What an Amazon Order Really Costs: Every Fee, FBA and FBM

An Amazon order costs you far more than the referral fee. On one order you pay the referral fee, either the FBA fulfillment fee or the shipping label and your packaging, a share of storage and inbound fees, a share of your advertising, and your item cost. Then, sometimes weeks later, returns and label re-rates. Most profit numbers stop after the first two lines. The money is in the rest.

What does Amazon charge on every order?

The referral fee: a percentage of the sale price, 15% in most categories, lower in a few (8% for computers, 12% for automotive), with a minimum per item. Media categories add a closing fee per unit. This is the only fee most sellers get right, because it's the one Amazon shows up front.

What does it cost to get the order to the buyer?

That depends on who ships it.

• FBA: a fulfillment fee per unit, set by size and weight. Before the unit sells you've also paid to get it into Amazon's network (inbound placement and transportation) and you pay monthly storage while it sits, more if it sits too long.
• FBM (seller-fulfilled): the shipping label, the box, the tape and the dunnage, and the time to pack it. If you sell kits or bundles, the extra components and the labor to put them together belong on the order too.

Either way, the label or the fee you see when the order ships isn't always final. Carriers re-weigh and re-measure, and a re-rate can post weeks later. One re-rate turned a 23.6% margin order into a loss.

What does one order cost, FBA vs FBM?

An example order we built in a Rilk demo account: a $40 item, costing $14. The figures are invented to show the shape. Check your own on the calculator.

Stop at the referral fee and the fulfillment fee and the FBA order looks like $28.50 profit, 71%. The real number is $10.65. Every line in between is a cost you pay whether or not you counted it.

What does a return cost?

More than the sale made. Amazon refunds the buyer and returns most of the referral fee, but keeps a refund administration fee: the lesser of $5 or 20% of the referral fee. On a seller-fulfilled order you've also already paid the outbound label, and you usually pay the return label as well.

In the example: the $7.20 label out, a $7.00 return label and a $1.20 administration fee is $15.40 gone, before you know whether the unit can be sold again. That's the profit on almost two orders. If the unit comes back damaged, add the item cost.

Which costs never show up on the order?

Storage, inbound fees, advertising, the subscription fee and most adjustments are charged to your account, not to an order. They're real, but they arrive in the settlement, spread across dates that don't match your sales. That's the main reason an order-level profit number and your deposit disagree. The full breakdown of that gap is in why your Amazon payout never matches your sales.

How do I calculate it for my own products?

1. Start with the sale price and the referral fee for your category.
2. Add the fulfillment fee (FBA) or your average label plus packaging (FBM).
3. Spread inbound, storage and advertising over the units they relate to.
4. Add your landed item cost: what you paid, plus freight in.
5. Set aside something for returns, based on your own return rate for that product.
6. Check the result against your settlements every month. The settlement is the truth.

How Rilk shows it

The free Amazon profit calculator does steps 1 to 4 for FBA or seller-fulfilled orders: commission, fees, shipping, packaging and kitting cost, and margin. It runs in your browser. The free Settlement Analyzer covers step 6: connect Amazon and see every charge and credit on your last two settlements, by type.

Inside Rilk, every Amazon order has a Financial tab with the settlement lines Amazon posted against it, so fees, re-rates and adjustments land on the order they belong to. Add item cost through purchase orders and Rilk shows true profit per order, plus reports. Those are on Pro and Ultimate.

Start free at rilk.ai — no credit card required. True per-order profit is on Pro and Ultimate, and every account gets one 14-day Pro trial to run it on your own orders. See plans.