Amazon Fees Have Become Insane! Is It Worth It To Sell On Amazon Anymore?

Around five years back I sent in a couple of batches of Amazon FBA shipments. Some of the products sold, some didn’t. I made a bit of money, and it seemed reasonable deal: I provide the products and Amazon does the heavy lifting. This model seems overtly clutch for a traveler, as all you need to do is swoop in, pick up some products, list them for sale, throw them in a box, and give it to the UPS guy who shows up at your door. It couldn’t be any simpler.

But when I tried to FBA a batch of Ghost Cities books today I was hit by a massive surprise: Amazon’s fee was a whopping $9.41. $9.41 cents for a book priced at $20.95. If I were to add the 40 cents per copy for shipping it to the warehouse, that’s nearly $10 to sell one book with Amazon FBA.

To get this batch of books from the publisher I had to pay $9.51 per copy. So if I sold them via Amazon FBA I would profit around $1.63 per book.

That’s not gonna do it.

So I switched over to the self-shipping option. By doing this my copies will not be sold via the buy now box, but if I price them a little lower then I will have the lowest price for the item and maybe an astute buyer would notice that.

But even doing this, Amazon still takes a huge chunk. If I sell them for $20.95 each, I will still be looking at paying Amazon $5.93 and only profiting $5.51 … and have to deal with sending out each book sold.

That’s a little better.

With this insane fees it’s a little difficult to imagine how you hear these stories of people making seven figures per year selling on Amazon … seriously, charging nearly $10 to sell a book?

I will test out selling other products with Amazon FBA — maybe I can find some higher returns somewhere. Maybe I will sell bras? Who knows?

If you’d like to buy a signed copy of Ghost Cities directly from me, you can do so here.