Amazon’s fee stack has four layers and only two of them are published where a seller can read them before signing up. On Amazon’s own US selling page, read on September 7, 2026, the selling plans are “$0.99 / item sold” on the Individual plan and “$39.99 / month” on the Professional plan, and referral fees “vary by product category,” charged as “a percentage of the total price or a minimum amount, whichever is greater.” The fulfillment and storage rates that make up the FBA layer are not on that page, and advertising is a budget you set rather than a rate Amazon quotes. So there is no single percentage that answers “what does Amazon take.”
Amazon changes its fee schedules, and it publishes different ones in different marketplaces. Everything below is a dated record of Amazon’s US figures on the day we read them, quoted as Amazon states them. Your own Seller Central account holds the schedule that applies to you, and that is the only one that governs your invoices.
Layer one: the selling plan
| Plan | Amazon’s published price, read September 7, 2026 |
|---|---|
| Individual | “$0.99 / item sold” |
| Professional | “$39.99 / month” |
The two are priced so that they cross at a volume you can compute rather than guess. At $0.99 an item, forty items a month costs $39.60, which is still under the Professional plan’s $39.99. At forty-one items it is $40.59, which is over it. On price alone, the Professional plan is the cheaper of the two from about forty-one items a month upward, and that arithmetic is ours from Amazon’s two published numbers.
Price is not the only difference between the plans, and the tools and eligibility attached to each are Amazon’s to describe, not ours to summarize from memory. The point of the calculation is narrower: the monthly fee is not an extra cost above a per-item fee, it is a replacement for one, and the swap point is a specific number of units.
Layer two: the referral fee, which is where most of the money goes
The referral fee is Amazon’s commission and it is charged per item sold, in every category, on both plans.
Two details in Amazon’s own wording matter more than the percentages. First, the base: “An item’s total price includes its list price, as well as shipping costs and any gift-wrapping charges.” The percentage is charged on what the buyer paid in total, not on your product price. Second, the floor: you pay “a percentage of the total price or a minimum amount, whichever is greater,” and the minimum shown against most categories on the page we read is $0.30.
Here are the categories Amazon showed us on that page, quoted as published on September 7, 2026:
| Category | Referral fee | Minimum |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Device Accessories | 45% | $0.30 |
| Appliances, full-size | 8% | $0.30 |
| Automotive and Powersports | 12% | $0.30 |
| Consumer Electronics | 8% | $0.30 |
| Home and Kitchen | 15% | $0.30 |
| Everything Else | 15% | $0.30 |
| Media: books, DVD, music, software, video | 15%, plus “a closing fee $1.80 per item” | not shown |
| Clothing and Accessories | “5% for products with a total sales price of $15.00 or less, 10% for products with a total sales price greater than $15.00 and less than or equal to $20.00, 17% for products with a total sales price greater than $20.00” | $0.30 |
That table is not the whole schedule. Amazon lists more categories than we have quoted, and the full current list is in your own account. What the excerpt does establish is the shape of the thing: on the categories we read, the published rate ranges from 8% to 45%. Any single percentage you have seen quoted as “Amazon’s cut” is a category, not a platform.
The $0.30 minimum sounds significant and rarely is. In a 15% category it only becomes the greater of the two below a $2.00 total price, and in an 8% category below $3.75. It is a floor for very cheap items, not a general charge.
The tiered category is a trap worth doing the arithmetic on
Clothing and Accessories is charged in three bands, and a banded fee has cliffs at the boundaries. The arithmetic below is ours, using Amazon’s published rates on the date read, and it ignores every other cost so the effect is visible on its own.
| Total price | Referral rate | Referral fee | Left after the referral fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| $15.00 | 5% | $0.75 | $14.25 |
| $15.01 | 10% | $1.50 | $13.51 |
| $20.00 | 10% | $2.00 | $18.00 |
| $20.01 | 17% | $3.40 | $16.61 |
A single cent of price increase costs $0.74 at the first boundary and $1.39 at the second. Working back up, a seller pricing just above $20.00 does not recover the $18.00 they kept at exactly $20.00 until the total price reaches about $21.69. The same effect at the lower boundary runs from $15.01 to about $15.84.
Two things follow from that, and both are checkable rather than opinion. The dead zones are real: on these published rates there is a band above each boundary where raising your price leaves you with less. And the boundary is set by the total price, which by Amazon’s own definition includes shipping and gift wrapping, so a shipping charge or a free-shipping price that absorbs postage can push an item into a higher band without you touching the product price.
Layer three: FBA fulfillment and storage, which Amazon does not publish here
This is the honest gap in this article, and it is the reason we have written it differently from the guides that rank for this question.
