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Guide

Every fee Amazon India charges a seller, and the ones you forget

Referral, closing, fulfilment, storage and 18% GST on all of them — plus the return, RTO and advertising costs that quietly decide whether an SKU makes money.

9 min read

Most sellers can name two Amazon fees. A profitable seller can name nine, because the gap between those two lists is usually the entire margin.

The fees that appear on the invoice

These are the ones Amazon shows you directly.

  • Referral fee — a percentage of the selling price, set per category. It is tiered by price, not flat: many categories charge 0% below a price threshold and a higher rate above it. The SMEMinds fee tables carry 236 category rates with their price tiers, which is why guessing "about 15%" is so often wrong in both directions.
  • Closing fee — a flat per-unit charge that varies by selling-price band and by fulfilment channel (FBA, Easy Ship, Self Ship, Seller Flex). Critically, the closing fee is not waived by a zero-referral tier. A low-priced item in a 0% referral category still pays it.
  • Fulfilment fee — on FBA, a pick-and-pack charge plus a weight handling charge. Chargeable weight is the higher of actual weight and volumetric weight ((L×W×H in cm) ÷ 5000), and the rate steps up by zone: local, regional, national.
  • Storage fee — charged on the cubic space your inventory occupies, monthly, with long-term surcharges on aged stock.
  • GST on fees — 18%. This applies to every Amazon fee above. If you are GST-registered it is claimable as input credit, but it still leaves your bank account first.

The deductions that are not fees

Two amounts are withheld rather than charged, and sellers routinely mistake them for costs:

  • TCS at 1% (GST section 52), collected by Amazon and creditable against your GST liability.
  • TDS at 0.1% (income-tax section 194-O), creditable against your income-tax liability.

Neither is a cost. Both are cash-flow: your money, held elsewhere, for a while. Model them in your working-capital plan, not in your unit economics.

The costs Amazon never invoices you for

This is where margin actually goes. The SMEMinds fee schedule documents sixteen of these layers; the four that move the number most are:

  1. Returns and RTO. A returned unit typically costs forward and reverse logistics — roughly twice one-way shipping — plus a handling charge, and the unit may come back unsellable. At a 6% return rate this is small. In fashion, where rates run far higher, it is often the single largest line after COGS.
  2. Advertising. If ads are what make the SKU sell, ad spend is a cost of goods sold, not a marketing experiment. Allocate it per unit.
  3. Write-offs and damages on aged or returned stock.
  4. The GST you charge the customer. On a GST-inclusive price, the tax is not revenue. A ₹999 item at an 18% slab is ₹846.61 of revenue and ₹152.39 of someone else's money.

What this means in practice

Run one SKU through a model that includes all nine layers before you run a hundred through a model that includes two. Our Amazon Profitability AI uses the live fee tables described above — including the tiered referral rates and the closing-fee bands — and reports the break-even price and the break-even ACOS alongside the margin.

The full treatment, fee by fee and screen by screen, is in the Amazon Account Management Playbook.