For years, "FBA reimbursement" services promised to comb your account for money Amazon owed you — lost inventory, damaged units, fee errors — and take a cut of whatever they recovered. In 2024–26 Amazon changed the rules enough that this business model largely collapsed. Here's what actually happened, and what's still worth recovering yourself.
What Amazon changed
- Automated more reimbursements. Amazon now auto-reimburses many warehouse-lost and damaged-inventory cases, so there's less left for a third party to "find."
- Shortened claim windows. The period you have to file a claim was cut dramatically, so old back-catalog sweeps — the bread and butter of recovery services — mostly aged out.
- Changed the reimbursement basis. Reimbursements moved toward your sourcing/manufacturing cost rather than retail value, cutting the payout on higher-margin items.
The combined effect: the percentage-of-recovery industry shrank hard. A sophisticated acquirer that bought a major player in this space wrote the recovery business down to a fraction of its purchase price within about a year and a half — a blunt market signal that the easy money is gone.
What's still recoverable
Recovery didn't hit zero — it moved from "sweep the back catalog" to "catch errors as they happen." The live categories:
- Fee overcharges from size-tier misclassification. When Amazon re-measures a product and puts it in a more expensive bracket, every subsequent unit is overcharged. This is refundable if you notice inside the window — and it's the single most valuable thing to watch. (See our 2026 FBA fee changes guide.)
- Weight/dimension disputes. Where Amazon's recorded dimensions differ from your product's true packed size, a re-measure can correct the fee.
- Genuinely lost or damaged inventory not auto-reimbursed. Some cases still slip through automation and are claimable — but only inside the shorter window.
Why "do it yourself" now wins
When windows were 18 months, paying someone 25% to sweep your history made sense. With short windows, recovery is a monitoring problem: you have to catch the error within weeks, every week, forever. That's not a service engagement — it's a standing check you run as part of reading your settlement. And once you're already reconciling the settlement (which you should be), the fee-error check costs you nothing extra.
This is exactly why Sumhound bundles fee-anomaly detection into the free settlement analyzer instead of charging a percentage of recoveries. The recovery you get is whatever you'd have paid a service to find — minus the percentage, and fast enough to still be inside the window.