Amazon FBA Fees in India: The Complete Guide

What Amazon FBA fees actually are

Amazon FBA fees are the charges Amazon deducts for storing, picking, packing, and shipping a seller's inventory through Fulfilment by Amazon, on top of the standard referral commission charged on every marketplace order. Sellers asking 'what are Amazon FBA fees' are usually expecting one number, but FBA is actually a bundle of separate charges that apply at different points — some per order, some per month, some only under specific conditions.

This is also why Amazon FBA India fees can look completely different for two sellers moving the same volume: the mix of product size, weight, storage duration, and return rate changes which fees apply and how much they add up to.

A note on sourcing: Amazon's own Seller Central India fee pages sit behind seller login and aren't publicly fetchable, so the numbers in this guide are compiled from Amazon's public seller-facing announcements plus reputable third-party breakdowns (Shiprocket, GST Co, Rekonsile, and others linked in the references section below) that track Amazon India's published rate cards. Rates move — Amazon revised its India fee schedule as recently as September 2025 — so treat every figure here as directionally correct and confirm the exact number for your category and dates in Seller Central before pricing a product.

The core fees that make up the total

A full Amazon FBA fee breakdown includes:

• Referral fee — Amazon's commission on the order, charged as a percentage of selling price and varying by category.
• Fulfilment fee (pick and pack) — the per-unit charge for picking, packing, and shipping the order, based on the product's weight and size tier.
• Weight handling fee — an additional per-kilo charge layered on top of pick and pack for heavier and bulky shipments.
• Monthly storage fee — a monthly charge based on the volume of space your inventory occupies in Amazon's warehouses, with peak-season rates in place from October through December.
• Long-term storage fee — an additional charge for units that sit in a fulfilment centre beyond 365 days.
• Removal and disposal fees — charged if you ask Amazon to return or dispose of unsold inventory.
• Returns processing fee — applicable per returned unit in apparel and shoes, and above a return-rate threshold in several other categories.
• Closing fee — a fixed per-order fee that stacks on referral and fulfilment fees and varies by price band and fulfilment method.
• 18% GST — charged on top of every Amazon service fee listed above, not on the product price itself.

Referral fee: category rates and price-band rules

The referral fee is Amazon's commission and is charged on every order regardless of whether you use FBA, Easy Ship, or self-ship — it's not an FBA-specific charge, but it's always part of the total cost of selling, so it belongs in this breakdown. Across Amazon India's published category list, referral fees generally range from about 2% to over 20%, and many categories use price bands rather than a single flat percentage.

Illustrative examples compiled from Amazon's public category rate card and third-party trackers (verify your exact category before pricing):

• Mobile phones: around 5%.
• Laptops: around 6%.
• Beauty and personal care: roughly 3.5%–12%, varying by sub-category and price band.
• Books: tiered from 2% (₹250 and under) up to 12.5% (above ₹1,000).
• Apparel and fashion: among the highest bands, historically 15%–24% depending on price and sub-category, with several bands reduced in Amazon's September 2025 revision.
• Furniture: roughly 10%–14.5% depending on price band.
• Automotive: around 2%, one of the lowest referral bands on the platform.
• Fashion jewellery: among the highest bands at roughly 22%–24%.
• Zero-referral-fee items: Amazon India has run a 0% policy on lower-priced items across many categories — reported thresholds range roughly ₹300–₹1,000 depending on category and revision — which materially changes unit economics for budget SKUs. This is a fast-moving part of the fee schedule, so confirm the live threshold for your category in Seller Central rather than assuming last quarter's number still applies.

Fulfilment fee: how weight and size tiers set the price

The fulfilment fee (Amazon calls the core component 'pick and pack') is charged per unit shipped through FBA and scales with weight and size tier rather than being a flat rate. For standard-size items, third-party rate trackers report a structure roughly in the range of ₹14–₹17 for the first kilogram, with additional per-kilo increments beyond that, and a cheaper incremental band introduced for shipments beyond 5 kg. Oversized, heavy, and bulky items sit on a separate, higher scale — reported starting points are around ₹26 and up, with per-kilo charges increasing again above roughly 12 kg.

