A shortage claim says Amazon received fewer units than you invoiced, and deducts the difference. Read on a remittance, it looks like an accusation that you short-shipped.
In most accounts, that is not what happened. The units left your dock, the carrier delivered them, and something went wrong between the trailer door and the inventory record. The vendor is then billed for a warehouse process they have no control over.
Where the units actually go
The failures cluster in a handful of places, and none of them are about shipping the wrong quantity:
- Split receipts. A truck is unloaded across two doors or two shifts. One half is booked, the other is booked late or against a different reference, and the system sees a gap.
- Late check-in. Cartons arrive on time and sit before being received. The claim is raised against the invoice before the units are booked in.
- Wrong purchase order. A receipt lands against a neighbouring PO, leaving one PO short and another over. The overage rarely gets credited back to you on its own.
- Pallet and carton mismatches. Case packs read as eaches, or a mixed pallet counted at the pallet level rather than the carton level.
Amazon notifies vendors of shortage claims about five days before the invoice is due, which is not enough time for a finance team to investigate any of the above. The deduction goes through, and it becomes a dispute rather than a correction.
Wait before you file
This one is counterintuitive. The instinct on receiving a shortage claim is to dispute it immediately. That is often the worse move.
Amazon continues booking in late-arriving units after the claim is raised. Filing on day one means disputing a gap that may partly close itself, and a dispute filed against stale numbers is harder to re-open than one filed a few weeks later against settled ones.
Roughly thirty days after notification is the practical window: late receipts have landed, the record has settled, and what remains is the genuine gap. That is the number worth building evidence around.
What wins the dispute
Amazon rejects thin disputes, and a rejected claim is harder to win the second time. The set that works is consistent across almost every shortage:
- Proof of delivery from the carrier, showing the shipment arrived and when.
- A signed bill of lading, showing what was on the truck and who accepted it.
- The ASN record — the EDI 856 you transmitted, matching carton and unit counts.
- The purchase order and the invoice, so the disputed quantity ties to a specific line rather than a total.
With that set assembled properly, a large share of shortage claims are recoverable. Without it, the same claims get rejected and quietly written off.
Why teams stop chasing them
Nothing above is difficult. It is just slow. Each claim needs its own file, the documents sit in three different systems, and one of them usually lives with a carrier rather than with you. An hour of work for a few hundred dollars is a bad trade for a finance analyst with a close to run.
At a few thousand claims a year, the same arithmetic inverts completely. That is the whole case for running it as an audit rather than as a task: the per-claim cost only makes sense when the claims are worked in volume, with the document retrieval automated rather than done by hand.
Shortages are one of six categories on a vendor account, and usually the largest. They are rarely the only one.