Amazon UK seller fees in 2026: what you really keep on a £25 sale

Most sellers can quote Amazon's referral fee from memory. Far fewer can say what a £25 sale leaves in the bank once fulfilment, storage, the digital services fee, returns and advertising have taken their share. This guide lists every fee a UK seller on Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) meets, with the 2026 rates, and then works one £25 order through to the penny.

Prices below are what Amazon publishes for the amazon.co.uk store, checked in October 2026. Fees change, usually in January and sometimes mid-year, so treat the rate card in Seller Central as the final word.

The fees, one by one

Selling plan. The Professional plan costs £25 a month excluding VAT. The Individual plan has no monthly charge but adds £0.75 per item sold, so it only makes sense below about 34 sales a month.

Referral fee. A percentage of the total sales price, which is the price the customer pays including VAT and any delivery charge. Most categories pay 15%. Consumer Electronics and Computers pay 7%; Electronic Accessories pay 15% up to £100 and 8% above; Home Products pay 8% up to £20 and 15% above; Clothing pays 5% up to £15, 10% between £15 and £20 and 15% above. The minimum referral fee in most categories is £0.25. Several of these lower bands are new: the Clothing cuts took effect on 15 December 2025 and the Home, Pet and Grocery cuts in early 2026 (Amazon's page says 5 January; some summaries say 1 February, so check your category).

FBA fulfilment fee. A flat amount per unit set by the size tier and weight band of the packed product. The April 2026 UK rate card (via a third-party calculator, since Amazon publishes the card as a download) gives, for example:

Products priced at £20 or less (including VAT) qualify for Low-Price FBA rates, roughly £0.30 to £0.40 lower per unit. Since 17 April 2026 a 1.5% fuel and logistics surcharge is added to every UK fulfilment fee.

Monthly storage. Charged per cubic foot of stock held, averaged daily. Standard-size items in most categories cost £0.76 per cubic foot a month from January to September and £1.51 from October to December. Clothing and footwear are £0.62 and £0.82. Oversize is £0.55 and £0.87. Stock older than 241 days attracts an aged-inventory surcharge on top.

Digital services fee. Since October 2024 UK-based sellers pay 2% on top of referral fees and FBA fees for sales in the UK store (3% for France, Italy and Spain).

Returns. When a customer returns an item Amazon refunds the referral fee to you but keeps a refund administration fee of 20% of the referral fee, capped at £5. The fulfilment fee is not refunded. Some of what comes back is unsellable, and categories with a return rate above Amazon's threshold pay an extra returns processing fee per unit.

Advertising. Sponsored Products is pay per click. Published 2026 benchmarks put a typical advertising cost of sales (ad spend divided by advertised sales) between 15% and 35%, with Electronics nearer 13% to 21% and Home and Kitchen 15% to 27%. Spread across all sales, including the ones that arrive without a click, most established sellers land somewhere between 5% and 15% of revenue.

VAT on the fees. Since August 2024 Amazon charges 20% UK VAT on most fees to UK-established sellers. If you are VAT registered you reclaim it; if you are not, every fee below costs you 20% more than shown.

The £25 sale, to the penny

The product: a digital kitchen scale, sold at £25.00 including VAT in the Kitchen category (15% referral fee). Packed it measures 24 × 18 × 5 cm and weighs 650 g, so it ships as a small parcel in the 900 g band. The landed cost of the unit, meaning the supplier price plus freight, duty and delivery to Amazon, is £7.40 (see the landed cost guide). The seller is VAT registered, runs advertising at 10% of sales and sees 5% of units returned, all resellable.

That is 14.7% of the £25 the customer paid, or 17.6% of the net sale. The Professional plan is not in the table because it does not depend on the order; at 300 orders a month it adds £0.08 per order and the kept amount becomes £3.59.

Three things stand out. The referral fee is charged on the VAT-inclusive price, so on a 20% VAT item you effectively pay 18% of your net sale, not 15%. The advertising line is bigger than the fulfilment fee: without ads this sale keeps £6.17, which is why "organic" and "advertised" units deserve separate profit lines. And the storage figure assumes the unit sells within six weeks; the same unit in December costs £0.17 to store, and after 241 days the surcharge is larger than the storage itself.

What changes the answer

• Price band. At £19.99 this product would qualify for Low-Price FBA (about £0.30 less per unit), but a Home Products item would also drop from 15% to 8% referral. Pricing just under a band is worth a calculation, not a guess.
• Size tier. Reducing the packed depth from 5 cm to 4 cm moves the scale from small parcel (£3.04) to large envelope (£2.72). That is £0.32 on every unit, forever.
• Return rate. At 15% returns with a quarter of them unsellable, the returns line rises from £0.19 to £0.85.
• Not VAT registered. Fees cost 20% more (£8.21 instead of £6.84 on this order), though you keep the £4.17 that would have gone to HMRC until you cross the £90,000 registration threshold.

How Merchvio fits

Merchvio reads each fee line from the Amazon settlement report rather than estimating it from a rate card, so the per-order figure above is what the books show for a real order, including the returns and advertising that arrive weeks later.

Fee percentages and amounts in this guide were checked against Amazon's public pricing pages and the April 2026 UK FBA rate card in October 2026. They are list prices for the amazon.co.uk store and exclude VAT; your category, size tier and programmes may differ, so confirm the figures in Seller Central's revenue calculator before relying on them.