Chargebacks are compliance fines. Amazon publishes operational requirements for how vendors label, pack, route and confirm shipments, and charges you when a shipment misses one.
Taken individually they are small enough to ignore. Taken across a year of purchase orders they become one of the larger deduction categories on a vendor account, and a significant share of them are issued against shipments that complied.
The categories you will see
Amazon runs dozens of chargeback types spread across several groups. The ones that generate the most volume:
- ASN accuracy. The EDI 856 does not match what arrived — counts, timing, or a transmission that landed after the truck did.
- PO on-time accuracy. The shipment fell outside the agreed delivery window.
- Carton content accuracy. What is inside the carton does not match what the carton says is inside it.
- Label accuracy. Missing, unreadable or incorrectly placed labels on cartons or pallets.
- Prep issues and ship-in-own-container. Units arriving without required poly-bagging, bundling or protective packaging.
- No-show. A delivery appointment booked through Amazon’s routing system that was not met.
- Paper invoice. Invoicing outside EDI when EDI is required.
They surface in the Operational Performance report inside Vendor Central, under Reports. That is the only place most vendors ever look at them, and usually only after the deduction has already been taken.
Why so many of them are wrong
Nobody at Amazon reviews a chargeback before it is issued. The rule is evaluated by system, the fine is applied by system, and it appears on your remittance without a human ever having looked at the shipment.
A machine-issued fine against a rule that moves, evaluated on data entered at a receiving dock, is going to misfire at a predictable rate. The question is not whether some of your chargebacks are wrong. It is how many, and whether anyone is checking.
The common failure patterns:
- A carton flagged for a missing label where the label is visible in the receiving photograph.
- A PO marked late where Amazon itself rescheduled the appointment, and the reschedule is in the routing record.
- An ASN flagged as inaccurate where the transmission log shows it was sent correctly and on time.
- A prep fine on a shipment where the requirement was introduced or changed after the PO was raised.
What the dispute needs
Chargebacks are more evidence-hungry than shortages, because you are proving a process was followed rather than proving a quantity. What works:
- Carton and pallet photographs from the receiving side, where they exist.
- The EDI transmission record, with timestamps, for anything ASN-related.
- Appointment and routing confirmations, including any reschedule initiated by Amazon.
- The carrier’s delivery record, to establish when the trailer actually arrived.
Do not chase them one at a time
Chargebacks are the clearest example of a category where per-claim chasing loses money. A fine might be a few hundred dollars. Pulling the routing record, retrieving the transmission log and writing the dispute takes longer than the fine is worth to any individual person on your team.
The only version that works is the batch version: pull every chargeback in the period, group them by type, retrieve the evidence per group, and file them together. That turns a losing per-claim trade into a straightforward one, and it is why this category tends to go completely unworked until somebody runs it at scale.
Chargebacks sit alongside shortages, price claims and co-op on the same remittance. The full breakdown is here.