Marketplace Briefing: Amazon sellers brace for higher fulfillment fees in 2026 as tariff costs bite

The company said FBA rates will climb by an average of eight cents per unit sold, though the exact increase depends on product size and price. For example, fees on small items over $50 will rise by $0.51 per unit, while large products between $10 and $50 will increase by $0.05 per unit. Multi-Channel Fulfillment fees will go up an average of $0.30 per unit, and Buy with Prime fees will rise by roughly $0.24.

Amazon is also revising its inbound placement and oversized item fee structures to add more pricing tiers, a move it says allows lower rates in some cases but higher ones where the company provides “enhanced services,” such as faster delivery or improved automation.

Although the price hikes are relatively modest compared to prior years, sellers expect the changes to compound cost pressures in the new year, particularly as they grapple with rising costs associated with the White House’s ongoing trade war against top trading partners. Sellers who spoke to Modern Retail for this story — many of whom have already raised prices at least once earlier this year — expect to either pass costs along to the consumer or absorb the increases themselves.

In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson said that “Amazon consistently offers the lowest prices across the widest selection of products. Prices have not increased outside of normal fluctuations across millions of items on Amazon, and we continue to meet or beat other retailers’ prices across the vast selection of products in our store.”

“My overall thoughts are, ‘Ugh, again?'” said Adam Wilkens, founder of Amazon consultancy Dotcom Reps, which advises about 30 clients. He said he expects sellers to raise the prices of goods in response to fee increases.

Amazon said the new rates reflect both higher operating costs and continued investments in its logistics network. In a statement, the company emphasized that its average FBA fee hike of less than 0.5% per item is “significantly lower than inflation” and below the rate increases announced by other major carriers over the past two years. The company also pointed to new seller tools designed to help merchants manage the impact of higher fees, such as its Profit Analytics dashboard, which breaks down product-level economics, and a revised fee calculator that lets sellers test how packaging, shipping or inventory changes could lower costs.

While Amazon didn’t raise FBA fees in 2025, many sellers say Amazon has eaten into their profits in other ways. Earlier this year, Amazon announced it would shift to a performance-based fee structure for its deals and coupons that sellers previously told Modern Retail risked hurting their top-selling products and straining already razor-thin margins. Last year, Amazon also announced a major change to how it reimburses third-party sellers for lost and damaged inventory that sellers said would squeeze more money out of them.

Fee hikes have been big business for Amazon. In 2024, the e-commerce giant earned more than $150 billion in revenue from the fees it charges sellers, up 7% from the year before. Seller fees can eat up about half of the cost per sale, hurting merchant profits, according to Marketplace Pulse.

Amazon’s core retail operation, meanwhile, continues to post solid growth. Its online stores division generated $67.4 billion in sales last quarter, up 10% year over year. But Amazon, like other major retailers, is under growing pressure to protect its margins as Trump’s tariffs threaten to erode consumer spending.

“Amazon’s costs — just like everybody else’s costs, just like consumers’ costs — are going up, and they need to do what they can to cover their costs,” said Jason Boyce, a veteran Amazon merchant who now runs Avenue7Media, a consulting business that works with 70 brands. For instance, Boyce said, if the brand is selling 1,000 units a day via FBA, at eight cents per order, the additional fees add up to nearly $29,000 per year. “While most brands and sellers really appreciate that they didn’t do major raises last year, this is a painful time to be raising fees again.”

Ultimately, customers pay the price, according to Phil Masiello, founder of acceleration agency CrunchGrowth, which manages about 70 clients across beauty, personal care and food brands. He told Modern Retail his clients have gradually raised prices by about 30% because of tariffs. He expects they’ll raise prices even more as the costs of everything, including Amazon platform fees, go up.

Craig Leslie, founder of The Bean Coffee Company, also raised prices by about 25% this year and said he expects to implement another “small increase, … like 10 cents a pound” before year-end. Like many merchants, the cost of raw goods — in Leslie’s case, the price of coffee beans — has risen because of tariffs. “There are coffee tariffs on every single coffee-producing country other than Mexico,” he said.

But for many merchants, raising prices isn’t enough to keep business afloat. At a time when shoppers are more cost-conscious than ever, brands are trying to hold the line on prices by trimming expenses wherever they can. 

One way brands are doing that is by cutting back on marketing and advertising spending.

“Media spend from our clients has decreased significantly. Upper-funnel awareness-type spend, like CTV spend, was cut back dramatically from a lot of our brands,” said Boyce. He added that sellers have been cutting back on third-party service providers, which Modern Retail has previously reported.

Masiello has seen a similar pullback across his client base, with sellers pulling back on more expensive advertising channels like Meta, Google and Amazon and redirecting those budgets toward more cost-efficient marketing, such as micro-influencers. Wilkens said he’s seen a pullback in ad spending, too.

Other sellers, like Monil Kothari, founder of the New York City–based fine-jewelry brand Haus of Brilliance, are pulling away from FBA in favor of storing and fulfilling inventory independently. His business has been diversifying away from FBA for the past couple of years, in part, because of the rising costs associated with selling on Amazon. His business has come to rely less on Amazon to make money. Now, the only two items he’s continuing to sell through FBA are his two best-selling products: a diamond tennis bracelet and a gold chain.

Like many import-reliant businesses, Haus of Brilliance has also been hit by President Trump’s new tariffs, which Kothari said introduced additional pricing pressures. “We had item cost increases anywhere from 30-60% depending on the item,” he said, citing a recent tariff on Indian goods.

Sellers broadly agreed that even small changes add up.

“The fees have never been an issue by themselves,” Kothari said. “It’s just the decreasing profitability, which is not just a function of FBA fees, but of all of the other expenses of selling on Amazon.”

What I’m reading

• Amazon sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity demanding that the artificial intelligence search startup stop allowing its AI browser agent, Comet, to buy items on behalf of users from Amazon.com, Bloomberg reported.
• After slashing 14,000 roles across the company, Amazon plans to cut even more jobs starting in January as part of CEO Andy Jassy’s broader cost-cutting push, per CNBC.
• Shopify told analysts on a Tuesday earnings call that shopper traffic coming from AI tools to Shopify merchant stores have increased sevenfold since January, while purchases attributed to AI searches have climbed 11-fold.

What we’ve covered

• Walmart adds AI-generated audio summaries to select product pages
• Shopify just became the biggest company to launch a Substack newsletter
• Amazon CEO expects to ‘find ways’ to partner with third-party AI shopping agents in the future