About

Four days to decide, thirty to file

Four days. That is the window a seller-fulfilled Amazon order now gives you to issue or decline a refund once a return arrives, tightened on 26 January 2026. Three weeks later, on 16 February, the window for filing a SAFE-T claim to be reimbursed for that same return went from 60 days to 30. Both changes are in Amazon's own policy pages. Almost nothing written for sellers has been updated to match, so a search still returns confident advice built on the old numbers — and following it means missing a deadline while reading something that sounds authoritative.

That gap is the reason for this site. Three questions in particular kept costing me evenings:

The tracking says delivered. The buyer says nothing arrived. What now? The results are a 2019 forum thread, a reply that says "just refund and move on", and a reply that says "never refund", neither of which explains which protection actually applies, what the platform looks at, or what a usable evidence packet contains before the case is decided against you.
The return came back lighter than it went out. Empty box, a different unit, a brick. Everyone agrees this happens. Nobody writes down the order of operations: what to photograph, which channel it gets reported through, at which point it stops being a return problem and becomes a fraud report, and what the platform can actually do afterwards.
The parcel was crushed and the carrier's page says "declared value". Declared value is not insurance, waiting periods differ by service, and the person who is allowed to file is not always the person holding the damaged box. Getting that wrong costs the claim, not just time.

So the unit of writing here is not a tip. It is a deadline, an evidence list, and the rule a decision is made under, each traced to the page it came from and stamped with the date that page was read. Where a rule has changed this year, the old version is named too, because the advice you will find elsewhere is still describing it.

Owen Kittredge, and what he cannot do for you

I'm Owen Kittredge. I sell vintage hand tools and small electronics out of a garage in Ohio — on eBay first, then Amazon — which is a small enough operation that a single lost parcel is a real number and a big enough one that it happens regularly. I have filed more carrier claims than I would like to admit, won some, and lost others for reasons that turned out to be written down somewhere I had not thought to look.

What I am not: a lawyer, a suspension consultant, or anyone with a contact inside a marketplace. I do not file appeals for other people and I do not sell a service. I have no way of telling you how a specific case will be decided, and any page here that seemed to promise that would be lying, because these decisions are made by people and systems I cannot see.

What I can do is read the policy in full, find the paragraph that actually governs the situation, and write down the procedure with the deadline attached.

The sources a guide is allowed to use

Every guide starts from a primary source and says which one: Amazon Seller Central policy and help pages, eBay's Money Back Guarantee and seller protection pages, Etsy's Seller Policy, the USPS Domestic Mail Manual and claims pages, and the UPS and FedEx tariff and service guides. Card network rules — reason codes, representment windows — come from the published Visa and Mastercard rules documents rather than from a payment processor's summary of them.

Four habits that keep a page usable

Naming the source is the easy half. Keeping a page true a year after it was written takes four more habits:

Every page carries a dated line. "Policy as of date, verify at page." If you are reading a guide six months later, that line tells you exactly what to re-check and where.
Recheck dates are scheduled, not left to chance. Anything tied to a deadline that has moved recently — SAFE-T, refund windows, USPS dimensional weight, which expands again in 2027 — is revisited on a fixed cycle rather than when someone complains.
Links carry their document title. Amazon reorganises its help URLs often enough that a bare link is a liability. The title is printed alongside so you can find the page again when the link breaks.
Forum threads are used to find questions, never to answer them. Seller Central and the eBay community are where these problems become visible; they are not evidence of anything. A sentence that cannot be walked back to a policy page, a tariff, or a published rule does not get written here at all.

A guide that has been corrected says so, in a line carrying the date and the old figure. Deleting the mistake would hide the one thing a reader needs in order to judge the rest of the page.

Cases this site cannot take

Not legal advice, and not a substitute for a lawyer if a dispute has escalated beyond a platform's own process.
Not a suspension or reinstatement service. Guides explain what a plan of action is expected to contain; they do not write one for you, and no template can, which is itself covered here.
Not about setting up a business. Entity formation, licensing, and sales tax registration belong to a different body of rules and a different kind of deadline. They are out of scope on purpose.
Not about client work. This site covers selling goods through a marketplace, not service agreements or invoicing clients directly.
Not affiliated with Amazon, eBay, Etsy, USPS, UPS, FedEx, or any card network. Nothing here is endorsed by them, and every rule described is one you can check at the source.

Filing a correction against a page

Policy pages move and I do not always catch it first. Send the page and the figure you think is stale to my own case queue; what happens next is that I open the source, correct the sentence, and leave a dated line saying what changed. Sellers who have been through a case and found the procedure here incomplete are the most useful correspondence this site gets.