Refund claims for lost and damaged FBA inventory

ZonWizard’s Analytics tool constantly monitors your inventory and identifies products for which you are eligible to receive a refund. This occurs in cases where Amazon has lost or damaged your inventory in the fulfillment centers or in cases where a customer’s return never made it back into the warehouse.

In this tutorial we will see how with ZonWizard you can quickly open cases in Seller Central, attaching all the necessary documentation to easily get the refunds you are entitled to.

Missing product summary

In the Analytics > Refund Claims you can view a list of products for which missing units have been identified and need to be refunded.

 

The “Missing | Claimed” column shows the missing units found to date and the pending units for which a case has already been opened. Missing units are divided by type:

• Lost (in Amazon’s logistics)
• Damaged (by Amazon’s logistics)
• Inbound (missing from inbound shipments to FBA warehouses)
• Not returned (by customers who have had a refund)

The “Reimbursable” column provides a baseline estimate of the amount Amazon should reimburse for all of the missing units. The amount is estimated based on the last sale price if available or alternatively on the purchase cost of the product indicated by the user in the Profit tool.

The “Actions” column shows in red the button to start the claims process, or, if a case has already been opened, the button to open it in the Seller Central case log.

Opening a refund claim

Clicking on the “Claim” button you start the 3-step procedure for opening a case.

In the first step, an Excel report containing a summary of the missing units and details of the reasons can be downloaded. We recommend downloading these documents because they may be required by Amazon for case resolution.

Once the files have been downloaded you can proceed to the next step by clicking the “Next” button.

The second step provides the template to be used as the problem description in opening the case.

Using the “Open Case on Seller Central” button directly opens the seller help page where you can paste the problem description. Amazon offers quick resolution options that vary according to the type of missing products.

The procedure provides indications of which options to select to get to resolution of the case as quickly as possible.

If email contact is requested at the end of the procedure, it is advisable to attach the previously downloaded excel document.

 

Having completed the steps for opening the case in Seller Central you can proceed with the last step on ZonWizard.

You have to copy from Seller Central and paste into ZonWizard the ID number that Amazon has assigned to the case that has just been opened and click on the “Save” button. This allows the software to track the subsequent refunds that Amazon will issue and monitor the progress of the case.

Case tracking

Once the refund requests have been made, the cases will appear in a list as shown in this screenshot:

From here you can easily monitor the status of requests:

• in yellow: open case awaiting reimbursement
• in green: closed case refunded
• in gray: case closed without reimbursement

Clicking on the “case ID” redirects you directly to the case log in Seller Central, while clicking on the icon next to the individual products allows you to download the documents that were attached at the time of the request.

The amount reimbursed for the individual case is shown in the “Reimbursed” column, while the total amount reimbursed for all cases opened through ZonWizard is shown at the top of the table.

Deleting a case

In the “Actions” column, clicking on the trash you can delete a case that was opened by mistake or incorrectly. This action restores ZonWizard to its previous state as if the case had never been created.

Closing a case

The software monitors the refunds received after the case is opened, and if a refund is obtained for all products within the request the case is closed by the system automatically.

Alternatively, the user can decide, by evaluating the responses obtained from Amazon support, that he/she wants to close a case before having received reimbursement for all requested units. This action is done by clicking on the X and in this way the case is closed and all products in the request are considered no longer missing.

Only one case can be opened per product per type (lost, damaged, not returned). In order to open a new case of the same type on a product, the previously opened case must have been closed or deleted.

Summary

If you have read this tutorial you will have realized that through ZonWizard’s “Refund Claims” tool you can:

• view a summary of lost, damaged and refunded items not returned to Amazon in a simple and intuitive dashboard, without having to cross-reference inventory reports
• request refunds from Amazon via a wizard, with pre-filled templates and documents to attach to the case
• monitor the status of open cases (claimed-refunded-closed), with full tracking of refunded amounts and returned units.

We hope you found this tutorial helpful in understanding the potential of this tool that makes it possible to recover the value of missing inventory in a systematic way.

If you are already a ZonWizard user you will find this functionality in the Analytics > Refund Claims section.

Or you can register for our service by taking advantage of a 14-day free trial.

Thank you for reading our Claims Tutorial.

Find more guides similar to this one in the Tutorial section of our Blog

 

Happy sales!