The best Amazon reimbursement service depends on a rule change most rankings ignore

Four shapes, and they are not interchangeable

Every ranking of this category lists vendors. Almost none of them explain that the vendors are structurally different businesses, which is the part that determines whether you are overpaying.

• Standalone contingency specialists. No subscription. They audit, file and chase, and take a published percentage of what arrives. GETIDA is the best-known example, publishing performance-based pricing starting at 25% with the first $400 recovered free for new accounts, read on 20 August 2026. Note the wording: 25% is a floor rather than a ceiling, so confirm your own rate in writing.
• Recovery bundled into a subscription. You pay a monthly platform fee and the commission on recoveries is lower. Seller 365 attaches 15% to its lower tiers and 5% to its top one, published on the plan comparison.
• Identify-only software. Analytics products that surface claim candidates and hand you the list. Filing is yours, through Seller Support. Most say so accurately, and it is an honest boundary rather than a shortcoming.
• Full-service operators. Teams who work recovery as one line inside broader Amazon account or supply-chain management, priced as a service rather than a percentage of found money. That is the category we are in.

The important consequence: they cannot be compared on rate alone. A percentage of recovered funds with no subscription and a lower percentage attached to a monthly fee produce different totals depending entirely on how much you recover. Below a few thousand dollars a year, the pure contingency almost always wins. Above a certain volume, the subscription-plus-low-commission shape overtakes it. Do that arithmetic with your own numbers before reading anyone's ranking.

The rule change that reset the category

Amazon's updated FBA inventory reimbursement policy took effect on 31 March 2025. The core of it: reimbursement valuation moved towards the manufacturing or sourcing cost of a lost or damaged item rather than its selling price, and sellers were given a portal in which to submit their cost documentation before the switch took hold.

Every ranking article we can find still evaluates this category as if that had not happened. It did, and three things follow.

First, the money on the table shrank in dollar terms. A unit reimbursed at cost is worth less than the same unit reimbursed at retail. Case studies quoting large historical recoveries describe a bigger pool than the one you are buying access to now. That does not make the services worse; it makes older comparisons unreliable.

Second, your own cost data now sets the payout. Where the sourcing cost Amazon holds is missing or wrong, valuation happens without your input. This is free to fix, it takes an afternoon, and no vendor can do it for you. Doing it before you engage anybody increases the value of every claim they subsequently file — which means the highest-return step in this entire process costs nothing and appears on no ranking.

Third, value moved towards the difficult categories. Where Amazon detects and settles an issue itself, there is nothing for a third party to find. The remaining work is inbound shipment discrepancies, removals that never came back, damage attribution, customer return and refund mismatches, and fee-level errors. Those are the categories to interrogate a vendor about, because they are what is left.

A scoring rubric you can run in twenty minutes

Score each candidate out of two on the six questions below. Anything scoring under eight is not a serious contender for a brand of size, and the exercise works equally well on us.

• Commission basis. Is the fee calculated on cases the vendor opened, evidenced and pursued — or on the total movement in your reimbursements report? Ask for the answer in writing and ask to see how it appears on an invoice. This is the single largest hidden variable in the category and it is almost never discussed.
• Claim coverage. Which specific categories, named. Lost units, damaged units, inbound discrepancies, removals, return and refund mismatches, and fee errors are six different disciplines. Very few vendors are strong at all six.
• Filing speed. Median days from detection to filing, given windows counted in days rather than quarters. A vendor with a backlog identifies claims perfectly and still misses them.
• Evidence handling. Who assembles the documentation, and does a human review a case before it is opened? Automated volume filing gets cases closed rather than paid.
• Cost-data hygiene. Does the vendor check whether your sourcing cost information is complete before filing? Post-2025 this materially changes the amount you receive, and a vendor who ignores it is leaving your money behind while charging a percentage of the rest.
• Change of control. What happens to your rate, your data and your open cases if the company is acquired? This is not hypothetical: SPS Commerce completed its acquisition of Carbon6, whose suite includes a well-established recovery product, in February 2025. Ownership moves in this market constantly. Price protection, notice periods and data portability are ordinary commercial diligence, not suspicion.

