Amazon Freezes Referral & FBA Fees For 2025, Admits Some 2024 Changes Went Too Far
It's that time of year when Amazon usually announces upcoming fee changes, but this year sellers are getting an early Christmas present with no increases to Referral and FBA fees and some fees for large, bulky items being lowered.
VP Worldwide Selling Partner Services Dharmesh Mehta gave the good news in a company blog post today, acknowledging some of the changes this year added too much complexity for sellers on the platform.
Nov 6, 2024
As we reflect on 2024 and look ahead to 2025, we want to start by thanking you for your partnership and the tremendous innovation and customer benefit that we have delivered together.
In addition to many innovations in the customer shopping experience, we maintained lower fulfillment fees for all low-priced products, lowered referral fees for low-priced apparel items, and invested heavily in our supply chain services, including the regionalization of our inbound fulfillment network, improved placement and forecasting, and more efficient operations.
As you leveraged these new capabilities and adapted your operations, we saw better in-stock levels, more products placed closer to customers, and the fastest Prime shipping speeds to date. Our partnership over the last year was key to driving record-breaking sales for independent sellers in Amazon’s store, with even more sellers growing their sales year-over-year.
We also recognize these changes and new fee types introduced complexity, requiring some of you to modify your operations, invest in different packaging, and navigate additional business decisions. With this in mind, in 2025, we want to focus on simplicity and stability, minimizing your operational burden and costs, while continuing to work together to delight customers and drive growth for your business.
While inflation continues to impact our expenses and we made the biggest ever investment in pay and benefits for our fulfillment and transportation employees, we have also continued to make significant progress in lowering our costs to serve by driving innovation, improving efficiency, and removing defects.
As a result, we will not increase US referral and FBA fees and will not introduce any new fee types. We will also lower some fees and provide additional benefits to support new selection growth.
Over the coming weeks and into 2025, we will continue to invest in our fee-related product experiences -- including improving your fee calculators and fee preview tools, enhancing the FBA inbounding experience with features that estimate transportation costs and recommend the most cost-effective shipping options to Amazon, and more, so that you can more easily understand and optimize your business.
The message went on to provide a summary of the important Amazon fee updates for 2025:
- We are lowering inbound placement service fees for large bulky-size products an average of $0.58 per unit for minimal shipment splits. For details, go to the Inbound placement service fee page. This change is effective January 15, 2025.
- We will waive the inbound placement service fee for new parent ASINs that qualify for the FBA New Selection Program and are included in shipments created between December 1, 2024 to March 31, 2025. These items will be exempt from the inbound placement service fee up to the first 100 inbounded units per new parent ASIN. For details, go to the Inbound placement service fee page.
- We are introducing more incentives for adding certain new selection in our store. We will enhance the New Seller Incentives and FBA New Selection programs with greater fee discounts to further support targeted segments of new selection growth. These timebound discounts will be available starting January 15, 2025 on the Seller Benefits page for eligible sellers and selection. We will regularly refresh these discounts and they will include products that are everyday essentials, have high customer demand but lower selection breadth in our store, and popular brands where customers want greater global availability.
How will these changes affect your Amazon business? Let us know in the comments below!
