How to Check Your Amazon Settlement for Adjustments

Open the settlement and pull out every line that isn't a normal order or a normal refund. The ones that cost sellers the most are shipping label adjustments: the carrier re-measured your box and charged you the difference. Next are refunds where nothing ever came back. Amazon doesn't email you about either one. They just show up in the settlement.

Most sellers never open it. One seller I sat down with had been on Amazon for two years and had no idea a settlement could contain adjustments at all. His last one held about $18,000 of them.

Does Amazon really know your box is bigger than you said?

Yes. Sellers ship with the wrong weights and dimensions on file, thinking nobody checks. The carrier checks. It re-weighs and re-measures the package, recharges the label, and that charge lands in your Amazon settlement as an adjustment, weeks after you counted the order as profit.

That seller and I downloaded his settlement report and put it in a pivot table. About $18,000 in that one settlement was shipping adjustments. That was unusually large. Many sellers find little or nothing; what you find depends on your volume and how accurate your box sizes are.

His fix was ordinary once he saw it: he corrected the weights and dimensions on file, and stopped using the carriers that kept re-rating him.

What does a shipping adjustment look like in the settlement?

A line with the transaction type Adjustment, sometimes ShippingServicesRefund or BuyerRecharge, tied to an order you already shipped. One line is a few dollars. Across a month of orders with the wrong box size on file, it's the gap between what you thought you made and what Amazon paid you. Here's one order where two re-rates turned a 23.6% margin into a loss.

Where else does money disappear in an Amazon settlement?

• Refunds with nothing returned. The settlement is where you find out Amazon refunded a buyer who never sent anything back. Where else would you know? A refund in the settlement, and no return on record, nothing received.
• Customer claims: A-to-z Guarantee refunds and chargeback refunds.
• Return label costs you paid on top of the refund.
• Reimbursements and clawbacks: FBA reimbursements for lost or damaged inventory, and clawbacks when Amazon takes one back.
• FBA fees that are easy to miss: inbound defect, inbound transportation, removal order and customer returns fees.

Why your Amazon payout never matches your sales covers the rest of the gap: reserves, deferred transactions and the settlement window.

How do I check my Amazon settlement for free?

Run the free Amazon Settlement Analyzer. It reads your last two settlements and groups every adjustment by type: shipping label re-rates, return labels, customer claims, reimbursements, clawbacks and the FBA fees that are easy to miss. Charges and credits are shown separately, with the largest lines called out. No credit card. It reads the settlement reports only, never your orders or buyer information.

How do I catch refunds where nothing came back?

That takes your returns as well as your settlement, so a settlement-only check can't do it. In Rilk, the refunded orders reconcile report has a view of Amazon orders refunded but not returned, next to the ones refunded and received. Reports are on Rilk's Pro and Ultimate plans.

What should I do after I find something?

Fix the cause first: the dimensions on file and the carriers. Then get off a system that only shows you the estimate. Rilk puts shipping adjustments and refunds against the order they belong to, so the next one shows up on the order, not three weeks later in a deposit you can't explain.

Analyze your last two settlements free · Start free at rilk.ai · See plans.

Rilk is inventory, order and shipping software for multi-channel sellers. Rilk is not affiliated with Amazon. Amazon is a trademark of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.