Table of Contents
- The 3 Main Fee Categories
- Referral Fee: 8-15 Percent of Sale Price
- FBA Fulfillment Fee: The Size Tier Math
- FBA Storage Fee: Per Cubic Foot, Per Month
- Low Inventory Level Fee (LILF): The New One
- Long-Term Storage Fee
- Returns Processing Fee
- Removal and Disposal Fees
- Inbound Placement Service Fee
- The Monthly Professional Plan Fee
- Real Per-Unit Math: A Worked Example
- How to Audit Your Real Fees
- Next Steps
1. The 3 Main Fee Categories
Amazon FBA fees fall into three main buckets, plus a handful of penalty-style fees you trigger if you make mistakes. The three core categories every seller pays:
- Referral fee. Amazon's commission on each sale. Percent of sale price. Varies by category.
- FBA fulfillment fee. Amazon's pick-pack-ship fee per unit. Flat dollar amount. Varies by size tier and weight.
- FBA storage fee. What Amazon charges you to store your inventory in their warehouses. Per cubic foot per month.
"There's three types of fees that you are going to pay when you sell products on Amazon. The bad news is that if you don't understand these fees, chances are that you are actually losing money. The good news is that you don't need to remember them all because we have tools to actually calculate our profit." Chris, Amazon FBA Fees Explained: The Ultimate Guide (2026)
Then there are penalty fees: the Low Inventory Level Fee (new in 2024), long-term storage fees, returns processing, removal/disposal, and refund administration. These are avoidable if you operate cleanly.
2. Referral Fee: 8-15 Percent of Sale Price
The referral fee is Amazon's cut. They charge a percentage of your sale price, calculated on the total order (item price + shipping if any). Most categories are 15 percent. A few are lower.
| Category | Referral fee |
|---|---|
| Most product categories (the default) | 15% |
| Electronics (consumer) | 8% |
| Computers | 8% |
| Camera & Photo | 8% |
| Personal Care Appliances | 8% on items under $10, 15% on items over |
| Watches | 16% on first $1,500, 3% above |
| Jewelry (fine) | 20% on first $250, 5% above |
| Amazon Device Accessories | 45% (yes, really) |
The referral fee has a $0.30 minimum. So on a $1 item, you pay $0.30, not 15 cents.
For OA sourcing this is the simplest fee to calculate. Multiply your projected sale price by your category's referral percentage. RevSeller and SellerAmp do this automatically.
3. FBA Fulfillment Fee: The Size Tier Math
The FBA fulfillment fee is what Amazon charges to pick, pack, ship, and handle customer service for each unit. This fee depends entirely on size tier and weight.
Amazon's size tiers as of 2026:
- Small Standard: under 1 lb, fits in a 15 x 12 x 0.75 inch box. Cheapest tier. ~$3.06 to $3.65 per unit.
- Large Standard: under 20 lb, fits in a 18 x 14 x 8 inch box. Most OA buys land here. ~$3.65 to $7.50 per unit depending on weight.
- Large Bulky: over 20 lb or oversized. Significantly more expensive. ~$10 to $20+ per unit.
- Extra Large 0-50 lb / 50-70 lb / 70+ lb: for furniture, large appliances. $26 to $100+ per unit.
The dollar amounts above are 2026 rates and they go up every year. Use Amazon's official Revenue Calculator for the live number. Don't guess.
The trap for beginners is buying a product that visually looks small but is technically classified by Amazon as Large Bulky because of one dimension. Always check the size tier in the calculator before you buy 50 units. A $14 product with a $10 FBA fee has no margin.
4. FBA Storage Fee: Per Cubic Foot, Per Month
Amazon charges you monthly for the cubic feet of warehouse space your inventory occupies. The rate varies by season.
| Period | Standard-size | Oversize |
|---|---|---|
| January to September | $0.87/cu ft/month | $0.56/cu ft/month |
| October to December (Q4) | $2.40/cu ft/month | $1.40/cu ft/month |
Q4 storage is roughly 2.8x more expensive than Q1-Q3 because Amazon wants to incentivize sellers to move inventory through the warehouse during peak season. If you have slow-moving inventory sitting through October-December, your storage fees can eat 5-10 percent of your sale price.
Per-unit storage in practical terms: most OA products run $0.15 to $0.50 in storage per unit per month. A small ASIN that takes up 0.1 cubic feet at $0.87/ft = about $0.09/month. The same ASIN in Q4 = about $0.24/month. Multiply by your average days-to-sale and you have your real storage cost per unit.
"In today's video we are going to break down all storage fees on Amazon so you can understand how much money you are paying and what affects how much money you are paying." Chris, Amazon FBA Storage Fees Explained
5. Low Inventory Level Fee (LILF): The New One
Amazon introduced the Low Inventory Level Fee in April 2024 and tightened the thresholds in 2025. The LILF applies when your inventory's forecasted weeks of cover drops below specific thresholds for a 4-week period:
- Less than 4 weeks of cover: $0.89 per unit
- 4 to 6 weeks of cover: $0.49 per unit
- 6 to 8 weeks of cover: $0.29 per unit
- 8 to 12 weeks of cover: $0.09 per unit
- More than 12 weeks of cover: $0
The fee applies to standard-size units in the US and shows up roughly 4 weeks after the trigger period. It's added to your fulfillment fee.
