Two honest caveats before I describe our own service, because both are things you should know when comparing agencies.
First: there is no industry standard for a point-based Amazon audit. Ours is a 25,000-point inspection, and that number describes our methodology rather than any recognised benchmark. Other agencies publish 9-point, 12-point or six-category frameworks. A bigger number is not evidence of a better audit, from us or anyone else. What matters is which areas get inspected and what evidence comes back.
Second: no independent benchmark exists for how much an audit typically recovers. The commonly quoted figure is 1–3% of annual revenue, and the sources publishing it describe it explicitly as an estimate from their own audit findings rather than a measured statistic. Reimbursement specialists publish their own performance claims — one states it secures reimbursement on more than 90% of claims it opens, at commission starting around 25%. Those are vendor figures. Every number in this space is produced by someone selling the service.
So this article describes what gets inspected and which findings recur, rather than promising a recovery figure. Anyone quoting you a specific percentage of revenue before looking at your account is guessing.
The six areas
1. Account health and compliance — Account Health Rating trend, Order Defect Rate, Late Shipment Rate, Valid Tracking Rate, open policy violations, product compliance documentation.
2. Listing and product quality — titles against current policy, bullets, descriptions, image compliance, A+ Content, retail readiness.
3. Keyword and organic — indexing verification, rank tracking against a baseline, backend search terms, competitor keyword gaps.
4. Advertising — campaign architecture, wasted spend, negative keyword hygiene, break-even against actual ACoS, and whether any automated tooling on the account complies with Amazon’s Agent Policy.
5. Pricing and brand protection — Buy Box ownership, MAP enforcement, unauthorised sellers, competitive position.
6. Inventory and fees — FBA fee accuracy against true dimensions, outstanding reimbursement claims, inbound reconciliation, inventory age.
Account Health: what the number means
Amazon’s own answers, from Seller Central, since most explanations of AHR are community guesswork:
- The scale is 0 to 1,000.
- “Any AHR above 200 is considered healthy.“
- “Your AHR will only improve if you successfully address the policy violations on your Account Health page.” Deleting a listing that carries a violation does not improve the score — a common and expensive misunderstanding.
- “If your fulfilled order count over the last 180 days decreases, your AHR may decrease, but it won’t decrease below 200 unless you have policy violations.”
- Violations carry four severity tiers: critical, high, medium, low.
- And the one that matters most: “Regardless of your AHR score, we may deactivate your account immediately if we suspect fraudulent, deceptive, illegal or otherwise harmful activity.”
You’ll see specific band figures quoted — every seller starts at 200, +4 points per 200 orders, violations subtract 2–8 points, “At Risk” at 100–199. Those are community-derived, not Amazon-published. Amazon’s own forum answers explicitly decline to name numeric thresholds beyond “above 200 is healthy.”
The standard performance targets are published: Order Defect Rate under 1%, pre-fulfilment cancellation under 2.5%, Late Shipment Rate under 4%, Valid Tracking Rate above 95%, On-Time Delivery above 90%.
The findings that recur
Across accounts, the same things come up. Every one of these is checkable, and most take under an hour to find.
Nobody populated Manage Your Sourcing Cost
This is the single most common recoverable finding, and it’s now the most expensive one to have missed.
Since 31 March 2025, items lost or damaged before a customer orders them are reimbursed at your manufacturing or sourcing cost rather than sale price. Amazon’s definition: “your cost to source a product from a manufacturer, wholesaler, reseller, or produce the item if you are the manufacturer” — explicitly excluding shipping, handling and customs duties.
If you don’t supply your costs, Amazon applies its own estimate, derived from comparable products sold by Amazon, other sellers and wholesale channels.
An account that never populated that page is being reimbursed at Amazon’s guess. The page sits in the Inventory Defect and Reimbursement portal. It’s the fastest fix in any audit and it applies to every future claim.
Post-purchase losses are still reimbursed at sale price minus referral and fulfilment fees.
Claim windows have expired, and UK windows differ from US
Most published guidance quotes US figures to UK audiences. They aren’t the same.
| Claim type | US window | UK window |
|---|---|---|
| Lost or damaged in a fulfilment centre | 60 days from report | 60 days from report |
| FBA customer returns | 60–120 days after refund | 45–105 days after refund |
| Removals lost in transit | 15–75 days from shipment creation | 15–75 days |
| Other removal claims | 60 days from delivery back | 60 days |
| FBA fee charged on wrong dimensions | 90 days from the charge | 90 days |
The US windows took effect 23 October 2024; the UK’s on 9 January 2025. Before those changes the window was 18 months.
That last point is why this finding recurs. Plenty of guidance still in circulation states an 18-month window as current policy. It isn’t, and an audit process built on it silently lets claims expire.
