Amazon Vendor Economics

Amazon Shortage Claim Disputes: 2026 Guide

By Robert Antolin · July 11, 2026

If you run finance for an Amazon 1P vendor, you have seen it on the remittance: Amazon claims it received fewer units than you invoiced, then pays the invoice short. That is a shortage claim, coded PQV (Purchase Quantity Variance) in Vendor Central. For a typical vendor, shortage claims run 1 to 3 percent of invoiced value per year, and 5 to 10 percent for accounts with systemic ASN problems.

Here is the part most finance teams miss: most shortages are not real. They are receiving-system artifacts, an ASN that arrived after the truck, a scan failure at the fulfillment center, a carton label that would not read. The units are in Amazon's building. The money is recoverable, but only through a dispute process that Amazon tightened significantly through 2025 and 2026.

This guide covers what changed, the dispute sequence that works now, and where the settlement path actually stands.

What changed in 2025 and 2026

Three rule changes reshaped the economics of shortage disputes:

The dispute window is now roughly 2 years, down from up to 5. Vendor Central still displays around 7 years of deduction history, but claims older than 2 years are auto-rejected. A missed window is a permanent write-off. If you have not reconciled remittances since 2024, some of that balance is already gone and more is aging out every month.

Bulk disputes are discontinued. Every claim must be filed individually through Vendor Central Dispute Management. For a vendor with hundreds of open shortage lines, dispute labor is now a real cost, which is exactly why so many teams stop filing and eat the loss.

AI screens your submission before a human sees it. Amazon's automated review rejects incomplete or poorly structured evidence packets outright. Vendors submitting audit-ready packets win around 70 percent of disputes. Unprepared vendors now clear under 40 percent. Submission quality, not claim merit, is the primary lever.

One more change worth flagging with a caveat: one source (Flex Logistik) reports a new shortage-recovery fee effective February 2026, charging vendors 10 to 25 percent of COGS for confirmed out-of-stocks that cause lost sales. We have not seen this corroborated by Amazon documentation or the major recovery providers, so treat it as unconfirmed and verify against your own Vendor Central account. If it applies to you, note that it is a separate line from PQV and is addressed by fill-rate improvement, not by dispute.

The dispute sequence, step by step

This is the operating sequence we run for 1P vendors. It assumes you have pulled the Backup Report and remittance data and separated shortage claims (PQV) from price claims (PPV/PDC).

1. Hold new claims for 30 days before disputing. Amazon frequently self-reconciles additional received units in the first 30 days after a shortage posts, shrinking or eliminating the claim. Disputing on day 3 wastes effort on money Amazon was about to return anyway. Keep a hold queue with a dispute-eligible date per claim.
2. Prioritize by dollar value and age. Largest claims first, and anything approaching 18 months old jumps the queue, because the 2-year auto-rejection is a hard cutoff.
3. Build the evidence packet per claim. Match PO to confirmed ASN to packing slip to signed Bill of Lading or Proof of Delivery. The signed POD is the decisive document: an unsigned or missing POD makes the dispute close to unwinnable. Add carrier tracking confirming delivery date and quantity, and label every attachment with the PO number, deduction ID, and document type so the AI screen can parse it.
4. File each claim individually in Vendor Central Dispute Management. One claim, one packet, one short explanation of what the evidence proves. Record the case ID.
5. Follow up at 30 and 60 days. No resolution at 30 days means escalating through Case Management.
6. If denied, re-dispute once with stronger evidence. You get a second round. Use it to fix whatever the denial flagged, not to resubmit the same packet.
7. Track the aggregate for a settlement conversation. Where individual re-disputes fail and material dollars remain, the settlement path opens, with conditions covered below.

Confirm every won claim against the next remittance, and tag each recovery with a root cause: ASN accuracy, carrier failure, label defect. That root-cause column is your prevention backlog. A shortage you prevent costs a fraction of one you dispute.

The settlement path: restricted, not dead

You may have read that Amazon killed shortage settlements. That is not quite right. What ended is self-service: settlement creation through Vendor Central and the email case form are gone. Case-by-case settlements still exist, but with two conditions. You need an assigned AVS manager or dedicated vendor manager to sponsor the case, and Amazon expects denied claims to have gone through the re-dispute round first.

The practical implication for finance leads: the dispute sequence above is no longer optional groundwork. It is the qualifying round for any settlement. A vendor who skipped individual disputes has no standing to negotiate an aggregate, and a vendor without AVS has no channel. If your unpaid balance is large and you lack AVS coverage, that math belongs in your next AVS renewal decision.

Why evidence quality decides everything

Amazon's system is presumed correct until you prove otherwise, and the burden of proof sits entirely with the vendor. The evidence that wins is generated at ship time or not at all: a signed BOL cannot be recreated three months after a deduction posts. The vendors clearing 70 percent win rates capture POD and BOL at carrier handoff, index them by PO and ASN, and transmit the ASN before the truck arrives, because an ASN that lands after the physical shipment is treated as missing and generates an automatic shortage.

If your team cannot pull the signed POD for a given PO in under five minutes, that retrieval gap, not Amazon's receiving accuracy, is your real recovery ceiling.

Shortage claims are also only one of three deduction streams hitting your remittance. Chargebacks and co-op deductions follow different rules and different evidence. Our overview of how Amazon vendor deductions work maps the full set, and if you are weighing tools to handle the volume, we compared the main options in our review of SupplyPike, Carbon6, and ChargeGuard alternatives.

What this is worth

Run the arithmetic on your own numbers. A vendor shipping $20M a year at a 2 percent shortage rate is losing $400K annually to short-pays. At a 70 percent win rate on the disputable portion, a disciplined process recovers most of that, and every month of delay pushes the oldest claims past the 2-year line for good.

If you want to know what is sitting in your own deduction history before committing to anything, we run a free deduction scan for 1P vendors: send us your remittance exports, and we return a breakdown of what was deducted, what is disputable, and what is about to age out. No commitment, and you keep the analysis either way.