What is Referral fee?

How the Amazon referral fee is calculated

Amazon applies the referral fee as a percentage of the total sales price, which generally includes the item price plus any shipping or gift-wrap charges you collect. The percentage depends on the product category. Broadly, rates tend to sit in the high single digits to mid-teens range, but you should verify your specific category against Amazon's current schedule because rates differ by category and get updated periodically.

On top of the percentage, many categories carry a per-item minimum referral fee. For inexpensive products, that minimum can be the binding number, meaning a low-priced item may owe the flat floor rather than the percentage. This is why margins on cheap items are so easy to misjudge: the effective referral fee rate on a low-ticket product can be far higher than the headline category percentage suggests.

A few categories complicate things further with tiered rates, where the percentage changes above or below a price threshold. Some media categories add a separate closing fee on top of the referral fee. And a product that Amazon has classified into the wrong category can quietly pay the wrong rate for months. None of these details are exotic. They're just easy to miss if you only ever look at your net deposit and never at the fee lines themselves.

• •Referral fee = the greater of (category percentage x total sales price) or the per-item minimum
• •Total sales price typically includes item price plus shipping and gift-wrap you charge
• •Rates vary by category, so verify yours against Amazon's current fee schedule
• •Some categories use tiered percentages that shift at a price threshold
• •Applies to both FBA and FBM orders, unlike fulfillment fees
• •Charged on the gross sale, before your own costs are considered

A worked example (hypothetical numbers)

Say you sell a kitchen gadget for $25 with free shipping, and suppose your category's referral fee is 15 percent (a made-up rate for illustration, always check the current schedule). Amazon takes 15 percent of $25, which is $3.75. If your landed cost is $8 and your FBA fulfillment fee is, say, $5.50, your per-unit economics look like this: $25 revenue, minus $3.75 referral fee, minus $5.50 fulfillment, minus $8 landed cost, leaves $7.75 before storage, advertising, and returns. The referral fee alone ate 15 percent of revenue but roughly a third of your remaining profit pool.

Now run the same math on a $6 accessory in a category with a hypothetical $1 per-item minimum. Fifteen percent of $6 is $0.90, which is below the $1 floor, so you pay the $1 minimum instead. Your effective referral rate is 16.7 percent, not 15. That gap looks trivial per unit, but it compounds: on the cheap item the minimum shaved an extra chunk off an already thin margin, and if you move a few thousand units a month the difference is real money. This is the pattern to internalize. The percentage governs mid-priced and expensive items, and the minimum quietly governs cheap ones.

One more wrinkle: if you charge the buyer $4 for shipping on that $6 item, the fee base becomes $10, not $6. The referral fee is then calculated on the full $10. Sellers who set a low item price and recover margin through shipping discover that Amazon's commission follows the total, so the trick buys nothing.

Referral fees vs fulfillment fees: don't confuse them

Sellers frequently lump all Amazon deductions together as 'fees,' but the referral fee and the fulfillment fee are different animals. The referral fee is the marketplace commission. You owe it on every sale no matter who ships the order. The fulfillment fee is what FBA sellers pay Amazon to pick, pack, and ship; an FBM seller who ships themselves pays no fulfillment fee but still owes the referral fee.

Keeping them separate in your accounting matters. They behave differently, they map to different lines on your settlement report, and conflating them makes it impossible to compare FBA versus FBM economics honestly. The referral fee scales with price, while the fulfillment fee scales with size and weight, so a heavy cheap item and a light expensive item have opposite fee profiles. A clean chart of accounts that splits referral fees from fulfillment fees, storage fees, and advertising is the foundation of knowing your real per-unit profit.

Neither one is the whole bill. A Professional account carries an Amazon seller monthly fee charged whether you sell anything or not, which belongs in overhead rather than cost of sales. FBA adds storage, and an FBA disposal fee or removal charge when you clear out stock that stopped selling. For a quick read before you commit to a product, Amazon's fee calculator (the Revenue Calculator inside Seller Central) estimates referral and fulfillment fees for a given ASIN. It won't know your landed cost, return rate, or ad spend, so treat its output as the ceiling on your margin rather than the answer.

Where referral fees show up in your accounting

Amazon nets referral fees out of your payout, so you never see the full sale price hit your bank. The gross sale and the referral fee deduction both appear on your settlement report, and clean books require recording the full revenue and the fee as a separate selling expense rather than only booking the net deposit. If you book only the net, your revenue is understated and your true selling costs are invisible. That distortion flows straight into your tax return and any margin analysis you attempt.

