covers inventory lost on the way to an FBA warehouse — a shipment that left your supplier or your warehouse and never showed as received. A separate situation, inventory lost on the way back to you during a removal order Amazon is fulfilling, is covered under Amazon's removal-claim window instead, and a merchant-fulfilled order lost on its way to a customer is an A-to-z or delivery-carrier matter, not an FBA inbound claim at all. Confirming which of the three you're actually in is the first step, because each has a different process and a different clock.

Who's responsible: the Amazon Partnered Carrier Program vs your own carrier

If you shipped inventory to Amazon using its Partnered Carrier Program — Amazon's own arranged small-parcel or LTL freight — Amazon takes responsibility for that shipment for its full transit, and a loss becomes Amazon's claim to resolve under its own FBA inventory reimbursement policy. If you arranged your own carrier instead — your own small-parcel account, your own freight broker — that carrier owns the transit leg, and a loss there is a claim against your carrier directly, using your own proof of shipment and their tracking record. Amazon does not step in to cover a loss on a leg it wasn't responsible for arranging.

What Amazon's own reimbursement policy actually says about the FBA-claim side

For shipments Amazon was responsible for, its published inventory reimbursement policy sets a claim window of 15 to 75 days from the shipment's creation date for a removal-style claim on inventory lost in transit, and 60 days from the item being reported lost or damaged for fulfillment-center operations claims. Valuation for a pre-order loss is your documented sourcing cost — what you actually paid your manufacturer or wholesaler, excluding shipping and duties — with Amazon's own estimate used if you don't supply one, and single-unit reimbursements are capped at $5,000. If a reimbursement is later found to be in error, or the missing inventory turns up and is returned to your account, Amazon reserves the right to reverse the credit — which is why any recovery figure, ours included, should always be stated net of reversals rather than gross.

Since 1 November 2024, Amazon proactively reimburses items lost inside its own fulfillment centers without requiring a claim at all — automation has already closed that specific seam. What automation doesn't reach, and what still needs an actual claim filed, is the inbound-transit window covered here plus anything the automated process misses or mis-values.

What you need on hand for either claim type

Both processes want the same two categories of proof, even though they go to different recipients: proof of ownership — an invoice from your supplier or manufacturer showing you purchased the specific units in question — and proof of shipment, the carrier's own tracking and delivery confirmation showing what left and what, according to the carrier's record, arrived or didn't. For an Amazon Partnered Carrier shipment, that evidence supports an FBA reimbursement case filed through Seller Central. For your own carrier, the identical two documents support a claim filed directly with them, under whatever process and time limit that carrier publishes — which is worth checking before you ship, not after something goes missing.

A case walk-through: a partial-count discrepancy that wasn't actually lost

In one account, an inbound shipment via Amazon's Partnered Carrier Program showed a unit-count shortfall against the packing list once it registered as received — the kind of gap that looks, on the surface, exactly like a lost-in-transit case. Before filing anything, the carrier's own delivery confirmation was pulled and compared unit-by-unit against the original shipment plan, and it showed the full count had actually been delivered — the shortfall was a receiving discrepancy inside the fulfillment center after arrival, not a transit loss at all. That's a different claim category under Amazon's own policy, filed with different evidence (the receiving discrepancy, not a transit loss), under one case ID rather than two competing claims filed on the same shortfall. Filing the wrong category first would have meant re-filing from scratch once the mistake surfaced, costing real time against the claim window.

What to do when a claim is denied or the window has closed

A denial usually means the documentation didn't match what that specific claim category requires — check first whether the proof of ownership and proof of shipment were both genuinely complete before assuming the denial reflects Amazon's final judgment on the merits. If they were complete, request internal review of the existing case rather than filing a fresh one; if something specific was missing, correct and resubmit inside the window if it's still open. A window that's already closed is unfortunately final for that specific claim — there's no informal extension — which is the strongest argument for tracking shipment dates against claim windows before a gap ever appears, not after.

$215,676 across 1,271 items came back through lost-inbound claims alone in the casework we track, and the pattern across those cases is consistent: the ones caught inside the window recover cleanly, and the ones caught after it closes don't, regardless of how clear the underlying loss actually was. Dr. Shield runs inbound-shipment monitoring against the claim window as standard practice, priced on the call as a contingency against what's actually recovered; most useful for a seller running enough inbound volume that catching every window by hand becomes its own job, unnecessary for occasional, small shipments a seller can track on a simple spreadsheet.