Warehouse loss and customer returns are now largely reimbursed proactively, from 1 November 2024 in the US, 15 January 2025 in the UK. Removal claims and fee errors still require manual filing. That’s where the manual effort should go.
Fee overcharges from wrong dimensions
Automated measurement at intake is imperfect. A loose polybag or a raised box flap registers larger dimensions, the product moves into a costlier band, and every subsequent unit is billed at the higher rate with no notification.
The audit compares the product-size-tier, the three side measurements and item-weight in the Fee Preview report against true measured dimensions. The full process for fixing and reclaiming this is here.
This finding got more valuable in 2026, because the new bulky packaging fee is priced on dimensional weight in five-pound bands. A measurement error that crosses a band boundary now costs an additional fixed fee per unit on top of the fulfilment fee.
Refunded but never returned
Consistently described as the largest recoverable category, and it requires a seller-initiated claim — Amazon’s proactive reimbursement doesn’t cover it. Customer refunded, item never came back, no automatic credit.
Search suppression that nobody noticed
Three different states get confused, and they need separating:
- Search suppressed: hidden from search results, still purchasable via direct link
- Inactive — out of stock or policy-violating
- Featured Offer suppressed — listing visible, no buy button
The first is the dangerous one, because the listing looks fine when you open it. Causes include missing category-required attributes, image specification failures, and title length: over 80 characters for apparel, shoes and luggage, over 130 for other categories triggers search suppression.
Note that’s a different rule from the 200-character policy maximum and from the 75-character title limit introduced in July 2026. Three separate thresholds, regularly conflated. Check Manage All Inventory filtered to Search Suppressed, and the Fix Your Products page.
Fee changes nobody modelled
Amazon’s 2026 US fee update took effect 15 January 2026 with at least 90 days’ notice, adjusting fulfilment, storage, low-inventory-level, aged inventory, inbound placement and return fees. No referral fee changes and no new fee types.
Amazon’s headline is an average increase of $0.08 per unit sold, “less than 0.5% of an average item’s selling price.” Worth noting that sellers responding on Amazon’s own announcement thread dispute it, reporting real increases of 30 cents or more once every fee type is counted.
Both can be true — an average across the whole marketplace tells you little about a specific catalogue. Which is the point of auditing your own numbers rather than accepting the headline.
What an audit cannot do
It can’t recover expired claims. Past 90 days on a fee error, past 105 or 120 on a return, the money is gone. This is why audit timing matters more than audit depth.
It can’t fix a product with broken unit economics. If landed cost plus fees leaves a 12% margin, no amount of campaign restructuring rescues it. That’s a pricing or sourcing decision.
It can’t promise a number. See the top of this article.
The three things to check today
If you do nothing else with this:
1. Open Manage Your Sourcing Cost. If it’s empty, every pre-order reimbursement you receive is calculated on Amazon’s estimate rather than your real cost.
2. Filter Manage All Inventory to Search Suppressed. It takes thirty seconds and periodically finds a product that has been invisible for weeks.
3. Pull the Fee Preview report and compare product-size-tier against what you measured. You have 90 days from each charge, and the clock started without telling you.
None of that requires an agency. It requires someone to look, on a schedule, which is the actual product any audit is selling.
FAQ
What does an Amazon account audit include? Six areas: account health and compliance, listing and product quality, keyword and organic performance, advertising structure, pricing and brand protection, and inventory and fee accuracy. Point counts vary between agencies and no industry standard exists.
What is a good Amazon Account Health Rating? Amazon states that any AHR above 200 is considered healthy, on a 0–1,000 scale. Specific band figures below that circulate widely but are community-derived rather than Amazon-published.
How much can an Amazon audit recover? No independent benchmark exists. The commonly quoted 1–3% of annual revenue is characterised by its own sources as an estimate from audit findings, not a measured statistic. Recovery depends on account size, category, claim history and how much of the window remains.
How long do I have to file an FBA reimbursement claim? It varies by claim type and region. Fee errors from wrong dimensions: 90 days from the charge. Fulfilment centre loss or damage: 60 days. Customer returns: 60–120 days in the US, 45–105 days in the UK. The former 18-month window ended in October 2024 for the US and January 2025 for the UK.
Why is my Amazon listing search suppressed? Usually a missing category-required attribute, an image specification failure, or a title exceeding 80 characters for apparel, shoes and luggage or 130 for other categories. Check Manage All Inventory filtered to Search Suppressed, and the Fix Your Products page.
Sami Sultan runs Ecom Enable, an Amazon growth partner for DTC brands, which sells the audit described here. Policy details and claim windows verified against Amazon Seller Central US and UK on 27 August 2026. Where a figure is an industry estimate rather than published data, this article says so.
Sources: Amazon Seller Central — Account Health Rating, Amazon staff, UK Seller Forums, US reimbursement policy update, UK reimbursement policy update, manufacturing cost valuation, reimbursement policy; 2026 US fee update.