Amazon FBA Selling Costs: The Full Cost Structure a Vietnamese Manufacturer Has to Model

Amazon FBA selling cost is a stack, not a percentage

The question we hear most often from Vietnamese factories is "what percentage does Amazon take?". It is the wrong question, and it leads straight to a wrong financial model. Amazon does not charge one fee. Some of it is a percentage of the sale price, some is a fixed amount per unit driven by size and weight, and some is charged on volume and on the number of days the stock sits in a warehouse. Those three mechanisms behave completely differently when you change your price or change your box.

Beyond Amazon, at least three other parties take money on every unit: the freight forwarder, the customs and tax authorities of the destination market, and, in Europe, the organisations that collect extended producer responsibility fees. On top of that sit advertising, returns, and the cost of maintaining the compliance registrations themselves. A model with only cost of goods and platform fees will always look good, and will always be wrong.

The right approach is a unit model. Take the selling price of one unit, subtract each layer of cost in the order the goods actually travel from factory to customer, and see how much contribution is left per unit. Then ask the harder question: is what remains enough to pay for acquiring a new customer, absorb the return rate of your category, and still leave profit.

It helps to sort costs into three groups: costs that vary per unit, costs that vary per shipment, and costs that are fixed per country per year. The third group is the one most often forgotten. It does not get cheaper as you sell more, but it is spread across volume, so your expected volume is what decides whether a market is viable at all.

Costs incurred before the goods leave Vietnam

Before any platform fee applies, most of the money is already committed here. These are the lines you control most, and also where a bad decision follows you for the entire life of the product.

Packaging is a double decision, not an aesthetic one. The dimensions and the weight of the packed unit together determine the size tier, and that tier decides the FBA fulfilment fee you pay on every single order, permanently. A box a few millimetres too large can push a product into a higher tier and eat straight into contribution; equally, shaving millimetres off the box achieves nothing if the weight keeps the unit in the higher tier. In parallel, in Europe, the weight and material type of packaging is the basis on which EPR fees are calculated. Lighter packaging with fewer composite materials is cheaper at both ends.

Labels work the same way. For food sold into the EU, the mandatory particulars must follow Regulation (EU) 1169/2011 and must appear in a language easily understood by consumers in the country of sale, and the label must carry the name and address of the EU-established food business operator under whose name the product is marketed, or of the importer. Getting it wrong means reprinting the whole batch, over-labelling, or worse, goods held at the border. Doing the label properly the first time is normally far cheaper than fixing it.

• Ex-works or FOB manufacturing cost
• Retail packaging: boxes, pouches, laminates, seals
• Destination-market labels and the FNSKU applied to each unit
• Transport packaging: cartons, void fill, pallets, stretch wrap
• Prep to Amazon's requirements: polybagging, warning labels, bundling
• Testing, technical files and product documentation for the destination market
• Samples, photography, video and listing content production

Freight, import duty, and how import VAT actually works

Freight is a per-shipment cost, so it has to be divided across the units in that shipment before it enters the unit model. Sea freight is the cheapest per unit but ties up capital the longest; air and express are far more expensive but can rescue a stockout. In practice most sellers run both: the main batch by sea, the top-up by air. Both move with season and lane, so the model has to survive a rate higher than the one you were just quoted.

Who acts as importer of record is a money question, not a paperwork question. All-in DDP service is convenient because the forwarder handles everything, but if you are not the official importer you generally will not appear on the import documentation and will not be able to deduct import VAT. To act as importer in the EU, a business needs an EORI number. The HS code and the origin of the goods determine the duty rate, which makes correct classification a genuine cost decision rather than an administrative one.

Two things that are often merged should be kept separate. Customs duty is, in principle, a real cost: it cannot be recovered as input tax. Only specific relief regimes can recover it — returned goods relief, inward processing, a refund where duty was wrongly assessed on classification or value, and in the US duty drawback — and each has to be checked case by case. Model duty as a real cost.