The behavior change Amazon is trying to drive: keep more inventory in stock so customers don't see Out of Stock. The fee penalizes thin inventory levels, even if you're profitable per unit. For a small OA seller with 30-50 ASINs, expect to see this fee on 3-5 ASINs per month, costing $30-$150 in extra fees.
The workaround: ship a deeper initial batch on every replenishable. Instead of shipping 10 units of a winner, ship 25-30. The economics of avoiding LILF usually exceed the cost of capital tied up in extra units.
6. Long-Term Storage Fee
Inventory that sits in Amazon's warehouses for 181 to 365 days incurs an additional aged-inventory surcharge of $1.50 per cubic foot per month or $0.15 per unit (whichever is greater). Inventory over 365 days incurs $6.90 per cubic foot per month.
The aged-inventory surcharge stacks on top of normal storage fees. So a slow-moving unit sitting for 200 days can cost you $1.50+ per unit per month between the two fees.
For OA sellers the practical rule is: anything not selling within 90-120 days gets liquidated (price-drop, removal, or destruction). Holding hoping it will sell at the original price always costs more than taking the loss.
7. Returns Processing Fee
When a customer returns an FBA order, Amazon refunds them and Amazon may charge you a returns processing fee equal to the FBA fulfillment fee for that unit. Amazon only charges this fee for high-return-rate categories (apparel, shoes, jewelry, certain electronics). For most OA categories the fee is $0.
The returns fee policy got more aggressive in 2024. Categories that previously didn't have it are now subject. If your sourcing is in apparel or shoes, model the returns fee into your buy math. Typical apparel return rate is 8-12 percent. Multiplied by the returns processing fee, you can lose 4-7 percent of revenue to returns alone.
8. Removal and Disposal Fees
If you want Amazon to send your inventory back to you (removal) or destroy it (disposal), they charge a fee per unit. Roughly $0.97 to $4.36 per unit depending on size tier for removal. Disposal is cheaper, $0.97 to $0.31 per unit.
Most OA sellers run removals once a quarter to clear out duds. Don't let dead inventory rack up storage fees indefinitely. Pull it back, sell it on eBay or Facebook Marketplace, and recycle the capital.
9. Inbound Placement Service Fee
Amazon's 2024 Inbound Placement Service fee (IPSF) charges you to send inventory to a single warehouse rather than splitting across multiple. The free option is splitting your shipment across 2-4 Amazon warehouses (more work, more labels, more carrier coordination). The paid option is sending everything to one location and letting Amazon handle the internal redistribution.
For most beginners the inbound placement fee is $0.27 to $0.49 per unit if you opt to send to a single warehouse. For small batches it's worth paying. For 100+ unit batches the split option saves real money.
Full breakdown of the shipping plan workflow including inbound placement decisions.
10. The Monthly Professional Plan Fee
$39.99 per month for the Professional seller plan. This is a fixed cost. Not per-unit. You owe this whether you sell 1 unit or 10,000 units in the month.
The Individual plan is $0/month plus $0.99 per unit. Switch to Professional if you sell more than 40 units per month. Individual plan sellers also cannot win the Buy Box, so for any real Amazon business the answer is Professional.
11. Real Per-Unit Math: A Worked Example
Let's run a real ASIN. You buy a small kitchen accessory at Kohl's clearance for $7.84 (post-discount, post-tax). You ship it to a prep center in Delaware (no sales tax) for $1.45 prep. You ship from the prep center to Amazon at $0.38 per unit. The product sells on Amazon at a 90-day Buy Box average of $24.99.
Your fee stack on the sale:
- Referral fee (15%): $3.75
- FBA fulfillment fee (Small Standard): $3.65
- Storage fee (estimate, 30 days): $0.15
- Total Amazon fees: $7.55
Your math:
- Revenue: $24.99
- Amazon fees: $7.55
- Net to you: $17.44
- COG + prep + inbound: $7.84 + $1.45 + $0.38 = $9.67
- Net profit: $7.77
- ROI on cost: $7.77 / $9.67 = 80 percent
- Margin on sale: $7.77 / $24.99 = 31 percent
That's a buy. Not every product will look this good. The discipline is running the calculator on every buy, every time. How to use the FBA calculator.
12. How to Audit Your Real Fees
Once you're running, Amazon's Fee Preview report tells you what fees they actually charged on every unit shipped. Pull this report monthly. Compare to your projected fees. Variance over 10 percent on any unit means either your calculator was wrong (re-check the size tier classification) or Amazon mis-classified the product (open a case).
Common reasons for variance:
- Amazon's measurement of your product (length x width x height) differs from what you entered.
- Amazon's category assignment is different from what RevSeller showed.
- You hit the Low Inventory Level Fee on an ASIN you didn't expect to.
Open a Seller Central case to correct size-tier mismatches. Amazon reimburses retroactively if you can document the actual product dimensions. This single audit move can recover $200-$500 per month for a mid-volume OA seller.
Watch me run the full fee stack on a real ASIN
Every Thursday at 8 PM EST. I source a product, model every fee, decide whether to buy, and ship it. You'll see the size-tier read, the storage estimate, and the real net math.
Reserve My Free Seat →13. Next Steps
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