Understanding the Amazon-Fulfilled Shipments Report for FBA Sellers
Covers the Amazon-Fulfilled Shipments Report available to FBA sellers, including what data it contains, how to request it, the tax-specific variant, date range limitations, and tips for handling file encoding issues.
Overview
The Amazon-Fulfilled Shipments Report is a downloadable report that provides FBA sellers with detailed data on completed shipments handled by Amazon. This report is essential for tracking order fulfillment, reconciling shipment records, and meeting tax compliance obligations. Amazon also offers a tax-specific variant of this report with additional fields to support sellers with sales tax requirements.
Key Points / What Sellers Need to Know
- Customer data restrictions — As of 2021, the standard report no longer includes customer names and street addresses. Sellers needing this information for tax purposes must use the dedicated tax variant of the report.
- Data freshness — Shipment data is typically updated within several hours after an item ships, though in some cases it may take up to 24 hours to appear in the report.
- Date range limits — Reports can be requested for shipments up to 18 months in the past, but each request is limited to a maximum date range of 31 days. Requests outside these limits may be automatically canceled.
- Two report versions available — The core Amazon-Fulfilled Shipments Report covers general shipment data, while the Tax variant includes additional fields specifically for sales tax compliance.
- SP-API access — Sellers with developer capabilities can programmatically request this report through Amazon's Selling Partner API, in addition to the manual download option in Seller Central.
What the Report Contains
The Amazon-Fulfilled Shipments Report is a text file (.txt) that lists all completed shipments fulfilled by Amazon during a seller-specified time period. The report includes order-level, shipment-level, and item-level data, covering details such as pricing and shipping address information. It is important to understand that this report operates at the shipment level rather than the order level. If a seller needs to identify which orders were dispatched during a specific window, Amazon recommends using the All Orders Report instead. Because the report captures shipments as they are reported to Amazon's system, there may be a slight lag — items shipped near the end of a reporting period might appear in a subsequent report rather than the current one.
Analysis & Recommendations
Why This Matters
FBA sellers need this report for shipment reconciliation and tax compliance. Understanding its limitations, such as the 31-day date cap and restricted customer data, helps sellers plan their reporting workflows and avoid gaps in their records.
Key Takeaways
- The standard report no longer includes customer names or addresses as of 2021 — use the tax variant for that data
- Reports are limited to 31-day windows and an 18-month lookback period
- The tax variant requires a specific Seller Central role and is restricted to tax use only
- Use UTF-8 encoding when opening reports in Excel to avoid garbled text
Recommended Actions
- →Verify your Seller Central account has the tax role assigned if you need customer address data for tax filings
- →Use date ranges of 31 days or less and request reports well before filing deadlines to avoid delays
- →Configure your spreadsheet software to use UTF-8 encoding (codepage 65001) when opening downloaded reports
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