What Amazon Actually Takes From a $100 Sale

The People Also Ask box under "amazon seller fees" opens with one question: How much does Amazon take from a $100 sale? Pulled from Google US on 25 August 2026, it sits above every other related question on that query. Most of the pages answering it stop at the referral fee, which is the one number Amazon publishes and the one number that rarely decides whether a SKU makes money.

So this post takes a real $100 order apart, line by line, with the current fee table. Where a figure is published, it is here and it is dated. Where it is not, this post says so instead of guessing, because the entire point of the exercise is that the numbers are real.

If you would rather have your own numbers than a worked example, our marketplace fee and margin calculator runs Amazon, Walmart WFS, Target Plus, Faire and your own store side by side. It takes about two minutes and it is free.

Who Google quotes for this today

Pulled live from Google US, logged out, on 25 August 2026. The AI Overview fires on "amazon seller fees" and cites four sources: YouTube, novadata.io, Wise and eFulfillment Service. Organic underneath is led by Amazon itself, twice, then a Reddit thread from r/FulfillmentByAmazon, a third Amazon page, Printify, ShipBob, Wise and Jungle Scout.

The same day, "amazon referral fee" returns an AI Overview citing Seller Central, sell.amazon.com, Feedvisor, Printful, YouTube, RocketSource, Printify and Marketplace Valet.

factoryjet.com appears in none of those results. Worth stating plainly. What the two SERPs have in common is that Amazon owns the top of both, and almost everything underneath is a tool vendor, a fulfillment company or a forum. Meanwhile the People Also Ask boxes are asking something narrower than any of those pages answer: how much Amazon takes from a $100 sale, whether you have to pay $39.99 to sell at all, and whether it is still worth selling on Amazon. Those three questions are what this post is built around.

The four charges, in the order they hit you

1. The referral fee, published and fixed by category

This is Amazon's commission. You pay a percentage of the total price, which includes the item price, the shipping you charged, and any gift wrap charge, or a per-item minimum, whichever is greater. The minimum is $0.30 in most categories.

Current US percentages, pulled from Amazon's own pricing page on 25 August 2026:

Two traps in that table cost real money.

Your fee category is not the category shoppers see. Amazon states this explicitly in its own fee schedule. A product that browses under Home and Kitchen can be billed as something else entirely. Check the fee category, not the browse node, and check it before you set the price rather than after the first settlement report.

Tiered categories punish the price point just above the break. A $21 shirt is billed at 17%, which is $3.57. A $20 shirt is billed at 10%, which is $2.00. One dollar of list price costs $1.57 in extra fees. Apparel sellers who have never mapped their catalog against those breakpoints are usually giving that away across hundreds of SKUs.

2. The plan fee, $39.99 a month or $0.99 a unit

• Professional: $39.99 a month, unlimited listings, plus bulk listing tools, Automate Pricing, Amazon Ads, Amazon Business B2B selling, Brand Registry features and the selling APIs.
• Individual: $0.99 per item sold, no monthly fee, and none of the above.

Breakeven is $39.99 divided by $0.99, so about 40 units a month. Below that, Individual. Above it, Professional. And if you intend to advertise or use Brand Registry at all, Professional immediately, because Individual cannot.

Notice what this does to the per-order math. At 100 orders a month the plan costs 40 cents an order. At 10 orders a month the same $39.99 costs $4.00 an order. Low-volume sellers systematically under-count this, because it does not appear per order anywhere in Seller Central.

3. Fulfillment, the number that actually decides it

If you use FBA, Amazon picks, packs and ships the order and handles customer service and returns. The fee is charged per unit and set by the size tier and shipping weight of your specific packaged product.

This is the one number in this article you should not take from an article, including this one. FBA fulfillment rates sit behind a Seller Central login, they are revised regularly, and they turn on dimensions we cannot know. Pull yours from the FBA Revenue Calculator in Seller Central using the box you actually ship, and remember that changing the packaging changes the fee.

What matters more than the exact rate is the shape of the thing: fulfillment is charged on dimensional size and weight, not on price. Which produces the single most important consequence in Amazon economics.

A $12 product and a $120 product of identical size and weight cost the same to fulfill. The referral fee scales with price. Fulfillment does not. So fulfillment is a rounding error on the $120 item and can be most of the margin on the $12 one. This is why "sell cheap stuff on Amazon" fails so reliably, and why the same catalog can be profitable on its premium SKUs and losing money on its entry-level ones without anybody noticing, because the P and L is reported in aggregate.

