FBA reimbursements: rank your cases by days remaining, not by dollars
Amazon has tightened its claim windows. A large case filed late is worth exactly nothing, which means the right sort order is time, not value.
September 14, 2026 · 6 min read
Inventory gets lost, damaged, disposed of without instruction, received short, or refunded to a customer who never sent the item back. Amazon has processes to reimburse for all of it. Those processes are bounded by eligibility windows, and Amazon has been tightening them.
That single fact should change how you work your reimbursement list. Most sellers sort candidate cases by value and start at the top. That is the wrong order.
Why time beats value
A $600 case that has aged past its window is worth $0. A $40 case with a few days left is worth $40. Sorted by dollars, you spend your first hour on the case you are most likely to lose and your last hour on the ones you could still have won.
Sort by days remaining and every hour of effort lands on recoverable money. Within the same urgency band, then sort by value.
The categories worth auditing
These are the recurring discrepancy types:
- Inbound shipments received short of what you sent.
- Units lost or damaged inside the fulfillment network.
- Disposals or removals carried out without your instruction.
- Customer refunds issued where the unit was never returned.
- Reimbursements issued at a value below your cost basis.
Reconciliation is a matching problem
Every one of those is found the same way: line up what you shipped against what Amazon recorded as received, line up adjustments and disposals against reimbursements already paid, and surface the rows where the two sides disagree. It is dull, it is mechanical, and it is exactly what software should do instead of a person with a spreadsheet at 11pm.
One warning, and it matters more than any technique here: claim windows and eligibility rules change, and they change in Amazon's favor. Never rely on a window length you remember or read in a blog post — including this one. Check the current policy in Seller Central for each case type before you plan your filing order.
Review, then file
Automated filing is a bad idea. A case opened on weak evidence wastes a support interaction and can prejudice a legitimate claim. The right output of an audit is a reviewable list — discrepancy, evidence, value, days remaining — that a human approves before anything is submitted. MySellerHQ is built read-only for exactly that reason: it finds and ranks, you decide and file.