One more that costs nothing and is worth doing on every supplier you have: get written notice of fee changes. Apply that to us as well.

Who publishes a price, and who does not

Transparency varies widely here, and it is worth stating neutrally rather than as an accusation, because there are respectable reasons on both sides.

Published on the vendor's own page, read on 20 August 2026: GETIDA's contingency rate starting at 25% and its $400 free allowance; Seller 365's 15% and 5% commission rates tied to subscription tiers. Those figures let you model before you talk to anybody, which is a genuine service to a buyer.

Quoted on a call: several specialists, including the recovery product inside the Carbon6 suite, which publishes no figures on its site and routes you to a conversation. Enterprise-oriented vendors frequently band contingency rates by recovery volume, and a single published number would misrepresent what a large account would actually pay. That is a defensible position rather than evasion.

We are in the second group. Dr. Stock has no published price. It would be incoherent to build a page around transparency and quietly skip that, so: on this specific measure, a vendor printing a flat percentage is ahead of us.

The practical instruction either way is the same. Ask for the rate, the basis it is calculated on, the invoice format and the notice period — all four, in writing, before the integration goes live. A vendor that answers those plainly has told you more than a published headline number would.

What recovery does not cover, and why it is usually not the biggest number

Reimbursement recovery is a claims process: something specific went wrong, there is a form, and there is a deadline. A large share of what leaks out of an Amazon P&L is not a claim at all, which means no recovery vendor is looking at it.

• Size-tier and dimension overcharges. Amazon bills fulfilment against the dimensions and weight it has recorded. When those are wrong, the overcharge repeats on every unit shipped for as long as the record stands. There is no claim form for this — it is a remeasure request and a dispute, pursued to a conclusion. It is also frequently the largest recurring line in the account, and it sits outside almost every recovery mandate.
• Aged inventory. Amazon's FBA page states that units held in a fulfilment centre beyond 181 days attract an aged-inventory surcharge, charged monthly on top of ordinary storage. Nothing about that is recoverable. It is avoidable, by deciding to remove, liquidate, discount or absorb before the assessment lands.
• Storage growth generally. Storage is charged on the volume you occupy. Slow-moving stock quietly compounds the bill every month it sits.
• Stockouts. Running out costs rank, and buying rank back through advertising costs more than the inventory would have. No claim exists for that either.
• Returns. The genuine landed cost of a return by SKU — reverse logistics, grading, disposition, restocking — is rarely calculated and often changes which products deserve shelf space at all.

Recovery is worth doing, and on contingency it is close to free to try. Just do not mistake it for the whole supply-side problem. For most brands past a few thousand units a month, the recurring leaks above are larger than the claims backlog, and they arrive again next month.

Where we fit, and when we would tell you not to bother with us

Dr. Stock does not fulfil orders, is not a system of record and is not an ERP. Nor is it a contingency recovery specialist, and we are not going to compete on rate with people who charge nothing unless they succeed.

Dr. Stock is the whole supply-side queue run as a product: Fable 5 on Amazon inventory and supply chain — reorder timing and stockout risk, storage and aged-inventory exposure, remove-or-liquidate decisions, fee and dimension disputes, inbound discrepancies, claim recovery and returns cost per SKU — with human operators supervising at an autonomy level you set, and purchasing decisions always coming back to a person.

Those operators come from Full Circle, a full-service Amazon management company with $500M+ in managed revenue across 100+ brands. No published price: a demo, the first 30 days free, and a number agreed on the call. Orbit is included at no extra cost, covering inventory, finance, ASIN-level profitability and the fee, price, BSR and buy box trackers.

When we would tell you not to bother with us: if reimbursement recovery is genuinely the only gap, engage a contingency specialist tomorrow, fix your sourcing cost data first, and spend nothing else. That is a better use of your money than a conversation with us.

And the redirect that catches a surprising number of brands: recovery often gets chased because margin slipped and this felt like the fastest lever. If the actual cause is advertising spend landing on search terms that never convert, the repair is in the ad account and Dr. PPC is the product for it.