Amazon.com hike FBA multichannel fulfilment fees for media

Amazon have announced a change to their FBA fees which will impact all sellers using Amazon.com to fulfil orders from their website or other marketplaces. Fees will largely go down, especially for priority shipping. That’s not the case however for the media category which is facing a massive price increase.

If you are based in the UK or EU and selling media through Amazon FBA, then the new fees will also impact you if you use Amazon to fulfil orders from other venues. However we’re guessing that many more Chinese sellers are operating in this manner as Amazon saw fit to publish the update in Chinese as well as in English.

Amazon are simply pricing media sellers out

If you read between the lines, basically Amazon are pretty much saying “We don’t want to fulfil media for your third party orders”. The fee hike is so punitive that if your media is in Amazon FBA it’s only worth selling it on Amazon after the 30th of August this year.

There are two main choices facing you, sell only on Amazon or (pay the fee) to have your stock returned to you so that you can fulfil your multichannel orders yourself.

This is a stark reminder that reliance on marketplace, and especially Amazon with their voracious appetite, isn’t necessarily a viable long term business strategy. It’s less than a month since Amazon.com started to demand to see supplier invoices from media sellers, that combined with the multichannel fee hike should be telling you loud and clear to get out of the media business if you are reliant on Amazon for your business success.

The main changes to Amazon.com Multichannel Fulfilment Fees

These changes are effective 30th August 2017

• Consolidation of Fulfillment Fees

  The Order Handling, Pick & Pack, and Weight Handling fees will be consolidated into a single, per-unit Fulfillment Fee.

• New Product Size Tiers

  The current product size tiers will be segmented into the following tiers: Small Standard-Size, Large Standard-Size, Small Oversize, Medium Oversize, Large Oversize, and Special Oversize. Media will no longer be a separate category.

• Discounted Fees for Multi-Unit Orders

  Amazon will offer discounted, per-unit fulfillment fees based on the number of units in a customer order for the following product size tiers: Small Standard-Size, Large Standard-Size, and Small Oversize.

• Changes to Unit and Dimensional Weight

  Amazon will change the way they calculate unit weight and dimensional weight to match the calculations used by Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) for orders placed on Amazon.com. Unit weight will be calculated by adding individual unit weight to a standard packaging weight and then rounding up to the nearest pound. Dimensional weight will be calculated by taking the unit volume and dividing by 166.

Examples of Amazon.com Multichannel Fulfilment Fees change