Gain insight into the costs of selling on Amazon, including fees, commissions, and other expenses, to help you optimise your business on the platform.
Thomas Hjul Alstrup
We are frequently asked by businesses that have yet to gain experience with Amazon as a platform: “How much does it actually cost to sell your products on Amazon?”
The question is entirely understandable and natural. However, there is no single straightforward answer, as the costs of selling on Amazon can vary significantly from case to case. Below, we highlight some of the most common expenses you should be particularly aware of when selling your products on Amazon.
Monthly seller account fee
When you create a Professional Amazon Seller Central Account, Amazon charges a monthly fee of 39.99 USD. If you estimate that you will generally sell fewer than 40 units per month, you also have the option to forgo the monthly fee and instead pay a fee of 0.99 USD per item sold. However, by opting out of the monthly fee, you lose certain benefits (such as access to advertising), which is why we almost always recommend setting up the Professional Seller Account and paying the monthly fee to Amazon.
For every single unit you sell via Amazon, you must pay a fee (the so-called “Referral fee”). The amount of this fee depends, among other things, on the product category your goods fall into. In your Seller Central Account, you can always see the referral fee for each SKU you have listed in your inventory.
If you – like most of our clients – choose to sell your products via FBA (Fulfilment by Amazon), where you send your products to one of Amazon’s warehouses and Amazon’s warehouse staff handle all the practical aspects of an order (handling, dispatch, returns), Amazon charges you a fee for these services. The size of this fee depends on the size and weight of the package. You can always choose to manage all logistics yourself by selling your goods as FBM (Fulfilment by Merchant). In addition to the extra resources you would need to allocate for this, you will also lose the ability to offer Amazon customers Prime (free shipping and guaranteed delivery within two days), which is highly valued by Amazon customers. Therefore, as a rule, we recommend choosing the FBA solution.
To give yourself the best chance of success on Amazon, we strongly recommend allocating resources for advertising on Amazon. The organic sales you can achieve through good, SEO-optimised copy and attractive content on your product pages and in your brand store will almost never be enough on their own. That is why you need to run well-structured campaigns to bring even more Amazon users to your product pages. How much you should allocate for this aspect of your Amazon sales adventure largely depends on the level of competition for the keywords or advertising spaces you are targeting on Amazon’s platform.
We often find that business owners underestimate the resources that, in our view, must be allocated to the daily management of their Amazon seller account. Every seller will, during their time on Amazon, encounter various unforeseen challenges that can hinder sales and must be addressed. Depending on your experience as an Amazon seller, many of these challenges can quickly eat up a lot of hours you may have planned to spend elsewhere. Therefore, we always recommend that, before you even start selling on Amazon, you consider partnering with an experienced Amazon agency such as WeMarket, who can help you resolve these issues more easily and efficiently than handling everything on your own. At the same time, even basic tasks such as account or product setup can quickly become extremely resource-intensive if you have little prior experience with Amazon.
If you would like assistance to increase your sales on Amazon, you are welcome to email us at kontakt@wemarket-digital.fr or call us on 70 44 42 88.
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