Amazon Waives Inbound Defect Fees on Delayed International FBA Shipments

Amazon Seller Central announcement: 30 October 2026

If you ship into FBA from overseas, you already know the problem. A multi-destination plan goes out as one booking, the containers split across ports, and one leg clears customs three weeks after the other. Amazon’s inbound performance system does not see a customs hold. It sees a shipment that never finished, marks it deleted or abandoned, and charges a defect fee. Amazon has now acknowledged the mismatch for the peak-season window and widened the clock.

1. What Amazon Changed

For qualifying international shipment plans, the window for related shipments to arrive has moved from 30 days to 45 days, counted from the date the first shipment is received. If the remaining shipments land inside that 45-day window, the deleted-or-abandoned defect fee is waived.

Read the trigger carefully, because it is the part most sellers get wrong: the 45 days run from the first receive date, not from the date you shipped and not from the date you created the plan. A container that sits at anchor for a fortnight before anything is received does not start the clock.

2. The Defect Still Shows. Only the Fee Goes.

This is the detail worth underlining. Amazon is waiving the charge, not the record. The defect continues to appear on your Inbound Performance Dashboard exactly as before.

That matters because the dashboard is the surface Amazon uses when it reviews inbound behaviour. A clean fee statement sitting next to a dashboard full of deleted-and-abandoned flags is still a pattern, and it is still visible. Treat the waiver as relief on cash, not as a reset on your inbound record.

3. Fees Already Charged Are Being Refunded

Sellers who were charged a defect fee on an eligible plan should not need to open a case. Amazon says the reimbursements are being applied automatically and will show in the Reimbursement report.

“Automatic” is not the same as “guaranteed”. Run the check yourself rather than assuming the credit landed.

• Open the Reimbursement report and filter to the period since 1 August 2026.
• Sort your international shipment plans by creation date and mark the ones that fall inside the 1 August – 30 November window.
• Match each eligible plan that carried a defect fee against a refund line.
• Where an eligible fee has no matching refund, raise it with Seller Support and cite the 30 October announcement.

4. What to Do Before 30 November

The qualifying window closes with November. Plans created from 1 December onwards are not covered by this waiver, so there is a short, practical window in which creating the plan early is worth real money.

• Create international shipment plans for Q4 and early Q1 restocks before 30 November 2026 where your freight timeline allows it.
• Track the 45-day period from first receive on every multi-destination plan, not from your own ship date.
• Keep carrier updates, customs hold notices and port delay confirmations. You do not need them to qualify, but you will want them if you end up disputing a fee that was not waived.
• Watch the 90-day auto-closure separately. The waiver widened the defect window; it did not move the point at which a plan closes itself.

5. The Honest Read

This is a sensible, narrow concession rather than a policy change. Amazon has not decided that ocean freight delays should stop counting as defects — it has decided that, for one peak-season window, it will not bill for them. The underlying measurement is unchanged, the dashboard is unchanged, and the window expires.

So take the refund, check the report, and keep managing inbound as if the 30-day clock is coming back. In December, it does.