Import VAT in the EU behaves differently. The party that imports in its own name, owns the goods, uses them for its own taxable business and is VAT registered in the country of import can in principle deduct import VAT as input VAT, subject to that country's conditions. A third party acting as importer of record for you but never owning the goods generally cannot deduct it. If you qualify, import VAT is a cash-flow item rather than a cost; if you do not, it is a real cost. Plenty of models show a false loss because import VAT was put in the cost column, and plenty of others are falsely optimistic because deduction was simply assumed.

The United States works differently. There is no VAT; imports are dutiable under the HTSUS based on classification and origin, and you still need an importer of record. On state sales tax, marketplace facilitator laws generally make Amazon responsible for collecting and remitting on marketplace sales, so that money does not pass through your hands. Do not read that as absolute: rules differ by state, the mechanism covers marketplace sales only, and it does not by itself remove every state registration or filing obligation, nor any income or franchise tax exposure. Sales you make off Amazon remain your own responsibility.

For food, the US carries its own layer, and it is not light: foreign food facilities must register with the FDA and renew that registration periodically, each imported food shipment requires prior notice to the FDA, an importer has to operate a foreign supplier verification programme (FSVP), and FDA food labelling is a separate rulebook from the EU's, so the label has to be produced twice. We set out the market-by-market detail in Amazon FBA services for the Americas.

On the export side, goods exported from Vietnam are subject to a 0% VAT rate where the documentary conditions are met, and a customs export declaration is still required; we cover the Vietnam-side steps separately in selling on Amazon from Vietnam. Finally, do not build a plan around shipping small parcels to avoid tax. The EU abolished the VAT exemption for low-value imported consignments on 1 July 2021: VAT arises on every consignment, whether it is collected at import or charged at the point of sale under the Import One-Stop Shop for low-value consignments. The customs duty relief threshold is a separate rule, not the same thing as VAT, and it is itself under reform, so check it at the time you rely on it.

Amazon fees: referral, fulfilment and storage

There are three main charges. The referral fee is a percentage of the total sales price and varies by category. The FBA fulfilment fee is a fixed amount per unit, set by the size tier and weight of the packed product. Storage is charged by volume per month, and in the major marketplaces it is higher in the fourth quarter, October to December. Inventory that sits too long attracts an additional aged-inventory surcharge.

Around those three sits a group of situational fees that newcomers routinely leave out of the plan. They are small per order and collectively large enough to flip a thin margin.

In Europe there is one more decision that hits both the cost column and the compliance column: hold stock in one country and ship across borders, or let Amazon distribute stock across several countries. Distributing stock usually gives lower fulfilment fees, but wherever stock sits, a VAT registration obligation arises in that country. This is a trade between variable fees and fixed compliance cost, and the answer depends on volume. We describe that structure in more detail in Amazon FBA services for Europe.

One thing we will say plainly: we do not print a fee table here. Amazon revises its fee schedules periodically and the schedules differ between marketplaces. Any number published in a blog post will go stale. Pull the current schedule for the exact marketplace you intend to sell in from Seller Central at the moment you build the model, and check whether the model still survives if fees rise by ten percent.

• Inbound placement fees when you do not split shipments as directed
• Removal or disposal fees for stock that cannot be sold
• Surcharges on inventory held beyond an age threshold
• In some marketplaces, a fee when inventory levels run too low against demand
• Return processing fees in certain high-return categories
• The monthly Professional selling plan subscription

Costs after the sale: returns, advertising and working capital

A return is not just lost revenue on that order. You refund the customer, absorb the processing of the returned unit, and some of what comes back cannot be resold at full price, particularly for food and dated goods. Return rates differ enormously between categories, so do not use a single blanket figure. Assume a return rate worse than you expect and check whether the model is still positive.

Advertising is a mandatory cost in the early phase, not an option. A new listing has no sales history, no reviews and no organic rank; all early traffic has to be bought. Cost per order in that phase is always poor, and it only improves as conversion and organic rank rise. The healthy way to treat it is as a bounded market-entry investment for the first few months, tracked as advertising spend against total revenue rather than against advertising-attributed revenue alone.

There is one more line that never appears on a profit and loss statement but kills businesses first: working capital. You pay the factory, the freight and the import duty, then the goods sit in Amazon's warehouse, sell down gradually, and cash returns on the platform's settlement cycle. The gap between spending and collecting can run for months. A product with a healthy margin can still drain you dry if the turn is slow or if you place the second order too early.

