When can a buyer cancel an order?
For the first 30 minutes after the order is placed, buyers can cancel their own order using the Cancel Items button located in Your Account > Your Orders on Amazon.
After 30 minutes, the buyer can no longer cancel the order directly; they can only submit a cancellation request for the seller to review. You will receive an email when the buyer requests a cancellation.
Both cancellations and returns are a normal part of the sales operations.
A buyer wants to cancel an order. What should I do?
Depending on the stage for processing the order, the following options may help you to determine next steps:
Official cancellation process that will not count against your Cancellation Rate metrics:
The official process by which a buyer can request an order cancellation is by finding the order they want to cancel in their Amazon account > Your Account > Your Orders > Request Cancellation.
The image below shows an example of Steps 2 and 3. On your Manage orders page, select the order you want to cancel and click Cancel order.
Example of Step 4: Select the reason for cancellation as Buyer cancelled from the drop-down menu.
A buyer requesting a cancellation solely via the Buyer-Seller Messaging tool without following the official cancellation process is considered an unofficial manner for buyers to cancel orders. Accordingly, if you cancel an order in response to a request from a buyer via the Buyer-Seller Messaging tool, this unofficial cancellation will affect your Cancellation Rate metric.
To avoid cancelling an order in a manner that affects your metrics, you can respond to the buyer’s message and request the buyer to submit a cancellation using the official process above.
Use the following instructions in your response: “You can find the order in your Amazon account by clicking Your Account > Your Orders > Request Cancellation”
To review your Cancellation Rate and policy requirements, go to Cancellation Rate.
Occasionally, you may need to cancel part of an order with multiple items and refund the items that have been cancelled. For a partial cancellation, upload an Order Adjustments Feed.
For more information, go to Cancel an order or multiple orders .
Amazon will automatically cancel orders if 7 days have passed since the expected shipping availability date and you have not yet shipped and confirmed the shipment.
What kind of cancellations negatively impact your Cancellation Rate metric?
Cancellation initiated by | Cancellation scenario | Negatively affect Cancellation Rate? |
Buyer | 1. I am cancelling because the buyer submitted an official cancellation request | No |
2. I am cancelling because the customer asked me to through the Buyer-Seller Messaging tool (unofficial cancellation processes) | Yes | |
Seller | 1. I am cancelling because my item has gone out of stock | Yes |
2. I am cancelling because the address was undeliverable | Yes | |
3. I am cancelling because the buyer was unresponsive | Yes | |
Amazon | 1. The order was automatically cancelled by Amazon because the seller did not confirm dispatch within 7 days of the ship-by date | Yes |
2. The order was automatically cancelled by Amazon because we detected the buyer to be fraudulent | No | |
3. Payment verification failed so the order was cancelled by Amazon | No |
For sellers who use order reports to process orders, an optional additional field called is-buyer-requested-cancellation is available on your order reports. The is-buyer-requested-cancellation column will have a “TRUE” value if there is a buyer cancellation request for the order and “FALSE” otherwise. (Shown below)
You can view these all orders that have buyer-initiated cancellation requests in your order reports by switching on the toggle button for the field called “Buyer Requested Cancel” (as shown below) available by accessing Add or remove order report columns.
MWS API
When a buyer initiates an order cancellation request:
Selling Partner (SP) - API
Similar to the orders API, for SP-API, when a buyer initiates an order cancellation request:
To learn more about the pre-fulfilment cancellation rate, watch this Seller University video.