Amazon Vendor: recovery (price discrepancies)

This article describes how to identify and dispute price discrepancies on invoices paid by Amazon Vendor.   

Table of contents

Introduction

Setup

Overview

Search, settings, and filters

Dispute price discrepancies on multiple invoices

Dispute price discrepancies on a single invoice

Export price discrepancies

FAQs

Video: recovery management

Introduction

Price discrepancies, also known as price claims, happen when Amazon pays less than the invoiced price of your products for any reason. The reasons for price discrepancies can range from Amazon incorrectly applying an outdated contract price, a misapplied promotion, or pricing errors in Amazon's system.

You can use ChannelEngine's price discrepancies feature to identify and dispute price discrepancies on invoices paid by Amazon Vendor. The process allows you to:

• Quickly identify price discrepancies for invoiced amounts for items.
• Submit disputes for price discrepancies on a single invoice or multiple invoices at once.

ChannelEngine automatically determines the type of dispute to submit to Vendor Central – a traditional dispute or a support case. 

Setup

The dashboard is part of the Amazon Vendor module. To enable the Amazon Vendor module on ChannelEngine, contact your customer success manager.

For ChannelEngine to retrieve recovery management data, it needs specific access scopes in your Amazon Vendor Central account. To grant access, invite a ChannelEngine user to your Vendor Central account. The user’s email address/contact details are provided to you by ChannelEngine.

1. Log in to your Amazon Vendor Central account.
2. In the top-right corner, go to Settings and select Manage permissions.
3. Click Add another person, then enter the email and contact details provided by ChannelEngine.
4. Under Roles and permissions, assign the Contributor role to ChannelEngine.
5. Grant the following access scopes:
   • API access
   • Invoices
   • Purchase orders
   • Payments
   • Costs
   • Shipments
   • Inventory
   • Operational performance
   • Operational reports
6. Click Send invitation.

Overview

The Price discrepancies overview shows all invoices submitted to Amazon Vendor, including invoices where ChannelEngine has detected price discrepancies. ChannelEngine’s logic detects price discrepancies, providing more opportunity to recover these than solely using Vendor Central.

To see an overview of the invoices, from the left-hand side menu, click Vendor, Price discrepancies.

At the top of the page, you can see:

• Total invoices - the total amount of all invoices submitted and number of invoices for which there are one or more price discrepancies, within the current search criteria.
• Recoverable amount - the total price discrepancy amount identified across all invoices, within the current search criteria.
• Recovered amount - the total amount recovered from Amazon so far through price discrepancy disputes (paid in full or partially recovered).
• Outstanding amount - the total outstanding amount for all price discrepancies that have not been recovered. This value updates based on the selected tab (Recoverable, In progress, Recovered, All) and applied filters.
  
  NB: ChannelEngine displays the amounts in the currency of the relevant Amazon channel (account or region). If multiple currencies are used, such as GBP and EUR, the amounts are shown in both currencies.

Search, settings, and filters

In the overview, you also you see a search, several different filters, and the following four tabs:

• Recoverable - all invoices for which there are price discrepancies that can be disputed now. If an invoice already has a related dispute that is pending, that invoice is not shown on this tab.
• In progress - all invoices for which there are pending disputes.
• Recovered - all invoices with price discrepancies recovered to date from Amazon Vendor through disputes.
• All - all invoices submitted to Amazon Vendor. 

Use the filters listed below to filter the invoices that are divided across the four tabs: Recoverable, In progress, Recovered, and All. Extra filters are available for the All tab to further narrow down the list of invoices. Search for a specific invoice by number or use the filters. You can combine the filters to see a specific invoice overview, such as 'all invoices across all Amazon channels, with a due date within the last 90 days, that have a disputable price discrepancy'.

