Using My AI Assistant to Automate Amazon Return Reimbursements

The Automated Operator

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Using My AI Assistant to Automate Amazon Return Reimbursements<br>Amazon uses unnecessary processes as a barrier against giving you money you're entitled to. Luckily, AI is very good at unnecessary processes!

Alex Willen<br>Jun 04, 2026

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When you return one of the products I sell to Amazon, I have a few options for what to do with it. First, I can have the Amazon warehouse staff determine its condition. If it’s as good as new, they put it back into inventory to be sold again. If it’s in less-than-perfect condition, they can:<br>Dispose of it

Mail it back to me

Grade the condition and resell it at a discount based on that grade

Liquidate it for 5-10% of the sale price

Alternatively, I can skip the whole process and just have it disposed of or sent back to me.<br>The big problem one encounters when it comes to having Amazon employees evaluate quality is that they have absolutely no idea how to evaluate quality. I am exaggerating, but only slightly. For very simple items, they’re okay. But for products that contain more than a couple of items, they’re not going to notice if one is gone.<br>Also, if your product is tightly packed into custom, opaque packaging, they will not open the packaging at all and will simply decide whether the product is resellable condition based on the exterior. Ask me how I know this.<br>So glad you asked. One of the products I sell is an indoor swing; basically a big loop of nylon fabric and a hardware kit to hang it from the ceiling. It comes in a custom, opaque bag. Once, someone bought one and then returned it, except what they actually returned was a dark blue bedsheet. Since the swing they ordered was beige, it probably would have been clear that this was the wrong product had whoever processed the return opened up the bag.<br>This all happened while I was still having Amazon evaluate everything that came in, so the way I found out was when someone left a one-star review because they ordered a beige swing and received a dark blue bedsheet. (If you order something from Amazon and get the wrong product, I beg you not to leave a bad review — it is almost certainly on Amazon, not the company selling the product.)<br>I spent a great deal of time getting that review removed — doing so is very difficult and requires one to utter the correct incantations and request specific escalations with no guarantee of success. Unfortunately, I very naively failed to address the root cause, so you can imagine how I felt when I received another one-star review from someone upset that they ordered a beige swing and received a dark blue bedsheet. Sigh.<br>At that point, I did the correct thing and turned off Amazon quality evaluation. Since this product is low volume, high price point, and relatively high return rate, I started having every unit sent back to me. Once a month or so, I go through all the ones I’ve received, check for missing parts/blue bedsheets, then repack the like-new ones and send them back to Amazon to be sold.<br>Getting Reimbursed

When the customer returns either the wrong product or the right one but missing parts, I can get reimbursed by filing a case with support. To do this requires providing:<br>The LPN — I had never actually thought about what this stood for until looking it up right now, and apparently it’s License Plate Number? At least that’s what the Google AI Overview says, and I don’t care enough to confirm. Anyway it’s a unique barcode/string that gets stuck on every return.

The removal order ID — Twice a month, Amazon creates an order to mail back all of the units that have been returned, and that order gets assigned a unique ID.

The return shipment ID — Removal orders typically come in multiple shipments, since the returns are held in different fulfillment centers, so each shipment gets its own ID.

The FNSKU — This is the catalog ID of the product.

A description of what I received

The obnoxious thing about all of this is that Amazon knows the removal order ID, shipment ID and FNSKU based on the LPN, but they make you pull all of those off of a tiny sheet of paper that comes back in the box. If you lose that piece of paper, you can’t get reimbursed. This is what it looks like:

A couple of fun little quirks here:<br>The actual paper is much smaller than it looks here, and the font size must be 5 or 6.

The FNSKU is in the column incorrectly labeled ASIN (which is a different product identifier).

The return ID is the string of letters and numbers between the first and second dashes in the string after “RA #:”. If you include the whole thing, support will have no idea what to do with that.

But hey, who can blame the scrappy little checks stock price 2.76 trillion dollar company, right?<br>Anyway: I must gather all of these pieces of information, along with a photo of the LPN sticker, the piece of paper pictured above, and the product that I received. (And again, you must provide...