How much does Amazon take per sale?

The fees that make up Amazon's cut

Amazon doesn't charge one fee. It charges several, and they add up. Understanding the structure matters more than memorizing any single rate, because the rates change over time and vary by category. Always verify the current numbers against Amazon's published fee schedule before you price a product.

One more thing before the list: these fees arrive at different times and in different reports. The referral and fulfillment fees come out of each order inside your settlement. Storage bills monthly against your whole inventory. Surcharges appear only when triggered. That timing spread is why eyeballing your bank deposits never tells you what Amazon actually took.

One thing that doesn't move the number: who made the product. Amazon private label products pay the same referral rate as a resold national brand, because the rate is set by category, not by whose name is on the box.

Here is the typical stack on a standard FBA sale:

• •Referral fee: a percentage of the sale price that varies by category. For most categories it's roughly 15%, but some run lower and some higher, so check your category's rate.
• •FBA fulfillment fee: a fixed dollar amount per unit based on size and weight, not a percentage. This is the fee that punishes cheap products, because it stays the same whether you sell for $8 or $80.
• •Monthly storage fees: charged per cubic foot of inventory you hold, with higher rates in the Q4 peak season.
• •Optional and situational fees: long-term storage surcharges, removal/disposal fees, returns processing in some categories, and the $39.99/month Professional selling plan (a flat subscription on the seller account, not a per-sale fee).
• •Prep and labeling: units that don't arrive sell-ready get prepped by Amazon at a per-unit charge, which is why plenty of sellers route inbound stock through a prep center for Amazon FBA instead and pay that cost outside the settlement.

Why the percentage swings so much by price

Here's the part most "Amazon takes ~X%" answers miss: because the FBA fulfillment fee is a fixed dollar amount, it eats a huge share of a cheap product and a small share of an expensive one. A roughly $4 to $6 fulfillment fee is more than half the price of a $10 item but barely 5% of a $100 item.

Stack the percentage-based referral fee on top of that fixed fee, and the total share Amazon keeps can swing by 30 percentage points or more across price bands. That's why a single blended number is misleading. Your real take is a per-SKU question, not a marketplace-wide constant.

We modeled this across five price points in the Amazon Fee Creep Report, which shows roughly a third of a $10 sale survives Amazon's fees and ads before product cost, versus nearly two-thirds of a $100 sale. If you sell low-priced products, the report is worth reading before you assume a flat margin.

Size tier compounds the price effect. Two products selling at the same $20 price can pay very different fulfillment fees if one fits in a small standard envelope and the other tips into a large standard tier. Sellers redesigning packaging to drop a size tier are doing real margin work, not penny-pinching: a small dimensional change can move the fee on every single unit you ever sell.

A worked example: where a $25 sale actually goes

Numbers make this concrete, so here's a purely hypothetical standard-size product. Say you sell a $25 kitchen item. Amazon takes its referral percentage first; at a typical mid-teens category rate, call it $3.75. Then the fulfillment fee for its size tier, say $5.50 in this example. Then a small storage allocation per unit sold, maybe $0.40 for a fast-turning product. That's $9.65 gone, roughly 39% of the sale, before advertising or product cost.

Now run the same math at $12 for a similar-size product. The referral fee shrinks with the price, but the $5.50 fulfillment fee doesn't budge. Total platform cost lands near $7.70, which is 64% of the sale. Same category, same box size, wildly different economics. That's the whole story of Amazon fees in two numbers.

These figures are illustrative, not current rates. The exercise to copy is the structure: percentage fee plus fixed fee plus storage, divided by your price. Run your own product through BeanHawk's FBA fee calculator with current rates and you'll have your real number in about a minute.

Notice what the example implies for pricing strategy. Raising the $12 product to $15 barely changes Amazon's dollar take, but it moves the percentage take dramatically and nearly doubles what's left for you. On low-priced goods, small price increases do outsized margin work. On premium-priced goods, the math flips: fee percentage matters more than the fixed fee, so category selection becomes the bigger decision.