Amazon’s Fulfillment by Amazon page, read the same day, states that “costs vary per item and include fulfillment and storage,” says that shipping with FBA “costs 70% less per unit than comparable premium options offered by other major US carriers,” which is Amazon’s claim rather than a measurement of ours, and routes sellers to its Revenue Calculator. It publishes no fulfillment rate, no size tiers and no storage rate on that page. The Seller Central help pages that hold the full rate card returned a server error to us on September 7, 2026.
So no FBA fulfillment fee, storage rate, aged inventory surcharge or placement fee appears anywhere in this article. Those numbers exist, they change on dated schedules, and they are specific to a unit’s size and weight. You can read yours in the Revenue Calculator inside your own Seller Central account against your own ASIN, which is more accurate than any published table could be for your product.
What we can describe is the shape of the layer, because that is structural rather than numeric. FBA charges a per-unit fulfillment fee driven by the product’s size and weight, and a storage charge driven by the cubic volume your inventory occupies and how long it sits there.
The first is a cost per sale and behaves like a variable cost. The second is a cost per day and does not care whether anything sold. That difference is the one that catches sellers: slow inventory keeps paying storage while producing no fulfillment fees at all, because a fulfillment fee is what a sale looks like.
It is also the layer that makes Amazon’s stack hardest to compare with anything else. Etsy’s fees are almost all percentages of an order, which is why Etsy’s whole stack fits on one order and Amazon’s does not.
Layer four: advertising, which is a budget rather than a fee
Amazon’s selling page names Amazon Ads alongside FBA as an “added cost if you use certain optional tools and programs” and quotes no price for it, because there is not one to quote. Advertising is bought at auction, so the cost is set by what you bid and what your competitors bid, and it is a number you choose rather than a schedule you are charged against.
That puts it outside a fee article, and we are leaving it there rather than pretending a platform rate exists. The one budgeting point worth making is structural: unlike the referral fee, advertising spend is not contingent on a sale, so it is the only layer of the four that can cost you money in a month with no revenue in it.
Adding it up, and why we will not give you one percentage
Put the four layers together and the parts you can total in advance are the selling plan and the referral fee. The parts you cannot are FBA, which depends on your product’s dimensions, and advertising, which depends on what you decide to spend.
That is why we are not publishing an all-in figure for what Amazon takes. Any such number is a category rate plus somebody’s guess about a product’s size and somebody else’s ad budget, and it will be wrong for your business in a way you cannot see from the outside. The version that is true for you sits in your own settlement reports, and reading three months of them tells you more than any article can.
What the fee structure does tell you plainly is where the exposure sits. The referral rate can be changed by Amazon, the FBA rates are revised on Amazon’s schedule, and storage keeps charging on inventory that is not moving. None of that is unusual for a marketplace, and it is the same underlying position an Etsy seller is in: the terms are set by someone else and can change after you have built on them.
If that is the part you are weighing rather than the percentages, our migration readiness checklist is the structured version of that question, and what your working week looks like off a marketplace covers the part FBA currently does for you and your own store would not.
The other side of the comparison, the fixed monthly costs of running your own store, is worked through in what Shopify really costs per month.
Last checked: September 7, 2026. All figures read that day from Amazon’s own US selling pages, sell.amazon.com/pricing and sell.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon, and quoted as Amazon publishes them. Amazon operates separate fee schedules in other marketplaces and changes them on its own timetable.
FAQ
How much does Amazon charge sellers per sale?
It depends on the category. On the US categories Amazon published on September 7, 2026, referral fees ranged from 8% on Consumer Electronics and full-size Appliances to 45% on Amazon Device Accessories, with a $0.30 minimum shown against most of them. That is charged on the total price, which Amazon defines as including shipping and gift wrapping. On top of that sit the selling plan fee and, if you use it, FBA.
Is the Professional plan worth $39.99 a month?
On price alone the two plans cross at about forty-one items a month: forty items at the Individual plan’s $0.99 each costs $39.60, and forty-one costs $40.59 against the Professional plan’s flat $39.99. Below that volume the per-item fee costs less, above it the subscription does. The plans also differ in the tools and eligibility attached to them, which are described in your Seller Central account.
Does Amazon charge a referral fee on shipping?
Yes. Amazon’s own definition is that “an item’s total price includes its list price, as well as shipping costs and any gift-wrapping charges,” and the referral percentage is charged on that total. It also means shipping can push a tiered category, such as Clothing and Accessories, over a rate boundary.
What are the current FBA fulfillment and storage fees?
This article quotes none, deliberately. Amazon does not publish the rate card on its public FBA page, which said only that “costs vary per item and include fulfillment and storage,” and the Seller Central pages that hold the full schedule did not open for us on September 7, 2026. The Revenue Calculator inside your own account returns the current figures for your specific product, which is the only source we would trust for them.
Why do different guides quote different Amazon fee totals?
Because the total depends on the category rate, the product’s size and weight, how long inventory sits in storage and what you choose to spend on advertising. Only the first of those is published as a schedule. Any single all-in percentage is a set of assumptions about a product that is probably not yours.