On top of pick and pack, Amazon layers a weight handling fee at the fulfilment-centre level for heavier shipments — reported figures put a base charge of roughly ₹108–₹114 around the 12 kg mark, rising per kilo through the 12–25 kg band, before the per-kilo rate eases again above 25 kg. The exact breakpoints have shifted across Amazon's recent fee revisions, so a product that sat comfortably in one tier last year may have moved into a costlier one without the seller noticing — which is exactly the kind of drift a fee audit catches and a quoted 'average' fulfilment cost never will.

The practical takeaway: two products priced identically can carry very different fulfilment fees purely because of dimensional weight and packaging. Compact, lightweight SKUs are cheapest to fulfil; anything that tips into an oversized or bulky tier adds cost that referral fee percentage alone won't explain.

Monthly storage fee: standard vs oversize, peak vs non-peak

Amazon charges a monthly storage fee based on the average daily volume (in cubic feet) your inventory occupies in its fulfilment centres, and — like other Amazon marketplaces — India runs a peak-season rate for the October–December quarter that is meaningfully higher than the rest of the year.

Rates reported across current third-party trackers:

• Standard-size items, non-peak (January–September): roughly ₹45–₹53 per cubic foot per month.
• Standard-size items, peak season (October–December): roughly ₹170 per cubic foot per month.
• Oversized items, non-peak: roughly ₹34 per cubic foot per month.
• Oversized items, peak season: roughly ₹85 per cubic foot per month.

Why the peak-season storage jump matters

The gap between non-peak and peak rates is large enough — roughly 2.5x to 3x for standard items — that inventory sitting in a fulfilment centre through Q4 without selling can quietly become one of the costliest line items in a seller's fee stack. Sellers stocking up ahead of festive-season demand should size inbound shipments against expected sell-through, not just against the discount they got from a supplier.

Long-term storage fee: the 365-day threshold

Separate from the monthly storage fee, Amazon charges a long-term storage fee (also called an aged-inventory surcharge) on units that have sat in a fulfilment centre for more than 365 days. Reported rates put this at roughly ₹490–₹552 per cubic foot, or a flat amount per unit (reported figures range roughly ₹11–₹15 per unit), whichever is higher — charged in addition to, not instead of, the regular monthly storage fee.

Some trackers describe additional intermediate aging tiers (for example, elevated surcharges starting around 181 days and stepping up again past 271 days) modeled on structures Amazon has used in other marketplaces. Whether India currently runs the same multi-tier aging schedule or only the 365-day cutoff is not something this guide can verify from public sources — check your Seller Central inventory age report directly, since this is exactly the kind of charge that erodes margin silently on slow-moving SKUs.

The fix is operational, not just financial: run inventory age reports regularly and clear anything approaching the 365-day mark — through a promotion, a removal order, or a liquidation channel — before the surcharge hits.

Removal and disposal fees

If you ask Amazon to return unsold inventory to you or dispose of it instead of continuing to pay storage, that's a removal or disposal order, and each carries its own per-unit fee based on size and shipping speed. Reported rates for standard-size items are roughly ₹10 for standard-speed removal and ₹30 for expedited removal, with heavy and bulky items charged a flat rate of roughly ₹100 regardless of speed. Some current trackers report somewhat higher figures (roughly ₹36 for standard-size and ₹51 for oversized removals), which suggests these rates have moved since the numbers most commonly cited online — another reason to check the live rate before budgeting a bulk removal.

Disposal fees are generally reported as slightly lower than removal fees for the same size tier, since Amazon doesn't have to arrange return shipping to you. Either way, removal and disposal only make sense once you've compared their cost against a few more months of storage fees (especially if peak season is approaching) and against what you'd recover by liquidating the stock through a discount channel instead.

Returns processing fee: which categories it hits

Amazon's returns processing fee structure treats apparel and shoes differently from everything else. In those two categories, a returns processing fee is charged on every customer-returned unit, with no return-rate threshold — you pay it on the return regardless of how often that SKU gets returned.

