The news: Amazon has started inviting FBA sellers to bid a per-unit price to get more of their products placed in its Sub Same Day network. Those are the dedicated fulfillment sites that hold fast-moving inventory near roughly 2,300 metro areas.
Until now, every Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) fee for moving a seller’s goods was a rate Amazon set. The new charge is the first one sellers price themselves.
It is also the third seller resource Amazon has priced by bid, after ad placement in search results and extra storage space.
The terms, from Amazon’s invitation to sellers, was first reported by EcommerceBytes in late August.
Sellers choose which additional products to put forward and set a per-unit price.
“You pay only for units that actually ship through Sub Same Day, at the per-unit price you bid,” the invitation reads. “Participation is optional, and you’re never charged more than the price per unit you set.”
Amazon already places some seller products in the network free, based on demand and supply signals, and says that continues unchanged.
The pitch: products in the network see 12% higher sales than standard FBA delivery, by Amazon’s own claim.
Customers already pay for the fastest end of this network. Amazon added one-hour and three-hour delivery tiers in March, at $9.99 and $4.99 for Prime members.
That double charge is where seller reaction started. “Amazon already charges the customer for super fast delivery even if they have Prime membership, but now they want sellers to chip in too!” one seller wrote in a post EcommerceBytes cited.
The pattern: Amazon has run this playbook twice before. Search placement went first, through Sponsored Products, which lets sellers bid against each other for position in search results. Those ads sit inside an advertising segment that brought Amazon $19.8 billion in the June quarter, up 26% from a year earlier.
Storage went second. In 2023, Amazon launched Capacity Manager, which lets sellers bid a per-cubic-foot reservation fee for warehouse space beyond their monthly limit, and grants the space starting with the highest bid.
Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of worldwide selling partner services, said it gave sellers more control over their capacity “while limiting unproductive use.” Marketplace Pulse described it as Amazon turning FBA into an auction.
Delivery speed is the third, and the same logic runs through all of them. The seller names the price, and pays when something happens: a click, a cubic foot of space held, a unit that ships.
Amazon is selling the same network outward at the same time. It opened its LTL freight network to all shippers in June with 26 terminals.
And its parcel service is undercutting FedEx and UPS by as much as $6 a package, per parcel-audit firm Loop, as The Conveyor reported in July. Outside shippers get courted with lower prices while the sellers already inside bid for position.
The network they would be bidding into is the fastest-growing part of Amazon’s system. It delivered nearly 70% more items on the same day in the US last year than the year before, per its Q4 2025 earnings release. And nearly 100 million customers used the service.
The backdrop: Sellers are being asked to bid in a year when Amazon has already raised their costs twice. FBA fees rose about $0.08 a unit on average in January, and a 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge, worth about $0.17 a unit, followed in April. Together those cost a seller moving 1,000 small units a day roughly $91,000 more a year.
Marketplace Pulse put Amazon’s total cut of a typical seller’s revenue above 50% in 2023, up from 40% five years earlier. Sellers set this new charge themselves, though, and can decline it.
The counter: Home Depot monetized paid speed differently in August, with a flat fee for three-hour delivery nationwide: $7 in most major markets, $10 in Los Angeles. Instead of sellers bidding, the customer pays it. But Home Depot mostly sells its own inventory, so it has no third-party seller to charge.
Amazon’s own base fees are not moving to bids either. Its 2026 peak fulfillment fee is a fixed surcharge averaging $0.32 a unit, set the way it has set every peak surcharge before it, per its Seller Central announcement.
Sub Same Day is an opt-in layer on top of that flat base. And its terms are the gentlest in the stack: no shipment, no charge, and no charge above the seller’s own number. Consultants quoted by EcommerceBytes still told sellers to check that the sales lift is incremental and that the fee does not eat the margin.
What’s unclear: Amazon has published no press release. This leaves real gaps:
Whether bids compete against each other for limited slots, as they do in Capacity Manager, or simply set the price a seller is willing to pay.
Minimum bids, category and marketplace scope, and whether this is a pilot or a general rollout.
Whether free automatic placements shrink as paid placements grow. Amazon says free placement “continues unchanged”; EcommerceBytes raised the question anyway.
How big the Sub Same Day network is now. Amazon does not publish a count. Marc Wulfraat of consultancy MWPVL International put it at 46 active US sites in early 2023, against an Amazon plan to reach 150.
My view: I would price this as a permanent cost from day one.
Amazon’s seller charges generally do not come back off. The 2022 fuel surcharge was folded into standard fees the next year, and April’s 3.5% surcharge is still running with no end date attached.
These charges start as optional, but the safer assumption is that this one becomes a standing cost of selling on Amazon rather than a peak-season experiment.
That makes the work worth doing now, and it starts with the products. The 12% sales lift is Amazon’s own number, averaged across the whole program. The question a seller can answer: do my products make more money when they arrive the same day?
If the answer is yes, those are the ones worth considering. Then it comes down to the margin each item carries, the volume it moves at peak, and whether Amazon is already placing it in the network for free. All while keeping a tab on what the bidding itself costs.
And whatever that price settles at, it belongs in next year’s budget too.
What’s next: Amazon’s peak fulfillment fee starts October 15 and runs through January 14, adding an average $0.32 a unit to every FBA shipment, while the 3.5% surcharge stays in place.
Amazon has told sellers to get holiday inventory into the network by October, warning that fulfillment capacity tightens through November and December as it shifts to processing customer orders.
So sellers have until October to work out what a Sub Same Day bid is worth to them, and to weigh it against both of those charges.
