Amazon publishes a great deal about your business across reports that were built for different purposes, on different clocks, and which disagree with each other. This is what those numbers mean, what they can prove, and what no tool can honestly claim from them.
Written from inside real Amazon accounts. If something here is wrong, tell us and we will correct it.
Amazon does not hide your numbers. It gives you a great many of them, in reports that were designed for different purposes and do not agree with each other. The Finance API returns roughly 180 days on a rolling basis. Settlement reports go back further but arrive on a payout schedule. The inventory ledger covers 18 months. Order data has its own retention.
This is the actual problem. Not a lack of data, but data on five different clocks, with the same figure appearing in three places at three values depending on which report produced it and when.
A seller comparing this month to last month is usually comparing two windows of different length without realising it. A tool showing "last 90 days" is often showing whatever it happened to have cached.
Amazon charges two categories of fee that behave in opposite ways, and lumping them together hides which one is hurting you.
Referral fees are a percentage of sale price, typically 15%. They scale with price. If your margin is being eaten by referral fees, the lever is price or category.
FBA fulfilment fees are per unit, set by size tier and weight. They do not scale with price at all. If fulfilment is the problem, raising price does nothing to your unit economics and shrinking the box does.
Most reporting shows one blended "Amazon fees" figure. That number cannot tell you which lever to pull, and the two levers point in different directions. A product that crossed a size tier and a product that is priced too low look identical until the fees are separated.
Units disappear inside FBA. The honest question is what can be evidenced, because a claim you cannot support wastes everyone's time.
Amazon's inventory ledger publishes, per SKU per month, an opening balance, every movement it recorded, and a closing balance. Receipts, customer shipments, customer returns, vendor returns, found, lost, damaged, disposed, and a column called unknown events, which is Amazon's own count of movements it cannot categorise.
That makes one thing provable: whether Amazon's own opening balance plus its own recorded movements equals its own closing balance. When it does not, the discrepancy is Amazon's arithmetic failing to reconcile against itself. That is a strong position to take to Seller Support, because it is not your reconstruction being questioned.
What cannot be proven is where the units went. Amazon never names a recipient. Any tool telling you your stock was sold by another seller is inferring, not reporting.
There is also a real and innocent explanation worth ruling out first: if a SKU is stickerless and commingled, units moving into other sellers' accounts is documented behaviour rather than loss. Check enrolment before concluding anything.
And the ledger covers 18 months. A unit received before that window cannot have its history reconstructed by anyone, at any price.
Recovering money Amazon owes you is a well-served category. Most tools count reimbursements credited and present the total as money recovered.
Amazon also reverses reimbursements. A credit issued in March can be clawed back in June, sometimes because the unit was later found, sometimes because the original claim was reassessed. These reversals appear in settlement data as adjustments, and they are frequently not netted off.
It is entirely possible to run a period where more was clawed back than credited, and to be shown a positive recovery figure throughout. The gross number is not wrong exactly, it is just not the number that describes your bank balance.
Any figure presented as recovered should be net of reversals, and should say how much of it rests on adjustment lines with no explicit type, because that portion is a classification judgement rather than a fact.
Stranded inventory is stock sitting in a fulfilment centre that no shopper can buy. Amazon publishes a stranded inventory report, and most tools read it.
The report lags. It also misses cases. And a tool that reads only that report shows zero stranded units when the report has not run, which looks identical to having no problem.
Stranded is a condition, not a report. A suppressed or inactive listing with stock behind it is stranded by definition, whether or not the report has caught up. So are units marked unfulfillable, which sit in a warehouse and cannot ship. Both are derivable from data you already have.
The distinction matters most when it is early. Stock that has just become unsellable can be fixed by fixing the listing. Stock that has been stranded for months has usually also aged into long-term storage fees, and the remaining options cost money.
A number of things are commonly asserted in this category that we do not say, because we cannot support them.
We do not say your settlements are reconciled to the cent. OP checks each settlement file against the total Amazon states in that same file, which catches parse failures and inconsistent files. That is an integrity check. Reconciling against your bank would require your bank, and we do not have it.
We do not tell you where missing units went. See above.
We do not change anything in your account. No pricing, no listing content, no images, no campaigns.
We do not present an estimate as a fact. Where a window is not supported by the data behind it, the window is shown as unavailable with the reason, rather than silently falling back to whatever range happens to be cached.
Connect Amazon in about two minutes. Nothing charged for 14 days.