How Much Does Amazon FBA Cost Per Unit? A Full Fee Breakdown

The honest answer is that nobody can tell you a percentage, and anybody who does is guessing. Amazon’s take on a unit is one percentage stacked on top of three or four flat amounts, and the flat amounts are what make the maths counterintuitive: they do not shrink when your price does.

So instead of a percentage, here is a complete list of every cost that lands on a single unit, and a worked example that adds them all up.

Every fee figure below is an assumption chosen to be plausible, not a quoted rate. Referral percentages vary by category, fulfilment fees depend on your size and weight tier, and storage rates change through the year. Replace them with yours.

The example unit

A bamboo cutting board sold at $24.99. Standard size tier. Sourced overseas, shipped into Amazon’s network by sea freight.

Cost 1: cost of goods

$4.10 per unit. The factory invoice divided by units. Straightforward, and the only cost most new sellers include.

Cost 2: inbound freight and landed costs

$0.80 per unit.

This is the one that gets left out. Freight is invoiced per shipment, so it never appears next to a unit unless you put it there. Take the total of everything it cost to get the goods from the factory door into an Amazon fulfilment centre — ocean or air freight, duty, customs brokerage, drayage, any prep, polybagging or FNSKU labelling you paid a service to do — and divide by the number of sellable units that arrived.

Divide by sellable units, not units shipped. If 500 arrive and 12 are damaged, your per-unit freight is the total divided by 488.

Cost 3: the referral fee

$3.75 — 15% of $24.99.

The only genuinely percentage-based fee, and the only one that moves when you reprice. Many categories sit at 15% but the range is real: some are meaningfully lower, a few higher, and a handful have a per-item minimum. Check your own category once and store it on a settings tab rather than assuming.

Cost 4: the FBA fulfilment fee

$5.45.

This is pick, pack and ship, and it is a flat amount determined by the size and weight tier your unit falls into — not by your price. On this $24.99 product it is 21.8% of the sale price. On a $12.99 product of identical dimensions it would be 42%.

Two things about this fee are worth more attention than they get:

Measure the unit in its final packaging. Tiers are decided by the box that ships, not the product inside it.

Re-measure after every packaging change. A supplier who adds a sleeve or upgrades a carton can push you into the next tier, and the fee step is large enough to wipe out several points of margin on a product that looks unchanged in every other respect.

Cost 5: monthly storage

$0.55 per unit per month.

Charged on the cubic feet your inventory occupies, and higher in the fourth quarter — which is exactly when your inventory levels peak. Two consequences follow.

Storage is a per-month cost, so its real weight depends on how fast a unit sells. A unit that turns in 30 days carries roughly one month of storage. The same unit sitting for five months carries five, and if it lingers long enough it can attract long-term surcharges as well. Slow-moving inventory is not merely capital sitting idle — it is actively becoming more expensive.

Cost 6: the Professional plan

$39.99 a month, spread across everything you sell. (Confirm current pricing in Seller Central.)

With eight SKUs, this SKU’s share is about $5.00 a month — $0.02 per unit at 320 units a month. Trivial here. Not trivial at all if you sell 40 units a month, where the same subscription costs you $1.00 per unit and can be the difference between a viable product and a hobby.

Cost 7: returns

About $0.42 per unit sold.

Not a fee Amazon charges you by that name, but real money leaving. Assume a 5% return rate and, per returned unit, that you have already spent the fulfilment fee ($5.45) and the inbound shipping ($0.80), and that half of returned units come back unsellable (losing $4.10 of COGS on those): that is $8.30 per return. Spread across 20 units sold for every one returned, it is $0.42 on every unit.

Cost 8: advertising

$1.28 per unit sold, on $410 of monthly ad spend across 320 units.

Whether you count this as a cost of the unit is a genuine judgement call — but on Amazon in 2026, most products do not sell at volume without ads, which makes ad spend a running cost of the product rather than an optional experiment.

Adding it up

Amazon’s own combined take — referral, fulfilment and storage — is $9.75, or 39% of the sale price. Add freight and goods and the per-unit calculator says 41.4% margin. Add the three costs that live outside a per-unit model and it is 34.5%.

Why the same product is unviable at a lower price

This is the part worth internalising. Sell the identical physical unit at $14.99 instead of $24.99:

Cutting the price by 40% cut the profit by 82%. The referral fee fell by $1.50; nothing else moved at all. The flat fees are the reason cheap products are so hard to sell profitably through FBA, and the reason a $10 price cut to win the Buy Box can turn a good product into a bad one overnight.

The three columns that keep this honest

Add these to your product sheet and the analysis maintains itself:

1. Total Amazon fees — = Sale price × Referral % + FBA fee + Storage
2. Total cost per unit — = COGS + Inbound freight + Total Amazon fees
3. Net profit per unit — = Sale price − Total cost per unit

Hold referral %, fulfilment fee and storage on a settings tab so a fee change is one edit rather than forty. Override the fulfilment fee on any row whose product sits in a different size tier — leaving a standard-size default on an oversize product is the single most common way one of these spreadsheets overstates profit.

For the full monthly picture — how ads, returns and the plan fee turn a per-unit number into a bank number — see the Amazon FBA profit calculator spreadsheet guide. If you are pricing a product you have not bought yet, start with your break-even price.