There are over 2.4 million active sellers on Amazon. With such high numbers, many things can go wrong on Amazon. Someone can hijack your listing. Your product can suddenly drop off in sales after a year of five figure months.
But one of the worst, and most common, things that can go wrong on Amazon is not receiving your full profits.
You get paid for every sale minus the Amazon fees. What if the Amazon fees are wrong? What if a customer didn’t return an item and you got charged for it?
That’s less money that you’re getting paid from your Amazon FBA Seller account, and it happens all of the time to FBA businesses of all sizes. The higher your revenue, the more you have to lose from any Amazon errors.
In this post, we cover everything you need to know about Amazon reimbursement services, including the important features to look for and a list of the top-rated companies to choose from.
What is an Amazon reimbursement service?
An Amazon reimbursement service is a company that helps third-party Amazon sellers recover funds from mischarged fees and damaged inventory. Around 94% of Amazon sellers rely on Fulfillment by Amazon to fulfill their orders and provide customer service. But with millions of transactions happening every day, errors are bound to happen.
Many sellers choose to audit their FBA accounts themselves, but it can be useful to partner with a reimbursement service so you don’t have to search for issues and file claims yourself. You can instead focus on product development and marketing.
What issues can a reimbursement service help to resolve?
A good Amazon reimbursement service should be able to perform essential FBA auditing tasks and help you recover funds for all possible errors.
Customer refund issues:
- Missing reimbursements
- Customer replacements
- Customer refund overages
- Missing order credits
Inventory issues:
- Destroyed items
- Warehouse lpsses
- Inventory adjustments
- Returned inventory errors
Payment issues:
- Transaction reconciliation
- Chargebacks
- Inaccurate order refunds
- Inaccurate reimbursements
Shipment issues:
- Shipment stock counts
- Damaged shipments
- Damaged returns
Fees and overcharges:
- Restocking fees
- Weight and dimension fees
- Commission fees
- Missing removal orders
Benefits of using an Amazon reimbursement service
Why use an external service to manage your Amazon FBA reimbursements?
These are the key benefits:
Opportunity to get more money back because of their auditing expertise
Because you’re partnering with a company that specializes in handling FBA claims, you’re far more likely to get money back. Through a commission structure, the company is incentivized to work hard and get money back for you. They have optimized processes for auditing FBA accounts and finding errors.
Can spend time on revenue-generating activities
As a business owner, the more things you can get off your plate, the more time you have to drive revenue. Instead of worrying about saving or recovering money, you use your time more strategically. You can research new product categories and product ideas and manage marketing campaigns.
Risk-free if you choose an Amazon-approved vendor that doesn’t charge up front
An Amazon reimbursement service is risk free so long as you choose the right one. At the very least, make the sure the company is an approved vendor in the Amazon Seller Appstore. Also make sure that they don’t charge you unless they recover funds. Keep reading for our complete list of how to vet a reimbursement company.
Can serve as a backup if you want to do most of the claims yourself
The final benefit worth mentioning is that the service can serve as a backup. As long as they don’t charge you for claims you file yourself, then you can have the service running in the background to find errors you’re too busy to find or don’t know how to find. But you can still file claims yourself whenever you want (and not have to pay the company a commission for them).
10 things to look for in an Amazon reimbursement service
Fortunately, an Amazon reimbursement service can protect your bottom line by monitoring your account and opening up claims with Amazon. There are a few options for these types of companies, so you need to know what to look for.
Here’s how to find the best Amazon reimbursement service:
1. Resolves all issues associated with return errors, FBA fees, inventory, and warehouse storage
30% of all products ordered online are returned.While customer return errors are one of the most common FBA issues, there are dozens of other things that can go wrong.
The Amazon reimbursement service you choose should be able to discover and file claims for all of these issues and more:
- Damaged inventory or lost inventory in an Amazon warehouse
- Customer refunded more than the original charge
- Damages caused by inbound shipper
- Errors with shipping fees based on weight and size
You need to find an Amazon reimbursement service that not only resolves all possible opportunities for FBA refunds.
2. Offers historical scanning to find past unresolved issues
The company you choose should be able to scan your account going back 18 months or 12 months (based on Amazon’s policy for that unique case type). They won’t be able to go back farther than Amazon’s policies, because when you wait too long, you’re no longer eligible for reimbursement.
But they should be able to scan as far back as Amazon allows and file claims on your behalf.
This gives you a big injection of unexpected cash and is a great way to kickstart your new relationship with the reimbursement service. They will then file new claims for you on a monthly basis.
3. Charges only after reimbursement
If you’re a seven-figure seller, there are errors for which Amazon owes you money.
Even if you’re just barely clocking five-figure years, you’re still likely owed some money.
However, there are no guarantees. Without digging into your account data, it’s impossible to guess whether you’ll be getting back $600 or $6,000 or even more.
