By Bernardo Campelo: Forbes Business Council E-Commerce Leader, Amazon SPN Certified provider, Amazon SP-API authorized partner, and Founder of PrepVia.
The message always arrives a week or two after delivery. A seller sent an LTL load to Amazon, the tracking said delivered, and then the shipment closed short, or sat in Delivered with nothing received. Amazon asked for the bill of lading and the proof of delivery. The seller went looking and found the only thing he ever saved: a screenshot of a tracking page.
The uncomfortable rule of freight documentation: every document that proves Amazon received your freight is created during pickup week and delivery week, and several stop being retrievable within months. When you finally need the paper trail, it is too late to build it. You either captured it while the load moved, or you do not have it.
We move freight into Amazon every week from our facility in Miami, Florida. Below is the full chain of custody for an LTL or FTL shipment into FBA, the one we archive for every load: document by document, who creates it, what it proves, and the deadline for capturing it.
The 60-second version
One tracking status proves nothing. Five records prove everything: a signed BOL with trailer number, seal number, and pallet count; the carrier POD with the fulfillment center confirmation; the carrier portal downloads for the load; the delivery confirmation email listing the POs on the load; and the Inventory Ledger, which is Amazon documenting its own receiving.
The deadline nobody respects: download the BOL and POD from the carrier portal the week of delivery. Portal access lapses, broker relationships end, and loads roll off. Months later is often too late.
The connector: a simple map from each PO number to each FBA shipment ID. Without it you cannot tie any document to the shipment that went short.
Retention: one folder per shipment, kept at least 24 months.
Delivered Is a Status, Not a Document
Carrier tracking answers one question: did a truck complete a stop at an address. It does not say what was on the truck, how many pallets came off, whether the seal was intact, or which shipments those pallets belonged to. A delivery scan is a database event with no quantity attached, and no reviewer treats it as proof.
A real inbound review asks for documents: the bill of lading, the proof of delivery, and evidence tying that load to your FBA shipments. Our guide on tracking an FBA LTL shipment covers watching a load move. This post is about what you must capture while it moves.
The chain has five links. Here it is at a glance, then link by link.
| Record | Who creates it | What it proves | Capture deadline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bill of lading (BOL) | Shipper, signed by the driver | What left your dock: pallet count, seal, trailer, timestamps | At pickup, before the truck leaves |
| Proof of delivery (POD) | Carrier, signed at the FC | The freight arrived: date, time, piece count, exceptions | Within days of delivery |
| Carrier portal documents | Carrier systems | The load-level history: appointments, scans, signed PDFs | The week of delivery |
| Delivery confirmation email | Carrier or freight program | Which POs were on the load that delivered | Archive on receipt |
| Inventory Ledger | Amazon | Units logged into inventory at a named FC on a named date | Export after receiving completes |
The BOL: One Page That Does the Heavy Lifting
The bill of lading is the contract of carriage and the birth certificate of the load. Most sellers treat it as a formality. It is the most important document in the chain, and its value depends entirely on what gets written on it at the dock.
| BOL field | Why it matters later |
|---|---|
| Trailer number | Ties your freight to the physical trailer that hit the FC gate. Yard systems log trailers, not tracking numbers. |
| Seal number | Proves the load was not opened between your dock and the FC. Matching seal at both ends means custody held. |
| Pallet count and piece count | The quantity that left, acknowledged by the driver signature. Your baseline for every later comparison. |
| Pickup date and time | Starts the custody clock. Delivery paperwork closes it. |
| Amazon reference IDs and PO numbers | The identifiers that connect the physical load to your Seller Central shipments. Without them the BOL describes anonymous pallets. |
| PRO number | The carrier tracking key, and your lookup key in the carrier portal later. |
| Weight and freight class | Corroborates the quantity story. A load that claims 26 pallets at 200 pounds total does not survive review. |
| Signatures, both parties | An unsigned BOL is a plan. A signed BOL is a record. |
The field that separates professional operations from everyone else is the seal number. The seal goes on at your dock, in front of your team. Write the number on the BOL before the driver leaves, and photograph the closed trailer doors with the seal number legible in the frame. That photo takes eight seconds and is the difference between asserting the load left intact and demonstrating it.