Doing this by hand gets old fast. A settlement report can contain thousands of lines, and referral fees sit alongside dozens of other transaction types. This is the problem amazon accounting software exists to solve: it parses each settlement, splits out referral fees, fulfillment fees, storage, advertising, refunds, and reimbursements, and posts a summarized journal entry to your ledger. If you run quickbooks for amazon sellers workflows manually, the equivalent is downloading each settlement report and building the journal entry yourself, which works at low volume but breaks down once you're settling every two weeks across multiple marketplaces.

Whichever route you take, the test of good amazon bookkeeping is simple: your profit and loss should show gross sales as revenue and referral fees as their own expense line, and the two should tie back to your settlement reports to the penny. Tools like A2X, Link My Books, and BeanHawk all follow this gross-up approach through an amazon quickbooks integration or a Xero connection; the differences are in how they handle inventory, reimbursements, and multi-channel data. Categorizing referral fees correctly is also what lets you calculate gross margin and contribution margin per SKU. Once referral fees, fulfillment fees, and your landed cost of goods are all mapped to dedicated accounts, you can see which products actually make money after Amazon takes its cut, and which ones only look profitable until the commission lands.

Common referral fee mistakes

The most expensive mistake is never auditing your category classification. Amazon assigns each ASIN to a category, and that assignment drives the rate. If a product lands in a higher-rate category than it should, you overpay on every single order until someone notices. Pull the actual fee charged on a recent order, divide by the sale price, and compare the result to the rate you think you're paying. Do this quarterly. It takes ten minutes.

A second mistake is pricing from the headline percentage while ignoring the per-item minimum, which punishes low-ticket products, and a third is modeling new products at last year's rates. Amazon revises its fee schedule, usually announcing changes in advance, and a category that worked at one rate may not work at another. Build your margin models so the referral rate is an input you can update, not a number buried in a formula.

Bookkeeping mistakes cluster around netting. Booking the deposit as revenue, coding referral fees and fulfillment fees to one generic 'Amazon fees' account, and ignoring the fee lines on refunded orders (Amazon returns part of the referral fee when it refunds a buyer, and that credit needs to be recorded too) all produce books that can't answer the only question that matters: what does each product earn after Amazon's cut?

Referral fees across other marketplaces

Because the referral fee scales with price, a higher selling price means a larger absolute commission, but the percentage stays the same, so the fee doesn't erode margin the way a fixed cost would. The bigger trap is category. Two products at the same price can carry different referral fee percentages, which changes the math on whether a category is worth entering at all.

Walmart, eBay, TikTok Shop, and other marketplaces charge their own referral or commission fees that work on a similar principle but at different rates. eBay calls its version a final value fee, and Walmart uses referral fee language much like Amazon's. If you sell across channels, modeling each marketplace's commission against the same product is the only way to know where a SKU actually nets the most. That calculation depends entirely on accurate, channel-by-channel fee accounting, which is why multi-channel sellers usually end up wanting one system that handles amazon fba accounting and ebay accounting software duties in the same ledger instead of stitching together per-channel spreadsheets.

How eBay's fee structure differs

eBay deserves its own look, because its fees are structured differently enough to break a margin spreadsheet built for Amazon. The final value fee is a category percentage of the total amount of the sale, including shipping and tax, plus a fixed per-order charge. There's no monthly subscription unless you open a Store. What Amazon has no equivalent for is eBay's listing-side charges: an insertion fee once you pass your free monthly listing allotment, which applies to a Buy It Now listing the same as an auction, and a separate reserve price fee if you set a reserve on an auction. The reserve price listing fee is calculated from the reserve amount itself, usually with a minimum and a cap, so a high reserve on an item that never sells can cost you money for nothing.

The edge cases are where cross-channel sellers get surprised, and each one has a bookkeeping consequence:

• •Cancelled or refunded orders: eBay credits the final value fee back when you cancel an order or refund a buyer, though the fixed per-order portion isn't always returned. Record the credit as its own line instead of trusting a net figure.
• •Ending an auction early: the insertion fee isn't refunded, and if you end the listing by selling to the current high bidder you still owe the final value fee on that sale.
• •Below Standard performance: eBay adds a surcharge on top of final value fees for accounts whose service metrics fall to Below Standard, which turns a service problem into a direct P&L item.
• •Payment disputes: when a buyer disputes a charge with their card issuer and the case doesn't go your way, eBay charges a dispute fee on top of the lost sale and the lost item.
• •eBay Motors: vehicles run on their own structure, closer to a listing charge plus a fixed successful-listing fee than a straight percentage, while parts and accessories use standard final value fees.
• •VAT: sellers in the UK, EU, and other VAT jurisdictions have VAT added to their eBay fees. Whether that's a real cost or a reclaimable input depends on your registration, so it shouldn't be dumped into fee expense unexamined.
• •Restocking fees: eBay hasn't allowed sellers to charge a restocking fee on returns for years, so a returned item comes back at full refund value and the recovery has to come from the fee credits.

