How to Dispute Amazon Shortage Claims (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. Published figures for what shortages cost a typical vendor trace back to recovery-provider marketing, so we do not quote one; the number that matters is the one in your own remittance data.

Here is the part most finance teams miss: many 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. Amazon's receiving runs on that label: its vendor documentation describes a required receive process that "scans a Serial Shipment Container Code (SSCC) barcode" on the outside of each carton or pallet, "eliminating the need to scan each item within the carton or pallet." 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. Some sources describe it as down from as long as five years, which we could not confirm. Vendor Central still displays around 7 years of deduction history, but claims older than 2 years are auto-rejected. SPS Commerce's dispute-timeline update for 1P suppliers, last updated in September 2025, is explicit that "any claims or re-disputes for invoices older than two years are now automatically rejected by the dispute management system," and that "the two-year time limit is according to the invoice date itself." 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.

Filing is item by item. Amazon has restricted the settlement route that bundled many shortages into one case (see the settlement path below), so unless you have an assigned vendor manager or a settlement offer, each shortage is disputed 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.

Submissions are screened for completeness. Recovery providers report that Amazon's review turns away incomplete or poorly structured evidence packets before anyone weighs the merits; we could not confirm how that screen works against an Amazon source. You will see confident win-rate comparisons quoted around this point, prepared vendors at one number and unprepared vendors at another. Every version we traced runs back to recovery-vendor marketing rather than measured data, so we do not repeat them. The mechanism stands without the statistics: submission quality, not claim merit, is the primary lever you control.

One more change worth flagging with a caveat: one source (Flex Logistik) reports a new shortage-recovery fee effective February 2026, charged on 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 doubtful and check your own Vendor Central account. If it does appear, it is reported to be a separate line from PQV, tied to fill rate rather than dispute.

The dispute sequence, step by step

This is the sequence we recommend 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. Queue new claims; you cannot file yet anyway. Amazon runs an automated matching window of roughly 35 days after the invoice due date, and dispute filing is blocked while it runs. Amazon confirms or reverses shortages itself during that window, so a share of your claims resolve with no effort from you. Treat this as a hard block rather than a tactical pause: log every new claim with the date it becomes dispute-eligible, and file the moment it opens. Waiting any longer only burns the 2-year clock.
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. Practitioners treat the signed POD as the anchor document and report that an unsigned or missing POD rarely wins. Add carrier tracking confirming delivery date and quantity, and label every attachment with the PO number, deduction ID, and document type so the reviewer can match each document to the claim.
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 with stronger evidence. Plan on one re-dispute that answers the reason Amazon gave for the denial, not a resubmission of the same packet. No published rule sets how many attempts a shortage claim gets, so make that round count rather than counting on a third attempt.
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. SPS Commerce's help guide on re-disputes and settlements, dated April 2026, states that "Settlement creation through Vendor Central has, for the time being, been discontinued," and lists the two cases in which one can still be created: "You have a Vendor Manager you can email directly regarding the creation of a settlement case," or Amazon's GSP team has contacted you with a "proactive settlement offer." Case-by-case settlements still exist, and SPS recommends taking every denied claim through the re-dispute round first. AVS coverage is not named as a requirement, so do not assume you need it before you ask.

The practical implication for finance leads: the dispute sequence above is no longer optional groundwork. SPS recommends the re-dispute round before any settlement request, so a vendor who skipped individual disputes starts that conversation from a weak position.

Why evidence quality decides everything

Once the matching window closes, the vendor carries the proof: Amazon's receiving record stands unless your documents show otherwise. 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 who recover consistently capture POD and BOL at carrier handoff, index them by PO and ASN, and transmit the ASN before the truck arrives, because Amazon requires the shipment confirmation before the product is received, and a late or inaccurate ASN raises shortage exposure downstream. Amazon's own documentation sets the clock: for palletized deliveries "you must send a shipment confirmation before requesting a delivery slot," and for parcels "the shipment confirmation needs to be submitted before items are shipped."

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 the five deduction types 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. For a vendor shipping $20M a year, every percentage point of shortage deductions is $200K a year in short-pays. We will not hand you an industry win rate to multiply that by, because the published ones are marketing rather than measurement. Use your own instead: pull the last twelve months of shortage deductions, count what you actually disputed and what actually came back, and apply that rate. Most vendors who have never run the process discover they have no recovery rate at all, which is the finding that matters. Every month of delay also 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 three or four standard Vendor Central exports, which you pull yourself so no login is shared, and we return a one-page readout: estimated recoverable dollars split by the streams your exports cover, and your top three findings. No commitment, and you keep the analysis either way. If you would rather hand the whole dispute queue to a specialist, that is our deduction recovery service.