Claiming Amazon FBA reimbursements on lost inventory: the new 60-day window

The money you have tied up at Amazon now evaporates in 60 days, and most sellers I talk to have no idea how much it is.

Short answer. Since October 23, 2024 you have only 60 days (instead of 18 months) to claim an FBA reimbursement on inventory that is lost or damaged in the fulfillment center. Amazon has handled part of this automatically since November 2024, but far from all of it. Anyone who does not claim within 60 days and supply their own COGS leaves money on the table.

What changed since late 2024

Two policy changes turned this from a background task into a time-critical process.

The first: as of October 23, 2024 the claim window was shortened from 18 months to 60 days for fulfillment center claims. You used to get a year and a half to get your records in order. Now your window is shorter than an average purchasing cycle.

The second: since March 10, 2025 Amazon pays out on manufacturing cost instead of on sales price. That is your purchasing or production cost per unit, not the retail value. In practice this makes recoveries 50 to 75 percent lower than before. And if you do not supply your cost documentation within the window, Amazon uses its own internal estimate that is structurally lower still.

The combination is harsh: less time, less money per claim, and a stricter burden of proof.

The three claim types you need to track

Not everything that goes wrong automatically triggers a reimbursement. These are the categories where money gets left behind.

Lost or damaged in the FC. Inventory that goes missing or breaks in the fulfillment center. Since November 1, 2024 Amazon partly reimburses this automatically at the moment it is logged. Partly. Not every loss is picked up, and not every automatic reimbursement matches your actual costs.

Lost returns. A customer returns an item, Amazon credits the customer, but the unit never comes back into your inventory or comes back damaged. This is the type that most often stays under the radar, because it is spread across weeks in separate transactions.

Inbound discrepancies. You ship 500 units, Amazon books in 480. Proving those 20 is your responsibility, with proof of delivery, a signed bill of lading and packing slips.

The process first: where it breaks down

Before I build anything, I look at how the claim steps run today. At most scaling sellers that is grown-by-hand work: someone occasionally exports the Inventory Reconciliation report (Reports > Fulfillment), searches for "Lost - Warehouse" transactions, and submits manually when there is time. That worked with an 18-month window. At 60 days it breaks.

What I almost always see:

• Nobody knows the running balance of what Amazon currently owes.
• COGS per SKU sits in a loose Excel file that is not linked to the claim, so every claim is substantiated by hand.
• Loss events are discovered when they are already past the 60 days.

Some of those steps can be done smarter, and some can go away entirely. A manual monthly export has no place in a process with a 60-day deadline.

The smarter solution: your own reimbursement ledger

The calculation and the monitoring have to happen. The only question is who does them and on which data.

There are services that pick this up on a no-cure-no-pay basis, such as GETIDA and Refunzo. For detecting standard FC losses on the happy path they do their job fine. Where they fall short: they work with their own assumptions about your costs, they miss your exceptions, and they do not connect to your own inventory, purchasing and accounting systems. That last part is exactly where your money is.

What I build is a ledger on your own data. Through the SP-API I pull in the inventory, return and inbound events, link them to your actual COGS per SKU, and continuously calculate what Amazon owes you. A dashboard shows the running balance, an alert fires the moment a claimable event approaches the 60-day deadline, and the cost documentation is already attached to the claim. No more monthly export, no estimated values, no missed windows.

The moat is in your own numbers. An external service works with what Amazon releases and with estimates. You have your real purchase invoices, your actual COGS and the link to your other channels. That is the basis on which you get back the maximum and the correct amount, instead of a squeezed percentage on an assumption.