Compliance cost is a fixed cost per country

This is the group Vietnamese manufacturers underestimate most, and the one that decides how many markets you should open. In Europe, holding stock in a member state creates an obligation to register for VAT in that member state. The One-Stop Shop lets you declare VAT on cross-border B2C sales within the EU through a single registration, but OSS does not replace local registration where the stock is held. Some countries require non-EU businesses to appoint a fiscal representative, and this requirement differs by country. The cost here includes both a setup fee and a recurring filing service fee, repeating every year.

Alongside that sits EPR, extended producer responsibility for packaging. In Germany, a business must register in the LUCID packaging register under VerpackG and contract with a dual system before placing packaged goods on the market. In France, a unique identifier issued via ADEME and membership of an approved eco-organisme are required. In Spain, household packaging falls under EPR and Ecoembes is a collective compliance scheme businesses can join; separately from EPR, Spain levies a tax on non-reusable plastic packaging, charged on the weight of non-recycled plastic placed on the Spanish market, so if your packaging contains plastic that is an additional line to model. EPR fees are generally calculated on the weight and material type of packaging placed on the market. Amazon requires sellers to supply EPR registration numbers in certain EU marketplaces, notably Germany and France, and can restrict listings without them.

Food adds another layer. The EU-side food business that places the food on the market — normally your importer, or your own EU entity — must register with the competent authority of the member state where it operates; a factory in Vietnam is not the party that registers with an EU authority. Labels must meet EU labelling rules and must carry the name and address of the EU-established food business operator under whose name the product is marketed, or of the importer, which means you do not have to set up your own EU entity if the importer takes that role. Some member states apply a reduced VAT rate to certain foodstuffs including tea, but the rate and the classification differ by country and must be confirmed in that country rather than inferred from a neighbour.

The structural point: these are fixed costs per country, not per SKU. Opening another country is therefore far more expensive than adding another SKU inside a country where the compliance infrastructure already exists. That is why the right strategy is usually to go deep in one market before going wide.

How we model price: the Matelier EUR 19.99 / 23 / 24.99 example

We do this exercise on our own brand. Matelier is the matcha brand we operate in Europe, running the full EU stack: VAT in Germany, France and Spain with OSS, packaging EPR, EU-side food business registration, EU food labelling, EORI and HS classification. When we set price, we do not look at competitors first. We build three scenarios at EUR 19.99, 23 and 24.99 for the same product and run each one through the entire cost stack described above, from ex-works cost through to EPR fees.

What matters is not the final number but how you read it. At the lowest price point, after every layer is subtracted, the remaining contribution is too thin to fund customer acquisition; that means the harder you advertise to grow, the more you lose, and you are locked into a model that only works if free organic traffic arrives on its own. At the higher price points, contribution is enough to buy customers, but only while conversion does not fall past a certain threshold. So the real pricing question is: at which price do I both have money to buy a customer and keep conversion.

That produces the answer to a more important question: why a premium product has to carry a brand and not just a SKU. An unbranded product has exactly one defence, which is a lower price, because anyone can order from the same factory and list a few percent under you. A high price on an unbranded listing tends to be competed down over time.

The whole group of fixed per-country costs above only pays back when a range of products shares that infrastructure and customers buy again. A single cheap SKU almost never carries the cost of VAT registration, EPR, food documentation and trademarks on its own. Brand here is not a nice logo: it is a registered trademark, greater authority over the detail page through Brand Registry, consistent packaging, and a repeat purchase rate.

One note on timing, because this is where sellers lose a quarter. Brand Registry gives enrolled brand owners access to tools and greater authority over the detail page, not total control of it: Amazon still governs the content and other sellers can still list on the same ASIN. Enrolment normally requires a trademark already registered with the trademark office of that market — a pending application qualifies only through Amazon's IP Accelerator route — and registration takes many months. Filing is not the same as being registered, so file before you schedule the launch. Brand in that sense is the only thing that holds the price your cost model requires.