That’s why it’s important to choose a service that doesn’t charge you upfront costs or any monthly fees. Instead, choose an FBA refunds service that only charges you after reimbursement has been processed based on their findings.
4. No charges for cases you reconcile yourself
What if you enjoy reconciling your account and you just want a service in place as a backup? There might be times where you’re too busy to crawl your account or there could be large issues that you accidentally miss, so having a backup in place is smart.
If that sounds like you, then you definitely want to sign up with a company that won’t charge you for any case that you find yourself.
Refunds Manager is a partner to successful Amazon FBA sellers and we guarantee that you won’t be charged for anything that you reconciled without our help, or before we did.
5. Is an Amazon-approved vendor that follows Amazon’s terms of service
Amazon Seller Central offers the Appstore where you can find software providers, services, and other Amazon-approved vendors to help you grow and manage your business. Vendors must go through an approval process before being added to the Appstore. It’s wise to only work with companies who are part of the Appstore. This way, you can be sure you’re doing business with a reputable company that follows Amazon’s terms of service and won’t place your account at risk.
Unlike most reimbursement services, Refunds Manager is an approved Amazon Seller Vendor. You can find our listing in the Appstore here.
6. Manual reimbursement requests
This is really important! If you remember nothing else, remember this: the best Amazon reimbursement service files claims manually.
Amazon has repeatedly stated that they don’t want to receive automated claims, because these are typically low quality and might not be fully accurate. Yet, there are services who automate this process. They are typically provided at a monthly fee, and the entire process from finding errors to submitting claims is fully automated.
Not only are such automated services an annoyance to Amazon but they also are not as effective, so be sure to use a service that handles claims manually.
7. Uses proprietary software to find more errors
As stated above, you don’t want a software to be submitting the claims for you. (A human should handle that.)
But that doesn’t mean that quality software isn’t important. The account data is incredibly complex, with related issues and transactions spread out across multiple calendar months.
The service you choose should use software to find more errors than a human can, but once those errors are found, it should be a real live person who is reviewing the issue, deciding whether or not it is valid, and then proceeding to file the claim.
8. Proven success expediting Amazon FBA reimbursement
There are some newcomers in the Amazon reimbursement space who have been in business for less than a year. This means they’re likely not experienced in:
- Knowing what information Amazon demands for each type of issue
- Formatting claims in a way that increases success
- Batching claims to streamline reimbursement for the support staff
- Verifying that claims are valid and worth pursuing in the first place
There are some things that you can’t learn without experience. As an Amazon FBA seller, you know this well. You might have watched a few webinars and listened to a few podcasts, but it wasn’t until you launched your business that you understood.
FBA reimbursement claims are complicated, so it’s wise to look for a company that is experienced.
To that point, Refunds Manager is the original FBA reimbursement service, and we’ve been in business for almost six years.
Refunds Manager covers over 19 possible reimbursement cases and successfully served over 9,000 US-based Amazon sellers
We’ve learned everything there is to learn about FBA reimbursements, including how to best deal with Amazon and how to fully vet claims before submitting them to ensure that they are high quality and highly likely to go through to reimbursement.
9. Seeks to cover new cases
An Amazon reimbursement service helps you add new cases and tracks the progress from start to finish.
Refunds Manager covers 19 different types of cases for Amazon FBA sellers including chargebacks not refunded and items lost or damaged in Amazon’s warehouse.
You should work with a company that frequently adds new cases to their service coverage. For example, we recently added another case that lets us get money back for when you pay for an inbound shipment, cancel it before the shipment date, and yet don’t get your shipment fee back.
10. Responsive support
The point of using a service is twofold:
- Save hours each week not having to reconcile your account
- Get more money back for issues you couldn’t have found yourself
For the most part, this is a “set and forget it” process. You’ll sign up for a refund service, and you won’t have to worry about FBA reimbursements again.
That said, there might be some times when you need additional help. Maybe you had a high amount of returns one month and you want to make sure they were all accounted for. Or maybe you’re waiting on a big reimbursement and the funds haven’t hit your account yet.
Whatever the reason, it’s critical that the service you choose features great customer support.
Top 3 Amazon reimbursement services
To kickstart your search for a trusted vendor, here are three companies to consider, with important vetting data for each one.
1. Refunds Manager
Year founded: 2012
Approved vendor in the Amazon Seller Appstore: Yes ✅
Manual claims (not automated bots): Yes ✅
Reviews: 5.0 trust score, with 367 reviews on Trustpilot ✅
2. Refund Sniper
Year founded: 2016
Approved vendor in the Amazon Seller Appstore: No ❌
Manual claims (not automated bots): Yes ✅
Reviews: 4.8 trust score, with 369 reviews on Trustpilot ✅
3. RefundLabs
Year founded: 2018
Approved vendor in the Amazon Seller Appstore: Yes ✅
Manual claims (not automated bots): Yes ✅
Reviews: No public ratings available ❌