Amazon raised seller fees three times this spring. With Prime Day set for June 23-26, third-party sellers say they no longer have room to offer steep discounts.
The fee stack: Three changes hit sellers in three months:
Jan 15: FBA fees rose by about $0.08 per unit on average. Items priced at $10-$50 increased by $0.25, and anything above $50 by $0.51
April 17: Amazon added a 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge on US FBA fees, about $0.17 per unit. The company tied the move to crude oil, which reached $112 a barrel after the Hormuz disruption
March 12: Amazon began holding seller payouts for seven days after delivery. For a seller generating $10,000 a day, that locks up roughly $70,000
The math: If you add it up, a seller moving 1,000 small units a day pays about $91,000 more a year to Amazon before tariffs, per our estimates . About $29,000 comes from the January increase and $62,000 from the April surcharge. That is shaping how aggressively sellers discount.
They “are feeling the pressure mathematically to offer less deals," said Jon Elder of Black Label Advisor.
How sellers are playing it: Most are still in, but discounting less. “We just can’t go quite as low as we used to,” SmartScout CEO Scott Needham said.
Podean CEO Mark Power said half his clients still plan to discount, “but in a more conservative way”, while the rest may skip the event.
Competition will be tight: eMarketer expects Amazon's US sales to rise 7.1% to $15.68 billion, with Walmart Deals (June 22-28) and Target Circle (June 23-26) running at the same time.
What to watch: Whether the surcharge eventually disappears. Amazon calls it temporary, but its 2022 surcharge became permanent the following year after being folded into standard fees, leading one seller to call it “tempermanent.”
Next up is a delayed change that would make sellers fund ad spend before payout, pushed from April to August 1 after backlash.
Amazon blinked once and sellers are watching to see whether it does again.
Dig deeper:
Amazon Takes a 50% Cut of Sellers' Revenue — Amazon's cut of a typical seller's revenue went from about 19% a decade ago to 50%+.
