{"id":182,"date":"2026-09-04T07:31:47","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T12:31:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/recouply.io\/blog\/amazon-fba-reimbursement-policy-change\/"},"modified":"2026-09-04T07:31:47","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T12:31:47","slug":"amazon-fba-reimbursement-policy-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/recouply.io\/blog\/amazon-fba-reimbursement-policy-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon FBA Reimbursement Policy Change: What It Costs You"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Spencerby spencer k<\/strong><\/div>\n

You finally sit down to reconcile last month’s reimbursements, and the payout for a batch of lost units is a fraction of what you expected. That’s not a processing error — it’s Amazon’s FBA reimbursement policy change working exactly as designed. Since a policy update Amazon rolled out in 2025 and has kept in place through this year, reimbursements for inventory lost or damaged before a customer ever ordered it are calculated off your manufacturing cost, not what the item actually sells for, and the gap between those two numbers is the kind of thing you barely notice on one unit and can’t ignore on a pallet.<\/p>\n

If you’re carrying excess or slow-moving stock in FBA — the inventory that sits longest and gets handled the most — this change quietly raises the cost of leaving it there. Here’s what the policy actually covers, why it lands harder on aged and excess inventory than on anything else in your catalog, and what to do differently now that the safety net under FBA storage pays out less than it used to.<\/p>\n

What Changed in Amazon’s FBA Reimbursement Policy<\/h2>\n

For most of FBA’s history, when Amazon lost or damaged your inventory inside its own fulfillment network, it reimbursed you close to what you’d have made selling it — roughly your sale price, minus fees. That changed with a policy update that shifted the basis for pre-order loss and damage claims to manufacturing cost: what you actually paid to source or produce the item, excluding shipping, duties, and other landed costs.<\/p>\n

The practical effect shows up fastest on anything with real margin. A seller who buys a product for a fraction of what it sells for used to get reimbursed close to the sale price when a unit vanished in a fulfillment center. Now that same seller gets reimbursed close to what they paid their supplier. Sellers and the seller-tool providers who track this closely have reported recovery drops of roughly 40 to 60 percent compared to the old sale-price basis, concentrated hardest on higher-margin, private-label-style products where the gap between cost and price is widest.<\/p>\n

Why Excess and Slow-Moving Inventory Carries More of This Risk<\/h2>\n

Reimbursement policy changes land unevenly across a catalog, and excess or slow-moving inventory sits on the wrong end of that unevenness. Stock that isn’t moving gets shuffled between fulfillment centers, sits through more inbound and outbound handling cycles, and lives longer in storage — all of which are the conditions under which units actually get lost or damaged in the first place. A fast-turning SKU is in and out of the network in weeks. A slow-moving one can sit for months, racking up both storage charges and exposure.<\/p>\n

Before this change, that exposure was mostly hedged: if Amazon lost a unit of your excess stock, you’d at least get paid close to what you would have made selling it yourself. That was cold comfort for slow-moving stock you were already struggling to move, but it wasn’t a loss on top of a loss. Now, the same event pays out closer to your cost basis, which means the inventory you’re least confident will sell soon is also the inventory where a warehouse mistake costs you the most relative to what you were counting on.<\/p>\n

How Amazon Calculates Your Payout Now<\/h2>\n
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pulling slow-moving stock out on your own terms beats leaving it exposed to a lower payout<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The cost-basis change only applies to units lost or damaged before a customer order exists — inbound shipments, warehouse handling, misplaced units sitting in inventory. If a unit is lost or damaged after a customer has already ordered it, reimbursement still runs off the sale price from that order, minus applicable fees, unchanged from before.<\/p>\n

For pre-order claims, Amazon pulls from the per-unit cost you’ve entered in Seller Central. If that field is accurate and backed by real supplier documentation, that’s the number your claim gets calculated against. If it’s missing or left at zero, Amazon substitutes its own internal estimate instead, and sellers consistently describe that estimate as running low. On top of that, most claims require supporting cost documentation submitted within a set window after filing — commonly described as around 60 days — or the claim defaults to Amazon’s own estimate regardless of what you actually paid.<\/p>\n

