Order cancellations

When can a buyer cancel an order?

For the first 30 minutes after the order is placed, buyers can cancel their own order using the Cancel Items button located in Your Account > Your Orders on Amazon.

After 30 minutes, the buyer can no longer cancel the order directly, they can only submit a cancelation request for the seller to review. You will receive an email when the buyer requests a cancelation.

Both cancellations and returns are a normal part of the sales operations.

A buyer wants to cancel an order. What should I do?

Depending on the stage for processing the order, the following options may help you to determine next steps:

If you haven’t shipped or confirmed shipment for this order, you can cancel it in Manage Orders, or use an Order Cancellation feed to cancel orders by uploading a file or through an API. To cancel an order from the Manage Orders page, follow the steps mentioned under Official cancellation process that will not count against your Cancellation Rate metrics.
If you already shipped, but haven’t confirmed shipment, you should confirm shipment and then contact the buyer via the Buyer-Seller Messaging service and advise them to either refuse the shipment or initiate a return.
If you haven’t shipped, but you already confirmed shipment, you can no longer cancel the order. You should begin a refund process and not ship the product.

Note:

When you cancel an order, Amazon automatically updates the order status in the buyer's Amazon account and sends an email notification to the buyer.
Messages about cancellation are considered a critical message, and will be delivered to a buyer even if they have opted out of non-critical messages.
If the reason you need to cancel an order is not due to a Buyer-requested cancellation, you should cancel this order instead of requesting the buyer to cancel it.
Canceling orders when the buyer unofficially requests cancellation through Buyer-Seller Messaging will impact your Cancellation Rate metrics.
The buyer is not charged for an order until you confirm shipment.

Official cancellation process that will not count against your Cancellation Rate metrics:

The official process by which a buyer can request an order cancellation is by finding the order they want to cancel in their Amazon account > Your Account > Your Orders > Request Cancellation.

If the buyer requests a cancellation after 30 minutes of placing their order, you will receive an email and will be able to view the cancellation request on the Manage Orders page, right above the order information, with a banner stating “The buyer has requested that this order be canceled. Canceling this order will not affect your Cancellation Rate metric”.
Canceling this order will not impact your cancellation rate metric if you select the reason for cancellation as Buyer Canceled.
After you cancel the order, you and the buyer will receive separate emails confirming the order has been canceled.

Note: Selecting the reason for cancellation as Buyer Canceled for an order cancellation that was not initiated by a buyer will count against your Cancellation Rate metrics.

To process an order cancellation request by a buyer, follow these steps:

From the Orders drop-down on Seller Central, select Manage Orders.
The orders which have a buyer-initiated cancellation will show up with a banner stating “The buyer has requested that this order be canceled. Canceling this order will not affect your Cancellation Rate metric.”.
Click Cancel order under the Actions column.
Note: The Cancel order button is available only for Unshipped orders.
On the order details page, select the reason for cancellation as Buyer Canceled.
Click Submit.
After you cancel the order, you and the buyer will receive separate emails confirming that the order has been canceled.

The image below show example of Step 2 and 3. On your Manage orders page, select the order you want to cancel and click Cancel order.

Example of Step 4: Select the reason for cancellation as Buyer canceled from the drop-down menu.

Note: If you cannot fulfill the order due to lack of inventory and need to cancel the order, select the reason as No Inventory. Do not contact the buyer and request that they submit a cancellation request.

Unofficial buyer-initiated cancellation process that will count against your metrics:

A buyer requesting a cancellation solely via the Buyer-Seller Messaging tool without following the official cancellation process is considered as an unofficial manner for buyers to cancel orders. Accordingly, if you cancel an order in response to a request from a buyer via the Buyer-Seller Messaging tool, this unofficial cancellation will impact your Cancellation Rate metric.

To avoid canceling an order in a manner that impacts your metrics, you can respond to the buyer’s message and request the buyer to submit a cancellation using the official process above.

Use the following instructions in your response: “You can find the order in your Amazon account by clicking Your Account > Your Orders > Request Cancellation”

To review your Cancellation Rate and policy requirements, go to Cancellation Rate.

Automatic cancellation

Amazon will automatically cancel orders if 5 days have passed since the expected shipping availability date and you have not yet shipped and confirmed the shipment.

What kind of cancellations negatively impact your Cancellation Rate metric?

Cancellation initiated by	Cancellation scenario	Negatively impact Cancellation Rate?
Buyer	1. I am canceling because the buyer submitted an official cancellation request	No
Buyer	2. I am canceling because the customer asked me to through the Buyer-Seller Messaging tool (unofficial cancellation processes)	Yes
Seller	1. I am canceling because my item went out of stock	Yes
	2. I am canceling because the address was undeliverable	Yes
	3. I am canceling because the buyer was unresponsive	Yes
Amazon	1. The order was automatically canceled by Amazon because the seller did not confirm shipment within 5 days of ship-by-date	Yes
	2. The order was automatically canceled by Amazon because we detected the buyer to be fraudulent	No
	3. Payment verification failed so the order was canceled by Amazon	No

Order reports

For sellers who use order reports to process orders, an optional additional field called is-buyer-requested-cancellation is available on your order reports. The is-buyer-requested-cancellation column will have a “TRUE” value if there is a buyer cancellation request for the order and “FALSE” otherwise. (Shown below)

You can view all orders which have buyer-initiated cancellation requests in your order reports by switching on the toggle button for the field called “Buyer Requested Cancel” (shown below) available by accessing Add or remove order report columns.

APIs for buyer initiated order cancellations

MWS API

When a buyer initiates an order-cancellation request:

The order will be updated (LastUpdateDate) and the ListOrders operation will return the orders updated during the specified time.
The ListOrderItems operation includes an isBuyerRequestedCancel flag and buyerCancelReason string for each OrderItem in the response when the order has a buyer requested cancellation.
The isBuyerRequestedCancel flag will be set to True if the order has a buyer cancellation request.
The buyerCancelReason will display the reason for cancellation specified by the buyer.

Selling Partner (SP) - API

Similar to the orders API, for SP-API, when a buyer initiates an order cancellation request:

The ordersV0GettOrderItemsList operation will include an isBuyerRequestedCancel flag and buyerCancelReason string for each OrderItem in the response when the order has a buyer requested cancellation.
The isBuyerRequestedCancel flag will be set to True if the order has a buyer cancellation request.
The buyerCancelReason will display the reason for cancellation specified by the buyer.