Chargebacks

A chargeback on Amazon Vendor Central is a fee Amazon deducts from your remittance when an order or shipment misses one of its compliance requirements.

Outside this context the word means something else, where a cardholder reverses a payment through their bank, but nothing in a vendor account refers to that sense: every chargeback here is Amazon billing you for an operational miss against its own rules.

What it is

Amazon sorts these charges into families by which part of the order cycle went wrong. Five of those families, and what each one is measuring:

• Advance Shipment Notice (ASN): the notice missing, late, or not matching what arrived at the dock.
• Purchase order on-time: confirmations and deliveries that fall outside the window the PO named.
• Carton: whether what a carton actually holds matches the contents recorded for it in the ASN.
• Preparation: the physical prep a unit needs before Amazon will take it in.
• Labeling: barcodes and item labels that scan wrong, or that are not there at all.

The field your account shows all of this under is Non-Compliance Performance, and it carries each charge as Pending, Waived, or Enforced. For the full category list, the sub-items under each family, and the fee each one carries, see Amazon chargebacks on Vendor Central.

Where it lives in Vendor Central

You can find all chargebacks in the Chargebacks section of your account, reached through Reports, then Operational Performance. Amazon’s own help calls the same area Vendor Operational Performance (Chargebacks), so either label points at the same data.

Why it matters to a vendor

A chargeback comes off the remittance directly, so the money is already gone from a payment you earned on units you shipped, usually before anyone on your side has looked at the charge.

A single miss is a nuisance you absorb, but a family that keeps repeating becomes a standing cost, because the broken step sits at your warehouse or your 3PL and charges again on every PO that passes through it. The size of it tends to stay invisible until you add the line items up across a quarter. Charges can be disputed inside Vendor Central within a limited window, and the post linked above covers that process start to finish.

Related terms

• ASN (Advance Shipment Notice): the shipment notice Amazon checks against what actually arrives, and one of the chargeback families above.
• Purchase Order (PO): the order whose confirmation and delivery windows a chargeback measures you against.
• Amazon chargebacks on Vendor Central: every category, the dispute process, and what to reconcile before you absorb a deduction.
• Glossary index: the rest of the Vendor Central terms and InsightLeap metrics.