Shortage Claim (SC)

A shortage claim is Amazon’s claim that a vendor invoiced for more units than Amazon’s receiving process recorded, and the difference comes off the payment on that invoice.

What it is

The gap sits between two numbers: the quantity you billed and the quantity the fulfillment center logged when the shipment was booked in. Where Amazon’s count is lower, Amazon pays the lower one and raises a shortage claim for the remainder.

Amazon usually opens the claim about five days before the invoice comes due, and reviews every one within 35 days of creating it.

Your count and Amazon’s can come apart at several points along the way, and they all land as the same deduction: packing and labeling errors, an incorrect carton assignment, counting mistakes during goods-in booking at the fulfillment center, transport damage, missing delivery scans, and incomplete invoice data.

Because the claim is tied to one invoice and settled on the payment side, it sits outside the Operational Performance chargeback categories, which score compliance defects on their own schedule and carry their own dispute path.

Where it lives in Vendor Central

Go to Payments, then Invoices, then Review/Dispute Shortages for the claims raised in roughly the last 30 days. Older ones sit under Payments, then Invoices, then View all Invoices, where you can search by shortage invoice or by invoice date up to about 90 days back. You can also file from Payments, then Dispute management, and pick the shortage invoice there.

The claim itself shows up under Deductions and Credits, keyed to the invoice number with an “SC” suffix, and the Financial Scorecard carries a shortages section if you want the trend across invoices instead of one claim at a time. Vendor Central’s navigation varies by region and account type, so check the labels in your own account before you write a path into a process.

Why it matters to a vendor

This is cash taken off a specific invoice, and no scorecard records it as a defect, so it never surfaces in the reviews built around Operational Performance. Unless someone is reading remittances line by line, the deductions add up unnoticed.

The console’s own windows push the same way. Review/Dispute Shortages covers roughly the last 30 days and the invoice search reaches about 90, so a claim nobody has worked by then takes real effort just to locate. Work the queue on a schedule instead of when a remittance looks wrong.

Related terms

• Chargebacks: Amazon’s other deduction against a vendor, scored through Operational Performance.
• Amazon Chargebacks on Vendor Central: the seven chargeback categories, which do not include shortages.
• Amazon Inventory Management on Vendor Central: the evidence a shortage dispute needs.
• Glossary index: the rest of the Vendor Central terms and InsightLeap metrics.