You may have read our previous blog post titled “A Breakdown of Amazon Fees“
One of the “Adjustment” financial events we listed was “ReturnPostageBilling_postage”. This was a shipping fee to compensate the buyer for shipping items back when seller was at fault.
It would be very useful to know which Amazon Order this charge belongs to. Actually, on Seller Central you see exactly this. Here is an example:
You would think then that the ListFinancialEvents API call would then return the same useful data. However, this is the data that is returned for this same event:
<AdjustmentEvent>
<AdjustmentType>ReturnPostageBilling_postage</AdjustmentType>
<AdjustmentAmount>
<CurrencyAmount>-4.98</CurrencyAmount>
<CurrencyCode>USD</CurrencyCode>
</AdjustmentAmount>
<PostedDate>2020-09-28T23:17:40.030Z</PostedDate>
</AdjustmentEvent>As you can see, there is no data returned associating this adjustment event to the 111-4301005-2005047 Amazon Order.
What makes this even more inconsistent, is if you call the ListFinancialEvents API with a filter of “AmazonOrderId=111-4301005-2005047”, this adjustment event is included in the results.
What this means is that if you are utilizing a 3rd party service or your own scripts to gather Amazon financial data with associating to the underlying transaction (an important step to understand Product True Profit). This adjustment event will have to be manually researched to find out the Amazon Order it belongs to, rather than have that data provided by Amazon (data which it clearly has).
This is an example of one of the many inconsistencies/bugs in the Amazon ecosystem that makes financial accounting for Amazon Sellers challenging. I hope to make as many of these issues known and documented.