Vendor: recovery (price discrepencies)

About this article

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

Table of contents

Introduction

Overview

Key metrics

Dispute process

• Dispute price discrepancies on multiple invoices
• Dispute price discrepancies on a single invoice

CSV export

FAQs

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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 The reasons for price discrepancies can range from Amazon incorrectly applying an outdated contract price, a misapplied promotion, or pricing errors in Amazon's system.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. 

Amazon's dispute eligibility window is typically on shortages from up to five years in the past. Use ChannelEngine to recover potentially five years of invoice shortages. 

To manage the recovery of price discrepancies, go to Vendor, Price discrepancies.

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 opportunities to recover these than solely using Vendor Central.

Key Metrics

At the top of the page are four key metrics:

• Total invoices - the total amount of all invoices submitted and the 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. 

Tabs

From the Invoice shortages overview, you can navigate through 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. 

Filters and search

At the top of the invoice price discrepancies overview, you can search and filter the list of eligible invoice shortages to dispute. 

Locate specific invoices in the search bar, or filter by Channel. (The default is All.) Filtering by Due date is especially powerful because Amazon typically allows disputes on historical shortages from up to five years in the past. 

Columns

Use the Columns multi-selector dropdown to further refine the invoices in each tab. You can combine filters with the visible columns to view a specific set of invoices, e.g: all invoices across all Amazon Vendor channels with a due date within the last 90 days that have a price discrepancy.

• Channel - the Amazon Vendor channel (account or region) through which the invoices were processed. 
• PO no. - the purchase order number.
• Invoice no. - the invoice number.
• Status - the status of the price discrepancy, e.g.: Dispute pending.
• Invoice amount - the amount on the invoice.
• Payee code - the unique code assigned to you by Amazon and used to track payments and financial transactions between you and Amazon Vendor.
• Invoice creation date - the date when the invoice was imported into ChannelEngine.
• Invoice date - the date when the invoice was issued.
• Invoice due date - the date by which the channel must pay the invoice.
• Discrepancy ASINs - the ASINs of the items whose invoice prices differ from the paid prices.
• Dispute count - how many times the given invoice was disputed.
• Discrepancy quantity - the number of items that are not yet completely remunerated by the channel.
• Discrepancy - the total amount of all price discrepancies on the invoice. 
• Recovered - the total amount already recovered through a previous dispute on a price discrepancy. 
• Recoverable - the Discrepancy minus Recovered.

Dispute process

Amazon's dispute eligibility window is typically on shortages from up to five years in the past.

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

CSV export

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

From how far back can I submit disputes?
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 follow a separate process. Re-submit the dispute, and ChannelEngine automatically determines whether to create a regular dispute or a support case based on Amazon's responses and the status of the dispute.

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