The POD: The Receiving End Signs
The proof of delivery is the BOL's mirror image: the carrier's delivery receipt, signed or stamped at the fulfillment center dock. A good POD shows the delivery date and time, the pallet count received, and any exceptions noted: shortage, visible damage, or a seal discrepancy. A clean POD matching the BOL count is the strongest single page in your file, the receiving party acknowledging in writing that everything the BOL promised arrived.
The POD carries weight precisely because you did not create it: it is not your assertion. But it often exists only as a scanned PDF inside the carrier system, which brings us to the link where most paper trails die.
The Carrier Portal: Download Everything the Week of Delivery
Amazon Freight keeps the BOL and the POD downloadable per load in its portal, and large national LTL carriers do the same, keyed by PRO number. While the load is recent, pulling the signed documents takes two minutes. The mistake is assuming that stays true in six months.
The fix costs nothing: the same week the load delivers, log in and download the signed BOL, the signed POD, and any load detail page showing appointment and delivery timestamps. Do it while it is boring, because by the time it is exciting, the window may be closed.
The Delivery Email and the PO List
For freight moving under Amazon's own programs, delivery confirmation emails typically list the POs that were on the load that delivered. That email is quietly one of the most useful documents in the chain: a machine-generated statement connecting a specific load to specific PO references on a specific date.
Archive the email itself, not a screenshot: the headers carry the original timestamp and sender, which makes the record self-dating. Keep a dedicated inbox label for inbound freight confirmations.
Mapping PO to FBA Shipment ID: The Connector Everyone Skips
Here is the failure that surprises sellers most: a signed BOL, a clean POD, the delivery email, and still no proof, because nothing on those documents says which FBA shipment the pallets belonged to. Carrier paperwork speaks in PO numbers. Seller Central speaks in shipment IDs. Somebody has to hold the translation.
In Seller Central, open the shipment in Send to Amazon and you will find both identifiers on the shipment details: the FBA shipment ID and the Amazon reference ID that appears on carrier paperwork. The mapping takes one minute per load; record it while the shipment is fresh.
| Load | PO references on the load | FBA shipments covered | Units |
|---|---|---|---|
| Load 1, delivered March 4 | Two PO references | Shipment A (600 units), Shipment B (450 units) | 1,050 |
| Load 2, delivered March 11 | One PO reference | Shipment C (800 units) | 800 |
A table this simple, kept per load, turns a pile of PDFs into a chain of custody. Every question that matters later has the same shape: this shipment went short, which load was it on, what do the documents for that load say. With the map, the answer takes thirty seconds. Without it, there is no answer.
The Inventory Ledger: The Third Record That Closes the Loop
Everything above proves what left your dock and what arrived at the FC gate. The last link proves what Amazon actually did with it, using Amazon's own books.
The Inventory Ledger, under Reports > Fulfillment Reports in Seller Central, is the event-level record of your inventory inside the network. Filter it to receipt events and it shows, for each FNSKU, the exact date, the fulfillment center, and the quantity logged into your inventory. We wrote a full breakdown in our Inventory Ledger guide, but for the paper trail one property makes it special: it is the receiving side documenting the receipt. You did not create this record. The carrier did not. Amazon wrote it in its own system of record.
That is what closes the pincer: the BOL proves the freight left, the POD proves it arrived, the ledger proves it was received into inventory. Three records, three independent authors, one consistent story. Any single record can be questioned. Three that agree are as close to certainty as logistics gets.
For the full decision tree when a shipment receives fewer units than you shipped, see declared vs received, and the common rejection reasons in why Amazon denied your reimbursement.
What to Archive Per Shipment, and For How Long
One folder per FBA shipment ID, named by ID and date. Here is what goes in it.
- The rate confirmation or booking record for the load, showing carrier, pickup date, and destination FC.
- The signed BOL, with trailer number, seal number, and pallet count filled in, scanned the day of pickup.
- Photos from loading: the wrapped pallets, the pallet labels, and the closed trailer doors with the seal number legible.
- The signed POD, downloaded from the carrier portal the week of delivery.
- The load detail export from the portal: appointment times, delivery timestamps, any scan history.
- The delivery confirmation email listing the POs on the load.
- The PO to FBA shipment ID map row for this load.
- The Inventory Ledger export for the receiving window, filtered to the FNSKUs on the shipment.
