You sent 480 units and Amazon says 456
A shipment leaves your prep centre with 20 cartons of 24 units. A fortnight later Seller Central shows it as closed with 456 received. Maybe one carton is still being processed, maybe it went to a different building, maybe it was genuinely lost. The honest answer is that most sellers never look, because by the time the shipment closes, the next three are already on the road.
When someone does look, the evidence is spread around: the packing list in the prep centre's portal, the carrier's proof of delivery, the box content information entered in Seller Central and the shipment event history. Pulling it together for one shipment takes an hour. Doing it for every shipment is not going to happen by hand.
Why shortfalls slip through
Receiving at a fulfilment centre is not instant. Cartons from one shipment can be checked in over days, and quantities can move between shipments when items are received against the wrong one. So a shipment that looks short on Monday may be complete on Thursday. That uncertainty makes people wait, and waiting turns into forgetting.
- Receiving happens gradually, so there is no clear moment to check.
- Units received against another of your shipments hide the real picture.
- The shipped quantity you trust is in the prep centre system, not in Seller Central.
- Proof of delivery sits with the carrier or freight forwarder.
- Amazon's own time limits for raising an investigation keep running while you wait.
The quiet cost of not checking
Every unit that was sent and never received is stock you paid for, prepped and shipped, and then lost without a trace in your records. Your stock value is overstated, your sell-through looks worse than it is, and the reorder decision for that SKU is based on a number that does not exist.
There is a time cost too. When shortfalls are chased only occasionally, each one becomes a small investigation, with someone reconstructing what happened from emails weeks after the event.
What we build to catch the gaps
- A record of what was actually packed for every shipment, taken from the planner or prep centre export at the moment the cartons are sealed.
- A daily pull from the Selling Partner API of each shipment's status and received quantities per SKU.
- A matching step that compares shipped and received across all your open and recently closed shipments, so a unit received against the wrong shipment is not counted twice as missing.
- A waiting period you set, after which a remaining gap is treated as a real discrepancy rather than receiving still in progress.
- An evidence pack for each discrepancy: packing list, carton labels, box content data, carrier tracking and proof of delivery where you supply it.
- A case queue that shows each gap, its value, how long is left before Amazon's time limit for that type of issue, and whether a case has been raised and what the outcome was.
| Shipment state | What the check does |
|---|---|
| Still receiving | Watches, no alert yet |
| Closed, quantities match | Marked as reconciled |
| Closed, small gap offset elsewhere | Linked to the other shipment, no case |
| Closed, real gap after waiting period | Flagged with evidence pack prepared |
| Case raised | Tracked until outcome is recorded |
Raising the case in Seller Central stays with a person. We build the evidence and the reminders; your team decides what to claim and sends it.
What changes for the person doing inbound
Instead of an occasional detective job, there is a short list each week of shipments with a real gap, each with the paperwork already attached. The ones that resolve themselves during receiving never reach that list.
Over a few months, you also see patterns: a carrier whose deliveries are received short more often, a SKU whose barcode causes confusion, a prep centre that miscounts one carton size. Those are process fixes, and they only show up when every shipment is checked the same way.
Does this sound like your account?
- You rarely compare shipped and received quantities after a shipment closes.
- Your prep centre's counts and Seller Central's counts disagree and nobody follows up.
- Finding proof of delivery for an old shipment takes a morning.
- You have missed Amazon's time limit on a shortfall because it was noticed too late.
- Stock figures in your own records drift away from what Amazon shows.