Amazon tells merchants using Fulfillment by Amazon to pay a fee of 35¢ per item sold in the US and Canada from October 15 to January 22, citing rising expenses
Context & Ripple Effects
The 35¢ per-item holiday fee is the second surcharge Amazon has layered onto Fulfillment by Amazon sellers this year, following the ~5% fuel and inflation surcharge added in April 2022 — itself pitched as cheaper than comparable surcharges at UPS and FedEx. It marks a reversal from late 2020, when Amazon delayed a planned raise in storage and shipping fees rather than impose one.
The fee also sits inside a longer arc about how Amazon charges sellers who leave its warehouses: a year later, leaked documents showed plans for a 2% fee per sale on merchants who ship products themselves, which was subsequently scrapped after disclosure. And the surcharge habit stuck — by 2026 Amazon was again adding a 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge to US and Canadian fulfillment fees when oil prices spiked.
First-order effects
- FBA merchants selling in the US and Canada face a direct per-unit cost increase of 35¢ across the entire Q4 peak season, forcing repricing or margin absorption decisions before the holidays.
- Sellers who had already priced in the April fuel-and-inflation surcharge now have to model stacked add-ons rather than a single annual fee schedule.
Second-order effects
- Merchants weighing self-fulfillment gain a fresh cost argument for leaving FBA — precisely the leakage Amazon tried to tax with its later-planned 2% fee on self-shipping sellers, suggesting the company sees defection risk at the warehouse boundary.
- With Amazon's surcharges still benchmarked below UPS and FedEx's, carrier pricing becomes the ceiling that lets Amazon keep adding fees while claiming relative value to sellers.
Third-order effects
- If 'temporary' surcharges keep recurring across cycles, FBA's headline fee schedule becomes a floor rather than a price, and sellers' real cost of Amazon fulfillment turns volatile enough to reshape sourcing and channel-mix decisions.
- A fee structure that penalizes both using the warehouses (surcharges) and avoiding them (the attempted self-ship fee) points toward tighter lock-in around FBA — the kind of seller-fee dynamics that historically draw antitrust and regulator attention, though whether scrutiny materializes remains open.
The trend: Amazon is converting episodic cost shocks into a recurring cadence of seller surcharges, turning fulfillment fees from a fixed published rate into a variable lever it adjusts whenever expenses rise.