How to Deal with Amazon FBA Missing Inventory

Amazon is an efficient organization, but it’s also a large one. Naturally, you expect your products to be delivered and received on time. However, sometimes things go wrong; with this in mind, I want to run you through what to do when you have Amazon FBA missing inventory.

Steps for Dealing with Amazon FBA Missing Inventory

Here is what you should do to determine if inventory has been misplaced:

1. Access the Inventory Adjustments Report

From your Reports drop-down menu, select Fulfilment, which is where you will find your Inventory Adjustments report.

While you can review up to 18 months’ worth of data online, it’s easier to download this report for closer analysis. Simply select the date range you are interested in and click on Download.

Source: Seller Central

2. Analyze the Data

Once you have the report in front of you, it’s best to sort by SKU to find discrepancies. Any items marked as M (-1) are missing. If that same item is found, it is marked with F (+1).

Any items that are damaged are marked with an E (-1). If you’ve been reimbursed for that item, it’s marked as O (-1).

Next, remove any items that Amazon correctly handled. This will leave you with a report of discrepancies, or potential Amazon FBA missing inventory, that you can investigate further.

3. Access the Inventory Reconciliation Report

To see what has happened to each product over a specific period of time, you can enter the SKUs into the Inventory Reconciliation report. This will ensure you can approach Amazon with concrete findings related to missing inventory.

4. Contact Amazon Seller Support

Now that you know what inventory might be missing, you can open a case with Amazon Seller Support.

Make sure that you provide as many details as possible when requesting reimbursement.

Amazon usually takes around 12 hours to respond. If you don’t hear from them within 24 hours, it’s best to follow up.

Since reimbursement requests might be a common occurrence, it helps to have a template that you can use to contact Amazon in the future again.

How to Deal with Damaged Inventory on Amazon

Amazon FBA missing inventory isn’t the only issue that sellers deal with – sometimes inventory gets damaged.

To determine whether any of your inventory has been damaged, you can use the Damaged Inventory Report in Seller Central.

Amazon is generally willing to reimburse sellers when products are damaged in the fulfillment center or en route to a center.

Just as you would with missing inventory, it’s best to regularly monitor damaged inventory to ensure you’re reimbursed accordingly.

You can view Amazon’s full FBA lost and damaged inventory reimbursement policy here.

Amazon FBA Refund and Lost Inventory Reimbursement Checker

Claiming reimbursements yourself is certainly the most affordable method. However, it can be time-consuming depending on how much inventory you handle.

There is also the option of using an Amazon FBA refund and lost inventory reimbursement checker tool.

Helium 10 and Sellerboard are the two options we usually recommend; they are very popular with Savvy Amazon sellers; look what Helium 10 has saved us in the past 18 months.

Helium 10 is my preferred choice, and their reimbursement tracker is just one of the tools we use regularly; if you are interested, You can read my full review here.

Some tools only process inventory data, whilst others also process reimbursements. It’s up to you how much you want to handle yourself; I’ll leave this up to you!

In Closing

Losing your Amazon inventory is frustrating, to say the least.

The good news is that your investment is not entirely lost, and Amazon is here to support you.

You need to be patient and organized, make sure you keep tabs on your inventory regularly to handle any issues as quickly as possible.

Have you got a question? Let me know below!