Don't forget advertising

Most sellers run Amazon PPC, and ad spend is effectively another slice Amazon takes. It just doesn't show up on the fee line. At a mid-range total advertising cost of sale (TACOS), ads can quietly consume another 10% to 15% of revenue on top of fulfillment and referral fees.

When you total referral fee + fulfillment fee + storage + advertising, the combined platform cost on a typical FBA sale often lands somewhere in the 35% to 55% range before you've paid for the product itself. That's the number that actually determines whether you're profitable.

Ads also hide in a different report than fees do, which is why so many sellers underestimate their true platform cost. Fees come out of your settlement before Amazon pays you; ad spend is usually invoiced or deducted separately. Unless your bookkeeping pulls both into one profit view, you're looking at two half-pictures and mentally averaging them, badly.

The fees Amazon gets wrong (and owes you back)

Amazon's fee math isn't always right, and the errors run in Amazon's favor often enough that checking is worth your time. The most common issues: units measured into the wrong size tier so every sale pays an inflated fulfillment fee, weight recorded incorrectly after a warehouse re-measure, and referral fees applied at the wrong category rate.

Then there's inventory itself. Warehouses lose units, damage them, or mis-grade returns, and Amazon owes you a reimbursement each time. It auto-reimburses some of these events, not all. The gap between what happened and what Amazon paid back is recoverable money, but only inside limited claim windows.

Fixing a wrong fee means opening a case. There's no published Amazon seller support phone number to call cold; you request a callback from the Help section inside Seller Central, and the case log there becomes your paper trail. So contact Amazon seller support the same way whether you want chat or a phone callback, and attach the measurements, photos, or report screenshots to the case rather than trying to explain a size-tier dispute out loud to someone reading from a script.

This is the problem an fba reimbursement service or amazon reimbursement software is built for: continuously comparing Amazon's inventory and fee records against what should have happened, then flagging or filing claims for the difference. You can do the same audit manually with Amazon's reports if your catalog is small. Either way, treat 'how much does Amazon take' as including the slice it takes by accident, because that slice is the one you can actually get back.

How to find your real number

Stop estimating and calculate it per product. Pull the referral percentage for your category, the fulfillment fee for your size tier, and your storage and ad costs, then subtract them from your price. What's left, minus your landed product cost, is your real profit.

Run your specific product through a calculator that uses current fee inputs so you're working from real structure rather than a remembered percentage. BeanHawk also reconciles your actual Amazon settlements, so you can see exactly what Amazon kept on every order after the fact, including fees Amazon over-charged and owes back.

For ongoing tracking, this is where amazon accounting software earns its place. Good amazon fba accounting means every settlement gets split into sales, referral fees, fulfillment fees, storage, refunds, and reimbursements inside QuickBooks or Xero, so 'how much did Amazon take last month' becomes a report you open, not a spreadsheet project. When comparing amazon seller accounting software, check that it itemizes fee types separately rather than lumping them into one 'Amazon fees' line; the lump hides exactly the fee creep you're trying to watch. BeanHawk, A2X, and Link My Books all approach this differently, so match the tool to whether you also want inventory and reimbursement auditing in the same place.

Common mistakes when estimating Amazon's cut

Four errors show up constantly in seller spreadsheets, and each one flatters your margin.

First, using last year's fee schedule. Amazon revises rates and size tiers regularly, and a stale number can be off by enough to flip a SKU from profitable to not. Second, ignoring returns: when a customer returns a product, you refund the price but don't always recover every fee, and the unit may come back unsellable. Third, forgetting storage on slow movers, where months of cubic-foot charges and possible long-term surcharges pile onto units that haven't sold yet. Fourth, averaging across your catalog. A blended 35% take across ten SKUs can hide one product losing money on every single order.

The fix is boring and effective: per-SKU math, refreshed whenever Amazon announces fee changes, reconciled against actual settlement data rather than projections. Sellers who do this catch fee creep in weeks. Sellers who don't find out at tax time, usually from an accountant asking why the margins don't match the story.

• •Using outdated fee schedules instead of current rates
• •Ignoring the cost of returns and unsellable units
• •Forgetting storage and long-term surcharges on slow inventory
• •Averaging across SKUs and missing individual losers