You refunded the customer. The unit never came back.
Amazon issues the refund immediately and the return follows — or it does not. Nobody reconciles the two automatically, which makes this the highest-volume leak in most accounts, and the one that hides best because every individual amount is small.
The five shapes it takes
- Refunded, never returned. The return window closed, no unit arrived, no reimbursement was issued.
- Returned, never restocked. The unit came back, was received, and never re-entered sellable inventory or got reimbursed.
- Returnless refunds above the threshold. Amazon can refund without requesting the item back — but not on items above the returnless limit.
- Refunded twice. The same order refunded through two paths.
- Wrong item returned. Something came back, but not what went out.
Why this one is invisible. A single unreturned $22 item is not worth anyone’s afternoon. Three hundred of them across a year is. This category is almost never found by looking — it is found by reconciling every refund against every physical return, which is a machine’s job.
The clock is different here
Customer return claims are not simply “60 days”. There is a waiting period first: the customer has to be given time to return the item, and only then does the claim window open.
That means a return discrepancy is not claimable the day it happens, and it stops being claimable sooner than people expect. Filing too early gets it rejected; noticing too late gets nothing. Both failures look identical on your statement, which is to say invisible.
Source: Amazon, FBA inventory reimbursement policy — see the customer return claim windows.
What we do about it
- Match every refund to its physical return, continuously — not in a quarterly sweep that misses most of the window.
- Track each one against its own eligibility dates, because they are not the same as the inventory dates.
- Queue by expiry rather than by value: a $22 claim expiring Friday outranks a $200 one with two months left.
- Check restocking actually happened, not just that a return was scanned.
Every check we run is published, this category included.
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