Watching for fee changes on both channels

Amazon and eBay both revise their fee schedules, and an eBay fee increase or an Amazon category rate change lands quietly on your next invoice whether or not you read the announcement. Both publish current schedules, and both give you your own fee history in their payment reports: Amazon in the settlement reports, eBay under Payments in Seller Hub. Comparing your effective fee rate month over month, total fees divided by gross sales, is the fastest way to catch a rate change nobody told you about, and it takes about five minutes per channel.

Frequently asked questions

What is the referral fee on Amazon?

It is the commission Amazon charges on each sale: a percentage of the total transaction price that varies by product category, often with a per-item minimum. It is Amazon's fee for letting you sell on its marketplace and applies to every order whether you use FBA or fulfill it yourself. Check Amazon's current fee schedule for your specific category, since rates change over time.

Is the referral fee the same as the FBA fee?

No. The referral fee is the marketplace commission you owe on every sale regardless of fulfillment method. The FBA fulfillment fee is a separate charge that only applies when Amazon picks, packs, and ships your order. An FBM seller pays the referral fee but no fulfillment fee, which is why keeping the two separate in your books is important.

Does the referral fee apply to shipping charges?

Generally yes. Amazon typically calculates the referral fee on the total sales price, which usually includes the shipping and gift-wrap amounts you charge the buyer, not just the item price. This catches sellers who set low item prices and high shipping to game fees. Confirm the current treatment in Amazon's fee schedule, as the rules can vary by program and category.

Why is the referral fee higher than expected on cheap items?

Because many categories carry a per-item minimum referral fee. On a low-priced product, that flat minimum can exceed the straight category percentage, so the minimum becomes the fee you actually pay. The effective rate on inexpensive items can therefore be much higher than the headline category percentage, which is easy to miss when pricing low-ticket products.

Do I get the referral fee back when an order is refunded?

Partially, in most cases. When Amazon refunds a buyer, it typically credits back the referral fee minus a refund administration charge, so you recover most but not all of the commission. The credit appears as its own line on your settlement report and should be recorded separately in your books rather than netted silently against the refund.

What is the eBay reserve price fee?

It's what eBay charges for setting a reserve, the minimum price an auction has to hit before you're obligated to sell. The reserve fee is calculated from the reserve amount rather than the final sale price, typically with a minimum and a maximum, and it's charged on top of any insertion fee. Availability varies by site and category. The accounting point is that a reserve fee is a listing cost you can owe on an item that never sells, so it belongs in selling expense, not in the cost of a specific sale.

Do I get the eBay final value fee back on a cancelled order?

Mostly. When you cancel an order or issue a full refund, eBay credits back the variable percentage of the final value fee, while the fixed per-order charge is often kept. The credit shows as its own transaction in your payments report, so book it as a fee credit rather than netting it against the refund. Doing it that way keeps both your refund total and your true fee cost visible.

How do I record referral fees in my bookkeeping?

Record the full sale as revenue and the referral fee as a separate selling expense, rather than only booking the net deposit Amazon sends to your bank. The gross sale and the fee both appear on your settlement report. Mapping referral fees to their own account in your chart of accounts is what lets you calculate true gross margin per product.

Does QuickBooks track Amazon referral fees automatically?

Not on its own. QuickBooks sees only the net deposit from Amazon unless something feeds it the detail. An amazon quickbooks integration such as A2X, Link My Books, or BeanHawk parses each settlement report and posts gross sales, referral fees, and the other fee types as separate lines, so your ledger matches what Amazon actually charged. Without a connector you'd rebuild that journal entry by hand from the settlement report each period.

What's the best accounting software for Amazon sellers who want fee visibility?

Look for amazon seller accounting software that books gross revenue and itemized fees rather than lump-sum deposits, ties every journal entry back to a settlement report, and breaks out referral fees from fulfillment and storage. A2X and Link My Books are established options focused on the settlement-to-ledger step; BeanHawk adds reimbursement tracking and inventory valuation on top. At very low volume, a spreadsheet built from your settlement reports is genuinely fine, and it's worth graduating to software only when the manual work starts costing you accuracy or hours.

Related terms

Go deeper

• The Amazon Settlement Report, Explained (and How to Book It)
• Amazon FBA Fees Explained (2026): Every Fee, and What You Can Get Back