Marketplace Pulse: in a first, Amazon's average cut of each sale reached 51.8% in 2022, up from 48% in 2021, 45.8% in 2020, 40% in 2017, and 35.2% in 2016
Grappling with slowing sales growth and rising costs, Amazon.com Inc. is squeezing more money from the nearly 2 million small businesses … Tweets: @tomgara , @carnage4life , and @astaniscia86 Tweets: Tom Gara / @tomgara : Given the underlying work involved in running Amazon vs drop shipping things on Amazon, this seems like a reasonable split and probably have more room to move in Amazon's direction https://twitter.com/... Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : Amazon earns 50% of the revenue when merchants sell goods on their site? 🤯 That's an insane statistic. https://www.bloomberg.com/... Giulio S. / @astaniscia86 : For the first time, Amazon's average cut of each sale surpassed 50% in 2022. A typical Amazon third-party seller pays: - 15% transaction fee (referral fee) - 20-35% in Fulfillment by Amazon fees - up to 15% for advertising on Amazon. https://www.bloomberg.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The climb past 50% is not a sudden move but a decade-long ratchet that researchers have tracked step by step: the Institute for Local Self-Reliance measured Amazon's average cut at 19% in 2014 and 30% by 2019, when seller fees netted roughly $60B, then projected fee-driven third-party revenue reaching $121B for 2021 with fees at 34% — see the earlier 30% take-rate report and the $121B fee-revenue projection. Marketplace Pulse's 51.8% figure extends that same series through 2022.
What makes the number bigger than a pricing story is composition: alongside rising fulfillment and referral fees, Amazon began breaking out advertising as its own line — $9.7B in Q4 alone after the first-ever advertising services disclosure — meaning an increasing share of each sale now flows to Amazon as ads sellers buy to stay visible on its own shelf.
First-order effects
- Nearly 2 million third-party sellers — including the professional merchants whose ranks grew after the share with $1M+ in sales doubled — now hand over more than half of every dollar of revenue before their own costs, directly compressing margins on goods they already sourced and shipped.
- For Amazon itself, the rising cut is the offset for slowing sales growth and higher fulfillment costs disclosed in the same period, converting marketplace scale into margin without raising retail prices outright.
Second-order effects
- Sellers respond by passing fees into prices or buying ads, which deepens dependence on the very platform taking the cut — a loop where Amazon's ad line grows because its fee line forces sellers to bid for visibility.
- Competing marketplaces and direct-to-consumer channels gain a sharper pitch: at a 51.8% average take, the cost gap versus Shopify-style storefronts becomes a headline argument for multi-channel selling among professional merchants.
Third-order effects
- A take rate above 50% strengthens the case for regulators treating seller-fee structures as market power rather than neutral service pricing, since the platform controls both the shelf and the auction for access to it.
- If the trajectory holds, marketplace economics bifurcate: only brands with pricing power or owned audiences survive profitably on-platform, pushing everyone else toward diversification and eroding the single-marketplace model.
The trend: Marketplace platforms are ratcheting take rates upward as growth slows, converting seller dependence into recurring fee and advertising revenue.