Amazon’s automatic reimbursement engine now catches a good share of the clean cases on its own — a single unit scanned lost, a straightforward damage event — without you having to file anything. What it doesn’t reliably catch are inbound receiving shortfalls, returns that never actually make it back into inventory, and anything that requires a human to piece together what happened. Those still need a manual claim, and manual claims are exactly where an outdated or empty cost field costs you the most.<\/p>\n

What to Do About It<\/h2>\n

Start with the housekeeping that’s entirely in your control. Go through your active SKUs and make sure the per-unit cost field in Seller Central reflects what you actually paid, backed by an invoice you can produce if asked. Keep it current as your costs change, and don’t assume it carried over correctly from an old listing or a bulk import. This is the single biggest lever you have over what a claim actually pays out.<\/p>\n

Beyond that, build a habit of reviewing your reimbursement reports monthly instead of trusting the automatic engine to surface everything. Inbound shortfalls and missing returns are worth checking for specifically, since those are the cases most likely to slip past automation entirely.<\/p>\n

The bigger structural question is worth asking too: how much excess or slow-moving stock do you actually want sitting in FBA now that the fallback for something going wrong pays out less than it used to? If you’re not confident a SKU sells soon, leaving it in the network means betting that nothing happens to it, and if something does, you’re now covered at cost instead of at value. Pulling that stock out with a removal order<\/a> and deciding what to do with it on your own terms is a different bet — one where you know the number going in, rather than hoping a reimbursement claim covers what you were counting on. That’s especially worth thinking through now, ahead of the seasonal push described in our rundown of what to do with slow-moving inventory before Q4<\/a>, when both storage pressure and handling volume tend to climb together.<\/p>\n

If you land on pulling excess or slow-moving stock out rather than leaving it exposed to a policy that now pays out at cost, get an instant estimate from Recouply<\/a> and see what a direct sale looks like next to the number you’d be hoping for from a reimbursement claim.<\/p>\n

FAQ: Amazon’s FBA Reimbursement Policy Change<\/h2>\n

Does the new reimbursement policy affect items lost or damaged after a customer orders them?<\/h3>\n

No. Post-order loss or damage still gets reimbursed based on the sale price from that specific order, minus applicable fees, the same way it always has. The cost-basis change applies only to units lost or damaged in the fulfillment network before a customer order exists.<\/p>\n

How do I avoid getting stuck with Amazon’s default cost estimate?<\/h3>\n

Enter an accurate, invoice-backed per-unit cost for every active SKU in Seller Central and keep it updated as your costs change. A missing or zeroed-out cost field means Amazon substitutes its own estimate, which sellers consistently report running lower than actual sourcing cost.<\/p>\n

How long do I have to file an Amazon FBA reimbursement claim?<\/h3>\n

Filing windows have been extended and vary by claim type, and Amazon adjusts them periodically, so don’t rely on a specific number from outside your own account. As of recent policy, sellers report a window around 18 months for most lost-or-damaged claims, with removal-order-related claims typically running on a much shorter clock closer to 90 days. Check the current windows in your own Seller Central help documentation before you assume you have time to spare.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amazon reimburses lost or damaged FBA stock at cost now, not sale price. Here’s what that reimbursement policy change means for your payout.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":180,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"slim_seo":{"title":"Amazon FBA Reimbursement Policy Change: What It Costs You - recouply blog","description":"Amazon reimburses lost or damaged FBA stock at cost now, not sale price. Here's what that reimbursement policy change means for your payout."},"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[29,51,22,75,14],"class_list":["post-182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-amazon-fba","tag-amazon-fba","tag-excess-inventory","tag-inventory-management","tag-reimbursements","tag-removal-orders"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/recouply.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/recouply.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/recouply.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/recouply.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/recouply.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/recouply.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/recouply.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/recouply.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/recouply.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/recouply.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}