Amazon India seller fees, explained properly.

Almost every new seller we onboard makes the same mistake: they price a product off the referral fee alone, see a healthy-looking gross margin, and only discover the closing fee, the shipping fee and 18% GST-on-fees when the first settlement report lands and the number is 8–12% smaller than they modelled.

Amazon's fee structure isn't hidden — it's just spread across four or five line items that interact with each other. Once you see how they stack, pricing stops being a guess. Here's the full breakdown, India-specific, with the numbers that actually matter in 2026.

The five fees that come out of every order

For a standard marketplace sale in India, your settlement is roughly:

Let's take them one at a time, because the order matters and the traps are different for each.

1. Referral fee — the big one, and it's category-specific

The referral fee is a percentage of the total sale price (item price + any charges you pass to the customer). It is by far the largest deduction for most sellers, and it is set per category — not flat across your account.

Representative 2026 ranges we see across Amazon India categories:

Two things sellers miss here. First, within a single category Amazon often sets different referral % by price slab — e.g. a lower rate under ₹300 or ₹500 and a higher rate above it. Second, for many categories items priced under ₹300 or ₹500 carry a sharply reduced referral fee, and a wide range of low-value items benefit from the broader sub-₹1,000 fee relief. We wrote about the pricing cliff that creates in the ₹1,000 margin rule — it's the single most exploitable line in the whole fee schedule.

2. Closing fee — flat, but it scales with price

The closing fee (sometimes shown as "fixed closing fee") is a flat rupee amount charged per unit sold. It doesn't scale as a percentage — it steps up across price bands and varies by fulfilment channel. As a rough 2026 guide for Easy Ship / self-ship orders:

• Items up to ₹250: a few rupees (often ₹3–₹5)
• ₹250–₹500: roughly ₹8–₹15
• ₹500–₹1,000: roughly ₹25–₹40
• Above ₹1,000: ₹40+ and rising

FBA orders typically carry a different (often lower per-unit) closing fee than self-ship, which is part of why FBA can win on small, fast-moving items. The closing fee feels trivial on a ₹2,000 product, but on a ₹180 phone cable it can quietly eat 5–8% of the sale on its own.

3. Weight handling / shipping fee — the silent margin killer

If Amazon moves the parcel for you (FBA or Easy Ship), you pay a weight handling fee based on the billable weight and the shipping distance (Local → Regional → National). Billable weight is the higher of actual weight and volumetric weight (L×B×H ÷ 5000 for most lanes), which is why a light-but-bulky product gets charged like a brick.

Indicative 2026 national-lane rates start around ₹70–₹90 for the first 500g and add per additional 500g/kg slab. A 1.5 kg item shipping national can easily attract ₹130–₹190 in handling alone — before referral, closing or GST.

4. FBA fees — only if you use Fulfilment by Amazon

If you store inventory in Amazon's warehouses, FBA replaces your shipping fee with two components:

• Pick & pack / fulfilment fee — per unit, by size and weight band. Often cheaper than self-ship at the small/standard end because of Amazon's scale.
• Storage fee — charged per cubic metre per month, and it spikes for inventory sitting longer than ~270 days (long-term storage). Slow movers in FBA bleed storage every month they don't sell.

FBA also unlocks Prime, which lifts conversion — so the right question is never "is FBA cheaper?" but "does the conversion lift more than cover the fee delta?" We break down that decision in FBA vs Easy Ship vs Self-Ship.

5. GST on fees — the 18% nobody budgets for

Here's the one that catches everyone: Amazon charges 18% GST on its fees — referral, closing, weight handling and FBA. So a ₹100 referral fee actually costs you ₹118 out of your settlement. If you're GST-registered you can claim this as input tax credit, but it still hits your cash flow on every settlement cycle, and if you model fees without the 18%, your projected margin is overstated on day one.

A worked example: ₹799 beauty product on Easy Ship

Let's run a realistic SKU end-to-end. Beauty product, priced ₹799, 250g, shipping regional, sold on Easy Ship, seller is GST-registered.

That's roughly 74.6% of sale price landing in your account — before you subtract your own COGS, packaging and any ad spend. If your product costs ₹250 to make and pack, your contribution before ads is ₹346. Run ads at a 30% ACoS (₹240) and you're suddenly at ₹106 contribution per order. The fee stack is exactly why ACoS in isolation is misleading — fees, not just ad spend, decide whether the order made money.

Change one variable — say the same product sits in a 15% referral category instead of 8% — and your net drops by ~₹56, turning a comfortable SKU into a thin one. That's the whole point: the same price is a different business in a different category.

The fees people forget exist

• Removal / disposal fees (FBA) — getting unsold stock back out of Amazon's warehouse costs per unit.
• Returns processing — high-return categories (apparel especially) can carry return shipping and handling that quietly erode the category's real margin.
• TCS (1%) & TDS — collected/deducted at source; reconcilable at filing, but a cash-flow drag every cycle.
• Long-term storage — the silent monthly tax on slow-moving FBA inventory.

What to do before you price your next SKU

1. Pull your exact referral % for the specific category and price slab from Seller Central — never assume.
2. Weigh and measure the packed product and compute billable weight (the higher of actual vs volumetric).
3. Add the closing fee for your price band and your fulfilment mode.
4. Apply 18% GST on the total fees, not just the referral.
5. Subtract COGS, packaging and a realistic ad allocation to get true contribution per order — and only then decide the price.

None of this is hard arithmetic; it's just five numbers most people skip. Get them right once per SKU and you'll never be surprised by a settlement report again.