For most other categories, the fee only applies once a product's return rate exceeds a category-specific benchmark — sellers with a return rate under the threshold for their category pay no returns processing fee at all on that SKU. This threshold-based model is a deliberate shift away from charging a fee on every single return, and it means high-return categories (fashion-adjacent goods, sized items, anything with fit or expectation mismatches) carry return risk that low-return categories like books or electronics accessories mostly don't.

This guide can't verify India-specific rupee amounts per category for the returns processing fee from public sources — Amazon's category-by-category rate card for this fee sits behind Seller Central login. If returns are a meaningful share of your FBA volume, that's a number worth pulling directly rather than estimating.

Closing fee: the fixed charge people forget

Separate from referral and fulfilment fees, Amazon India charges a fixed closing fee per order that varies by price band and by fulfilment method — FBA, Easy Ship, Easy Ship Prime, and self-ship each have their own closing fee schedule. Reported figures put closing fees anywhere from roughly ₹5 at the lowest price band up to ₹65 at the highest, with FBA's closing fee schedule generally running lower than self-ship's at the top end but higher at the very bottom, reflecting a September 2025 revision that adjusted several bands by about ₹1 per slab.

Because it's a flat amount rather than a percentage, the closing fee matters disproportionately on low-price items — a ₹20 closing fee on a ₹150 product is over 13% of the sale price, while the same ₹20 on a ₹2,000 product is exactly 1%. Sellers pricing budget SKUs should model closing fee as a real cost, not an afterthought.

FBA vs Easy Ship vs self-ship: how the fee stacks differ

Referral fee applies identically no matter which fulfilment method you choose — it's a commission on the sale, not a shipping charge. What changes across FBA, Easy Ship, and self-ship (FBM) is everything downstream of that: who pays for storage, who pays for picking and packing, and how the shipping charge is calculated.

FBA bundles pick-and-pack, weight handling, and monthly storage into the fee stack described above, and adds long-term storage risk if inventory doesn't move. Easy Ship, by contrast, charges a single per-order shipping fee based on weight and delivery zone — Amazon picks up from your location and delivers, but you hold your own inventory, so there's no monthly storage fee and no long-term storage surcharge to manage. Self-ship shifts logistics entirely to the seller, trading Amazon's shipping fee for your own courier cost and operational overhead.

Reported per-unit cost comparisons put FBA's all-in fulfilment cost somewhat above Easy Ship's for the same product — commonly cited as FBA running roughly ₹15–₹25 more per unit once weight handling and storage are factored in. FBA's counter-argument is Prime eligibility and Amazon's own fulfilment reliability, which several sellers and secondary sources associate with meaningfully higher conversion — but that's a demand-side effect, not a fee-side one, and it doesn't show up in a settlement report the way a fee does. The only way to know which model wins for a specific SKU is to model the full fee stack for both and compare against your actual sell-through, not to assume FBA's velocity premium automatically outweighs its fee premium.

This is also where a fee stack becomes hard to audit manually: FBA, Easy Ship, and self-ship orders can sit side by side in the same settlement report with different fee logic applied to each, and a miscategorized order is easy to miss without pulling every line out and checking it. TheEcomWay's reconciliation engine reads settlement reports at that line-item level, so a fulfilment-method mismatch or an incorrectly tiered fee doesn't just blend into the total.

Getting an accurate number for your own products

Because so many variables affect the total, the only reliable way to know what Amazon FBA fees actually cost you is to calculate referral fee, fulfilment fee, and an amortized storage cost for your specific product's category, weight, and size tier — not to rely on an average figure quoted for a different seller's catalog.

TheEcomWay's Profit Guard tool calculates this full FBA fee stack — referral fee, fulfilment fee, and storage — for Amazon alongside Flipkart and Meesho, and TheEcomWay's reconciliation engine checks the fees actually charged in your settlement report against what should have applied, so a miscalculated size tier, a wrongly applied peak-season storage rate, or an unexpected long-term storage charge doesn't go unnoticed.