A reimbursement workflow that actually scales

Once you've solved fee detection, the next operational pillar is reimbursement recovery. Reimbursements are money Amazon owes you for things that went wrong on their side: lost inventory, damaged units, miscounted returns, dim-weight overcharges, removal-order miscredits. This guide is the playbook for handling them at the scale of "more than a dozen cases per week," which is roughly when an ad-hoc workflow stops working.

The queue

The first thing that breaks at scale is the spreadsheet of open cases. If you're tracking reimbursements in a tab labeled "open" and a tab labeled "closed," you've already lost. The queue you actually need has these states:

• Detected — the discrepancy is identified but no case has been filed.
• Filed — a case has been opened with Seller Support; awaiting response.
• In review — Amazon has responded with a request for more information.
• Approved — Amazon has agreed to reimburse; awaiting payment.
• Paid — the reimbursement has hit a settlement.
• Denied — Amazon has rejected the case; decide whether to escalate.

Every case has a dollar amount, a category, an age, and a deadline. The dispute window is 90 days for most categories (fewer for some); the queue should sort denied + nearing-deadline + high-dollar to the top and never lose track of the deadline.

File or batch?

Not every detected discrepancy is worth filing. There's an operational cost to opening a case — at minimum a few minutes of attention from somebody who knows the SKU and the category. The breakeven varies by team but a useful rule of thumb is:

1. 1

   Under $25, batch it

   Wait until you have 5+ similar discrepancies (same SKU, same fee category) and file them together. The case is one piece of work and the expected recovery is 5x.

2. 2

   $25–$200, file individually

   Worth the operational time. File within 7 days of detection.

3. 3

   Over $200, file the same day

   Don't batch. Don't wait. Get the case in front of Seller Support while the data is fresh.

4. 4

   Approaching dispute window, file regardless

   If a case is within 7 days of the 90-day window, file it. The cost of losing the dispute window is the entire claim amount.

These are guidelines, not hard rules. Adjust them to your operation.

Filing the case

The mechanics of filing a reimbursement case haven't changed much in years. You file through Seller Support, in the relevant category, with:

• The order ID, ASIN, or removal order ID.
• The discrepancy amount and the calculation.
• Any supporting documentation (carrier weight, original manifest, photos).
• A short, factual description of the discrepancy.

The single most useful tip we have here: lead with the calculation. Seller Support is processing thousands of cases per day. The cases that resolve quickly are the ones where the discrepancy is computed for them and the supporting data is attached up front. Cases that ask Seller Support to do the math themselves go to the bottom of the pile.

MarginLock's reimbursement detectors emit a "case-ready" payload for each discrepancy: the SKU, the relevant settlement line, the expected vs actual amount, the supporting evidence, and the recommended case category. Copy that payload into the case body and attach the evidence. That's the entire filing flow.

Tracking recovery

Once cases are filed, the work shifts to monitoring. Every case in the queue needs a state transition tracker — when did it move from filed to in_review? When did it sit in in_review more than 14 days?

The metric that matters is recovery rate: of the dollars detected this month, how many were ultimately reimbursed? Track it by category, because the recovery rates differ wildly. Lost-inventory cases recover at one rate; dim-weight overcharge disputes recover at another.

If your overall recovery rate is below 60%, the bottleneck is almost always filing quality (under-supported cases or poorly-stated calculations) rather than the detection layer. If it's above 80%, you're well-tuned.

Escalation

Some denials are unjust. The escalation path:

1. Reopen with new information. If your original case was thin, file again with the supporting data filled in.
2. Request a Tier 2 review. Ask explicitly for a senior reviewer. Phrase it factually, not aggressively.
3. Brand Registry escalation. If you're enrolled, the Brand Registry contact path tends to get senior eyes faster.
4. Reimbursement service vendor. Some operations use a paid third-party service for the most complex cases. Be aware they typically take 25%+ of recovered amounts.

What to track at the operation level

Three numbers, weekly:

• Detection rate. Discrepancies detected per $1M of FBA revenue.
• Filing rate. Of detected cases, what fraction were filed.
• Recovery rate. Of filed dollars, what fraction were recovered.

The product of those three is your overall reimbursement yield, and it's the single number that tells you whether the workflow is actually doing its job.