• Channel - filter by the Amazon Vendor channel (account or region) through which the invoices were processed. You can filter by All channels or specific channels.
• Due date - filter the invoices by the date range by which they must be paid.
• Invoice date - filter the invoices by the date range by which they were issued.
• Creation date - filter the invoices by the date range when they were imported into ChannelEngine.
• Columns - the tabs contain multiple columns that display invoice data. You can filter the tabs to display specific columns, as needed. 
• Has recovered items - filter by invoices that include initial shortage amounts. 
• Has recoverable amount - filter by invoices that include items with discrepancy amounts already recovered through a previous dispute.
• Has current shortage - filter by invoices with a current shortage or not, Yes or No. 
• Has pending dispute - filter by invoices with a dispute submitted to Amazon Vendor that is pending.
• Is disputable - filter by invoices that are currently eligible for dispute.
• Payee code - filter by the unique code assigned to you by Amazon and used to track payments and financial transactions between you and Amazon Vendor.

All tabs contain the following columns that display the invoice data:

• Channel
• PO number
• Invoice number
• Invoice amount
• Payee code
• Invoice creation date
• Invoice date
• Invoice due date
• Discrepancy quantity
• Discrepancy amount
• Discrepancy ASINs
• Recovered amount
• Recoverable amount
• Actions

Dispute price discrepancies for multiple invoices

You can dispute price discrepancies that exist on multiple invoices at once and submit the disputes to Vendor Central. If you do this, all items on the selected invoices with discrepancies are included in the submitted disputes.   

1. From the left-hand side menu, click Vendor, Price discrepancies.
2. Select the specific channels (accounts or regions) for which you want to dispute the invoices from the dropdown, if needed.
3. On the Recoverable tab, select the check box for each invoice with discrepancies you want to dispute. Select the Channels check box to select up to ten invoices to dispute at once. If you want to dispute more than ten, repeat for each page of results. 
4. Above the table, click Dispute selected. On the Dispute price claims page, you see the total number of disputed invoices, the total number of disputed items across all invoices, the total dispute amount for all items across all invoices, and the total dispute amount for each invoice.
5. Click Submit disputes to submit the disputes to Amazon for approval.

Dispute discrepancies for a single invoice

You can dispute shortages for specific items on a single invoice and submit the dispute to Vendor Central.

1. From the left-hand side menu, click Vendor, Price discrepancies.
2. Select the channel for which you want to dispute shortages on invoices, if needed.
3. On the Recoverable tab, locate the specific invoice with price discrepancies that you want to dispute. 
4. Click Submit price claim. On the Dispute price claim for invoice page, you can see the invoice details and update the default Dispute details to provide the justification for the dispute. 
5. All items included in the invoice with price discrepancies are available to dispute. For each item, you can see its Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN), the item quantity, its catalog cost, PO cost, invoiced cost, paid cost by Amazon, and the total recoverable or outstanding amount for all items. 
6. In the Dispute items section, uncheck any items that you do not want to dispute. 
7. Click Submit price claim to submit the dispute to Amazon for approval. 

When you submit a dispute, ChannelEngine queues it for export to Amazon Vendor and generates a temporary dispute number. When the submission process completes, ChannelEngine replaces the temporary dispute number with a permanent dispute number

Export price discrepancies

To review and analyze your price discrepancies, you can export them as a CSV file. On the Invoice price discrepancies page, click Data export, then select CSV as the file format and choose a delimiter. Click Download report data. The CSV file is downloaded automatically to your computer. You can open it in a spreadsheet program (e.g.: Google Sheets) or any other tool that supports CSV.

FAQs

How far back can I submit disputes from?

This depends on your Vendor agreement with Amazon. ChannelEngine enables you to submit disputes from as far back as Amazon allows, typically five years.

What happens if Amazon rejects my dispute? 

If Amazon rejects your dispute, the dispute count increases and you can re-dispute the price discrepancy if you believe Amazon is in error. Sometimes, a dispute is successful after 4-5 attempts.

Should I dispute everything at once or only a few price discrepancies at a time?

ChanelEngine automatically manages the submission of your disputes and support cases to Amazon, so you can dispute as many price discrepancies as often as you like.

Do I always have to click the Submit price claim button to submit a dispute?

Yes, currently, it is only possible to manually dispute price discrepancies on ChannelEngine.

If Amazon rejects my dispute, how do I dispute the price discrepancy again? Do I need to submit a support case? 

You do not need to do anything different. Re-submit the dispute and ChannelEngine will automatically determine whether to create a regular dispute or a support case based on Amazon's responses and the status of the dispute.

Video: recovery management