If you fulfill yourself, which Amazon calls FBM, you pay no FBA fee and you carry the actual shipping, packaging, labor and returns instead. That is often cheaper for large, heavy or slow-moving items and almost always worse for anything that benefits from Prime delivery speed.

4. The four costs nobody quotes you

Returns. Amazon's customer-friendly returns policy is a feature for shoppers and a cost line for you. On FBA you may be charged a returns processing fee in categories where a product's return rate goes past a threshold, you pay to have returned units inspected and either restocked or disposed of, and anything that comes back unsellable is a total loss. Apparel is where this most often turns a profitable SKU negative. The thresholds and rates are published, they change, and they are worth reading for the categories you actually sell in.

Storage. Charged monthly per cubic foot on inventory sitting in Amazon's warehouses, higher in the fourth quarter, with additional charges once stock has aged past Amazon's thresholds. Storage is a tax on bad forecasting. A slow SKU can accumulate more in storage than it earns in margin, quietly, for a year.

Advertising. Not a fee, and functionally not optional. Organic visibility on a competitive listing without ad support is thin, and once competitors bid on your listing the choice is spend or lose the placement. There is no universal percentage here, and any article handing you one is guessing. Pull your own ACoS out of your ad reports and treat it as a cost of sale. On plenty of accounts it lands larger than the referral fee, and it is missing from almost every Amazon fees article on the internet.

Your time. Listing hygiene, suppressed listings, buy box loss, account health, suspension appeals. Real, uncosted, and the reason management services exist.

The worked $100 sale

A Home and Kitchen product at $100, sold through FBA on a Professional plan, at 100 orders a month, with ads running at a 15% ACoS. That last figure is an assumption rather than a published rate, so swap in your own.

That $69.60 is not what you keep. Three things still come out of it, and this article deliberately puts a number on none of them:

• FBA fulfillment, per unit, set by the packaged size and weight of your specific SKU.
• Returns and storage. Both move with the category, with the season, and with how long a unit sits in a fulfillment center, and the fourth quarter costs more than the rest of the year. Current returns processing thresholds and storage rates are on Amazon's published fee schedule and in the Revenue Calculator inside Seller Central. Read them for the categories you actually sell in rather than taking a figure from an article, this one included.
• Cost of goods and inbound freight, meaning what the unit cost you to make or buy, and what it cost to get into Amazon's warehouse.

The lesson is visible before any of those are filled in. At a 15% ACoS, advertising costs exactly what the referral fee costs. The two of them together take $30 of the $100 before fulfillment, returns, storage or cost of goods are counted at all. That is the arithmetic that catches sellers who priced a product against a 15% referral fee and nothing else.

To run this on your own SKU with your own numbers, including Walmart WFS, Target Plus, Faire and your own store side by side, use our marketplace fee and margin calculator. Two minutes, free, and the honest first step before anybody, us included, quotes you for anything.

What to do with this

Map your catalog against the fee table. Specifically the tiered categories: apparel, beauty, baby, grocery, furniture, electronics accessories, jewelry. Find every SKU priced just above a breakpoint. Some of them should move down.

Pull fulfillment fees per SKU, not per catalog. Size tier is decided by the packaged unit. A repack that drops a product into a smaller tier is the cheapest margin improvement in this entire article, and it is a packaging decision rather than a marketing one.

Cost returns by SKU, not in aggregate. One high-return SKU hiding inside a healthy category average is the most common thing we find on an Amazon audit.

Count advertising as a cost of sale. Not as a marketing budget. It behaves like a fee, so model it like one, at your real ACoS.

Then ask whether Amazon should be the only channel. Walmart Marketplace, TikTok Shop, Target Plus and Faire have different fee structures and very different competitive density. Some products that lose money on Amazon make money elsewhere. That is a calculation rather than an opinion, and the calculator above runs all of them.

Where this goes next

If you are not selling on Amazon yet, start with how to sell on Amazon in 2026 instead. This post is about what you keep, not how to start. The equivalent guides for the other channels are how to sell on Walmart Marketplace and how to sell on TikTok Shop.

If you are already selling and the numbers above made you want to check your own, our Amazon agency work is where the Amazon-specific detail lives, and marketplace management is the page for running Amazon alongside everything else. We do not publish a package grid, because the honest answer depends on your catalog, your size tiers and your return rates. Run the calculator first. If the arithmetic does not work, we would rather tell you that than sell you a retainer.