Published June 14, 2026
Amazon FBA looks hands-off — you ship inventory to a warehouse, Amazon picks, packs, and ships. But "Amazon takes care of fulfillment" hides a stack of fees that can quietly turn a $25 sale into a $3 profit. This guide breaks down every Amazon FBA fee for 2026 and runs them through a real profit calculator so you know your margin before you buy inventory.
Amazon takes a percentage of every sale as a "referral" for bringing the customer. It varies by category — about 15% for most consumer goods, 8% for some categories like personal computers, and 45% for Amazon Device Accessories. For most sellers, plan on 15%.
This covers pick, pack, and ship. It depends on size tier and weight. A standard-size item under 1 lb typically runs around $3.00–$4.00; larger or heavier items climb quickly. This is the fee that eats new sellers alive on low-priced products.
Amazon charges for warehousing your inventory, billed monthly and calculated daily. Rates roughly double in Q4 (Oct–Dec). Slow-moving inventory is a silent margin killer.
If you don't send inventory to the exact locations Amazon requests, you pay an inbound placement fee. Sending to a single location costs more; distributing to multiple locations costs less (or nothing). Many sellers overlook this.
To rank and sell on Amazon you usually need Sponsored Products ads. Realistic sellers budget 10–25% of revenue for PPC, especially in a product's early days.
Know your real Amazon FBA profit per SKU.
Get the FBA Profit Tracker Spreadsheet — $19Let's say you private-label a kitchen gadget that sells for $25, you buy it from a supplier for $5, it's a standard-size 12 oz item, and you spend 15% of revenue on PPC to keep it ranked. Here's the real math:
| Sale price | $25.00 |
| Product cost (COGS) | −$5.00 |
| Referral fee (15%) | −$3.75 |
| FBA fulfillment fee | −$3.22 |
| Storage (per unit, approx) | −$0.50 |
| PPC (15% of revenue) | −$3.75 |
| Inbound placement (estimated) | −$0.30 |
| Net profit per unit | $8.48 |
That's a 33.9% profit margin — healthy for FBA, but only because COGS is low. If your product cost were $9 instead of $5, margin would collapse to under 18%, and a single return would erase two sales' worth of profit.
The #1 reason FBA sellers quit isn't competition — it's that they launched products without running the full fee math first. They priced for revenue, not profit.
Doing this math by hand for dozens of SKUs, restocks, and ad campaigns is exactly how profit leaks go unnoticed for months. The Ecommerce Profit Tracker spreadsheet automates it: enter sale price, COGS, and fees per product, and the Orders and Dashboard sheets calculate true per-unit profit, margin %, and monthly totals across all your SKUs — in Excel or Google Sheets, no macros.
Stop guessing. Track real Amazon FBA profit per SKU.
Get the Profit Tracker — $19 one-timeOr try the free profit calculator first.
Use Amazon's FBA Revenue Calculator (search it in Seller Central) with your product's dimensions and weight. The $3.22 above is a representative figure for a standard-size item — yours will vary.
It's a flexible profit tracker — you enter the fee values that apply to each SKU (referral %, fulfillment, PPC, storage). It works for Amazon, Etsy, Shopify, and eBay sellers because you input your actual costs.