How long: at least 24 months. The window for filing a missing units claim is short, measured in weeks, which is why the portal downloads cannot wait. But documentation outlives the claim window: account reviews and carrier disputes can reach back a year or more, and a folder of PDFs costs nothing to keep. We keep ours indefinitely.
The Classic Failure Modes
| Mistake | What it costs you later | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| Trusting tracking alone | A scan with no quantity, seal, or shipment linkage. Proves a truck stopped at a building. | Treat tracking as monitoring, documents as evidence. Capture both. |
| Seal number never recorded | No way to demonstrate the load traveled untouched, which weakens every later argument. | Seal on at your dock, number on the BOL, photo of the sealed doors. Every load, no exceptions. |
| Waiting months to pull portal documents | Loads rolled off, broker access gone, POD unreachable. | Download BOL and POD the week of delivery, into the shipment folder. |
| No PO to shipment ID map | A complete document set that cannot be tied to the shipment in question. | One spreadsheet row per load, written the day the load books. |
| Keeping only the unsigned BOL you printed | A plan, not a record. Signatures are what make it evidence. | Scan the signed copy after the driver signs, before the truck leaves. |
| Purging documents once the shipment closes clean | Nothing to stand on when a later review or audit reopens the period. | Closed is not finished. Keep the folder 24 months minimum. |
How We Run It at PrepVia
None of this requires software or headcount, only the discipline to do eight boring things per shipment in the week they are cheap to do. At our warehouse it is baked into the outbound routine: pallets photographed during loading, seal photographed on the doors, signed BOL scanned before the driver pulls out, portal documents pulled weekly, load by load. It is part of the same pallet to check-in workflow we run for every wholesale client. It is also one of the reasons we can put our check-in commitment in writing in our SLA guarantee. When every link is documented, discrepancies stop being mysteries and start being tickets with attachments.
One scope note: this post is about freight. Small parcel has a thinner chain, individual box tracking instead of BOL and POD, and the trade-offs are covered in SPD vs LTL. The short version: LTL gives you a stronger paper trail precisely because pallets move under a sealed, signed, single-load chain of custody, if you bother to capture it.
Final Take
Freight documentation is asymmetric. Capturing the chain costs minutes per shipment and feels pointless on the hundred loads that arrive clean. Missing it costs the entire value of the one load that does not, plus the frustration of knowing the freight was fine and being unable to demonstrate it.
The chain is five links: the signed BOL with trailer, seal, and count. The POD with the FC confirmation. The portal downloads, pulled the week of delivery. The delivery email with the PO list, mapped to your shipment IDs. The Inventory Ledger, where the receiving side writes the final word. Build the folder while the load is moving. You will almost never need it, which is exactly why it is worth having.
Frequently Asked Questions
What documents prove Amazon received my FBA shipment?
Five records together: the signed bill of lading showing pallet count, trailer, and seal number, the carrier proof of delivery signed at the fulfillment center, the carrier portal records for the load, the delivery confirmation email listing the POs on the load, and the Inventory Ledger receipt events in Seller Central. The BOL proves what left, the POD proves what arrived, and the ledger is Amazon documenting its own receiving. Together they are very hard to argue with.
What should a bill of lading include for FBA freight?
Trailer number, seal number, pallet and piece count, pickup date and time, the Amazon reference IDs or PO numbers connecting the load to your shipments, the PRO number, weight and freight class, and signatures from both the shipper and the driver. The seal number is the field most often left blank, and it is the one that proves the load traveled unopened.
How long should I keep FBA shipping documents?
Keep the complete folder for every shipment at least 24 months. The window for filing a missing inventory claim is short, measured in weeks, but account reviews and carrier disputes can reach back a year or more. A folder of PDFs costs nothing to store, so the practical answer is to never delete it.
Can I download proof of delivery for Amazon Freight loads?
Yes. Amazon Freight keeps the BOL and POD downloadable per load in its portal, and major LTL carriers offer the same lookup by PRO number. Download the signed documents the week of delivery, because loads roll off active views and access through brokers ends when the broker relationship does. A POD that exists in a portal you can no longer log into does not help you.
Talk to PrepVia about your FBA freight →
24-36h prep · 35h end-to-end or prep is free · Documented chain of custody per load · Amazon SPN Certified · Miami, FL
