Amazon FBA fees by market

The seven layers of cost in FBA

1. Selling plan. Individual per unit or Professional per month, priced differently per marketplace.
2. Referral fee. A percentage of the price, by category.
3. Fulfillment fee. The logistics cost per unit shipped.
4. Storage. Monthly, by volume and season.
5. Inbound shipping and prep. Getting the goods to Amazon and making them compliant.
6. Returns. With their handling costs and unsellable stock.
7. Advertising. Amazon Ads, which in practice is close to mandatory.

Only the first two and the last are percentages or amounts you can know without more data. The other four depend on your product and your operation.

Individual or Professional plan

The prices for both plans are in the comparison table above. The arithmetic is direct: the indifference point sits where the monthly subscription equals the per-unit amount times your sales. At 39 a month and 0.99 per unit that is around 40 monthly units; at 25 and 0.75, about 33; at 49.95 and 0.99, about 50.

What changes the calculation is that the Professional plan unlocks features the Individual one does not have, advertising among them, so in practice the comparison is not only about price.

For per-unit maths, what matters is spreading the subscription: 39 across 100 units is 0.39 per unit; across 10 units, 3.90. On thin-margin, slow-moving products that difference decides viability.

Referral fee

The percentage Amazon charges for selling on its marketplace, calculated on the total price the buyer pays. It depends on the product category: Amazon states most fall between 8% and 15%, with outliers from 5% on some apparel below a price point up to 45% on Amazon device accessories, and minimum amounts in some categories.

!The 15% shown by default in the calculator is only an editable starting point, not a universal rate. Look up your category's percentage in Seller Central before setting prices.

A detail that surprises people: in markets where the displayed price includes tax, the fee is calculated on that price while you receive the tax-exclusive amount. A 15% on gross is 18.2% on net at 21% tax.

The fulfillment fee and why it cannot be estimated

The Amazon fulfillment fee covers picking, packing, shipping to the customer and the associated service. It is charged per unit and depends on the category, the dimensions and weight, the country, the season, the fulfillment programme and special conditions such as hazardous goods or oversized items.

With that many variables, any tool that hands you a fulfillment fee without knowing your product is inventing a number. And it is a dangerous number, because a few grams can change the size tier and move the fee enough to put a product into loss.

iThat is why the fulfillment fee is a required field in our calculator, not a default value. Get it from the relevant marketplace's Seller Central or its official revenue calculator. With that real figure, everything else comes out exact.

Storage, inbound shipping and prep

Amazon charges storage by volume occupied per month, and the rate rises in peak season. There can also be surcharges for low-rotation inventory. For per-unit maths, divide the monthly cost by the units you sell that month: if your product turns slowly, storage per unit sold rises.

And two costs that are not Amazon's but exist all the same: inbound shipping to the fulfillment center, spread across the units in the shipment, and prep and labeling (polybags, labels, bagging), which you can do yourself or pay a prep service for.

Advertising: the deciding cost

On Amazon, visibility is bought. A new product with no sales history rarely reaches the first results without advertising, and that makes Amazon Ads spend another variable cost, not an optional extra.

It is also the cost that has turned the most “profitable” products into losses: it is common to see FBA analyses with the referral fee, the fulfillment fee and storage worked out perfectly and not a line for advertising. In the example below, advertising takes half the profit.

The number to watch is the maximum ACoS: the share of the price you can spend on ads before losing money.

Full worked example

The conclusion this exercise usually produces: on FBA, products with low cost and a mid-to-high price are the ones that survive the fee structure. Cheap or bulky items have to be exceptionally good on product cost to leave anything behind.