Order cancellations

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.

What should I do when a buyer wants to cancel an order?

Depending on the stage for processing the order, the following options may help you to determine next steps:

1. If you haven’t dispatched or confirmed dispatch for this order, you can cancel it in Manage orders or use an order Cancellation feed to cancel orders by uploading a file or through an API. To cancel an order from the Manage orders page, follow the steps mentioned under Official cancellation process that will not count against your Cancellation Rate metrics.
2. If you already shipped, but haven’t confirmed dispatch, you must confirm dispatch and then contact the buyer via the Buyer-Seller Messaging service and advise them to either refuse the shipment or initiate a return.
3. If you haven’t shipped, but you already confirmed dispatch, you can no longer cancel the order. You must begin a refund process and not dispatch the product.

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.

1. If the buyer requests a cancellation after 30 minutes of placing their order, you will receive an email and will be able to view the cancellation request on the Manage orders page, right above the order information, with a banner stating “The buyer has requested that this order be cancelled.
2. After you cancel the order, the buyer will receive an email confirming that the order has been cancelled.

To process an order cancellation request by a buyer, follow these steps:

1. From the Orders drop-down on Seller Central, select Manage orders. On the “Unshipped” tab, you can click “Show filters” to open the filtering pane and then under the section of “Pending action”, you can tick the box called “Buyer requested cancel” to filter orders that have a Buyer-Requested Cancellation.
2. The orders that have a buyer-initiated cancellation will show up with a banner stating “The buyer has requested that this order be cancelled”. Cancelling this order will not affect your Cancellation Rate metric”.
3. Click Cancel order under the Actions column.
   Note: The Cancel order button is only available for Unshipped orders.
4. Click Submit.
5. After you cancel the order, the buyer will receive an email confirming that the order has been cancelled.

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: Buyer cancelled is pre-selected and cannot be edited as we know that this is a buyer requested cancellation.

Unofficial buyer-initiated cancellation process that will count against your metrics:

A buyer requesting a cancellation solely via the Buyer-Seller Messaging tool without following the official cancellation process is considered as 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 service, 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.

Partial order cancellations are not supported at this time. However, you can issue full and partial refunds for each item in an order by using either the Refund orders tool or the Order Adjustment Feed.

For more information, go to Cancel an order or multiple orders.

Amazon will automatically cancel orders if seven days have passed since the expected shipping availability date and you have not yet dispatched it and confirmed the dispatch.

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 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” (shown below), available by accessing Add or remove order report columns.

MWS API

When a buyer initiates an order cancellation request:

1. The order will be updated (LastUpdateDate) and the ListOrders operation will return the orders updated during the specified time.
2. The ListOrderItems operation includes an isBuyerRequestedCancel flag and buyerCancelReason string for each OrderItem in the response when the order has a buyer-requested cancellation.
3. The isBuyerRequestedCancel flag will be set to True if the order has a buyer cancellation request.
4. The buyerCancelReason will display the reason for cancellation specified by the buyer.

Selling Partner (SP) - API

Similar to the orders API, for SP-API, when a buyer initiates an order cancellation request:

1. The ordersV0GettOrderItemsList operation will include an isBuyerRequestedCancel flag and buyerCancelReason string for each OrderItem in the response when the order has a buyer-requested cancellation.
2. The isBuyerRequestedCancel flag will be set to True if the order has a buyer cancellation request.
3. The buyerCancelReason will display the reason for cancellation specified by the buyer.

Coming soon to all sellers: Selling Partner (SP)–Notification API (Currently available to pilot sellers)

ORDER_CHANGE Notification API is the upgraded version for ORDER_STATUS_CHANGE Notification API. Sellers can subscribe to get proactively notified when there are important changes such as order status change and buyer requested cancellation. Once a seller subscribes, if a buyer initiates an order cancellation request:

1. An ORDER_CHANGE notification will be triggered to seller automatically.
2. The isBuyerRequestedCancel flag will be set to True if the order has a buyer cancellation request.

Check the SP user guide on how to subscribe to ORDER_CHANGE Notification.

See also

Cancellation Rate

Cancellations FAQ