Amazon Hikes Referral And FBA Fees For 2022

This week, Amazon announced that starting January 18, 2022, it would be adjusting FBA fulfillment fees to help offset its now-increased operating costs. Although Amazon pointed out that these fees are still an average of 30% less costly than if sellers attempted to fulfill their own orders, the fee increase is still extremely high, at around $0.22 per unit.

To soften the blow, Amazon padded its announcement with a long preamble highlighting that, despite the hardships of COVID, it has more than doubled its U.S. fulfillment capacity, increased its employee starting wage, and is building new services such as the Brand Referral Bonus, Search Analytics Dashboard, and Product Opportunity Explorer. In addition, it announced that it would be increasing the FBA New Selection program’s benefits, and launching the New Seller Starter Pack in Q1 2022 to help sellers “kick start early sales.”

Amazon also pointed out that U.S. sellers sold over 3.8 billion products in Amazon stores alone this year, with a growth of more than 200,000 new third-party sellers in the U.S. store – 45% more than last year.

However, Amazon will get no empathy from sellers who have in the past 18 months been quite scarred by Amazon’s restock limits and made to outsource much of their storage to third-party warehouses, further increasing costs to sellers in the process. It’s rather more salt in the wound.

If these fee increases see restock limits done away with as Amazon mentioned at their Amazon Accelerate online event back in October 2021, that will help to offset these fee hikes. If not, it just means less margins for sellers, making it more important than ever to find other ways to save on costs across the supply chain through diligent inventory management and smart shipping optimization.

For more information on the fee changes, visit www.amazon.com/selling-fee-changes.