This issue has not gone away, and it’s causing constant stock and financial losses for us—and many other sellers too, from what I can see across the forums.
Amazon is still marking orders as “lost in transit” and reimbursing customers, even when the customer has actually received the item. Some honest buyers are even taking the time to message us:
"I have received the item but it says it's been lost."
"Just wanted to let you know that I received the seeds, thank you."
These customers didn’t need to contact us—but they did. Why? Because they were surprised that Amazon claimed the package hadn’t arrived. And meanwhile, we as sellers get hit: our stock is deducted, the order marked as “lost”, and we're not paid.
This creates a toxic environment. We're being conditioned to view all buyers with suspicion—wondering if they’re trying to game the system. That’s not how good customer relationships are built. We want to trust our customers, but this situation is making it increasingly difficult. It leaves a bitter taste and pushes sellers toward treating every order as a potential scam. We have to save all
We only sell chilli, tomato and sunflower seeds, and when we first started on Amazon, we used to go the extra mile—sending customers freebies with their orders, hoping to build trust, earn great reviews, and share the joy of growing. But now? We’ve had to stop all of that. With so many unjustified refunds and losses, we now only send exactly what was ordered—nothing more, nothing less. That generosity has been stripped away because Amazon’s system has made it too risky to trust.
To make matters worse, we use Royal Mail 1st and 2nd Class Letter services, which are untracked, as allowed under Amazon’s guidelines for low-value, lightweight items. But here’s the absurd part: Amazon cannot track these shipments—yet they’re somehow notifying customers that the item is “lost”.
How can Amazon determine that a parcel is lost on a service that has no tracking data?
This kind of automated assumption is fuelling unnecessary refunds, stock loss, and seller frustration. Amazon is essentially undermining its own sellers based on zero evidence.
And on top of that, we now have to manually save every Royal Mail label outside of Amazon, because Amazon deletes them after 30 days. If a claim is raised later, we’re left with no proof unless we’ve downloaded and stored it ourselves. That’s a significant, time-consuming admin burden just to defend ourselves from a flawed system.
We’ve flagged this repeatedly, and it’s clearly not an isolated issue. See previous threads:
Original discussion here
https://sellercentral.amazon.co.uk/seller-forums/discussions/t/42c7dee7-231f-442f-9179-8813b57c6944
https://sellercentral.amazon.co.uk/seller-forums/discussions/t/a4542784-a28e-4866-a6f3-c575b40d31f9
https://sellercentral.amazon.co.uk/seller-forums/discussions/t/96f65b2a-63fb-43b6-8a9b-d2530dd1d61b
https://sellercentral.amazon.co.uk/seller-forums/discussions/t/c28eed23-2ee3-493d-acb8-08bd927c1534
This affects customer trust, seller trust, and shows a serious flaw in how Amazon handles logistics and order tracking.
We need Amazon to:
Investigate how and why these orders are marked as lost.
Review the tracking and reconciliation process.
Stop reimbursing customers for items they have received unless there’s clear evidence of non-delivery.
Provide sellers with better protection and compensation for lost stock.
Real numbers from our business
On our own webshop, using Royal Mail 2nd-Class Large Letter, our non-delivery rate is around 1 in 2,000 orders (0.05%).
On Amazon FBM, using the exact same postage, our non-delivery rate jumps to around 1 in 75 orders (1.3%).
That’s a 26× higher “lost” rate on Amazon—clearly driven by Amazon’s own messaging to customers, encouraging them to believe items are missing when they’re not.
