FBA stands for Fulfillment by Amazon. You send your inventory to Amazon's warehouses; Amazon stores it, picks and packs orders, ships them with Prime delivery speeds, and handles customer service and returns. In exchange Amazon takes a fee per unit and a share of everything, and imposes rules that decide whether your business is profitable.

FBA versus FBM, in one paragraph

The alternative is FBM — Fulfilled by Merchant — where you keep the inventory and ship the orders yourself or through a 3PL. FBA buys you the Prime badge, a meaningful conversion advantage and Amazon's customer service. FBM buys you control, lower fees on slow-moving or bulky items, and no exposure to storage surcharges. Most established sellers run both: fast movers in FBA, everything else FBM.

What FBA costs in 2026

Sellers routinely price against two fees and get ambushed by seven. The stack:

  • Referral fee — Amazon's commission, around 15% in most categories.
  • Fulfillment fee — per unit, roughly $3.11–$3.70 for small standard items and climbing steeply with size and weight. Since April 17, 2026 there is also a 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge on US fulfillment fees.
  • Monthly storage — about $0.78 per cubic foot January through September, then $2.40 October through December. Storage triples exactly when your inventory peaks.
  • Inbound placement — $0.14 to $1.50 per unit if you send everything to one or two facilities; zero if you split the shipment across five or more.
  • Low-inventory-level fee — charged on units sold while your stock sits below 28 days of forecast demand.
  • Aged inventory surcharge — starts at 181 days and ratchets hard; past a year it reaches $6.90 per cubic foot or more on top of normal storage.
  • Inbound defect fees — when a shipment arrives mislabeled or not matching what you declared.

Note the trap built into that list: too little stock is a fee, too much stock is a fee. Amazon has priced both directions of being wrong.

The rule that changed everything: Amazon stopped prepping for you

For years a missing barcode or an unbagged unit meant Amazon fixed it and billed a service. That ended January 1, 2026. Amazon retired its US prep and labeling services. Units must now arrive fully prepped: poly bags at least 1.5 mil thick with suffocation warnings, a scannable FNSKU label on every unit, cartons under 50 lb and 25 inches per side. Short of that you risk refusal, defect fees, or a blocked shipment.

The full checklist is in our FBA prep requirements guide.

How experienced sellers actually run FBA

  • Keep a buffer, not a stockpile. Four to eight weeks inside FBA; the rest held upstream and fed in on a cadence. The low-inventory fee never triggers and October storage is paid on weeks, not months.
  • Always take the optimized split. Five or more destinations costs nothing; one destination costs up to $1.50 a unit, every unit.
  • Never let stock cross day 180. The aged surcharge ladder does not come back down.
  • Check the fee preview per SKU monthly. Size-tier reclassifications land quietly and a product profitable in March can be underwater by July.
  • Do not live on one channel. Suspensions happen to careful sellers. The same inventory can sell on Walmart and eBay.

The deeper version of the fee math is in selling on Amazon FBA in 2026.

Importers have the natural version of the buffer play: the container lands at Seattle or Tacoma, we pull it, the freight goes into storage minutes from the terminal, and FBA prep feeds Amazon in optimized splits every couple of weeks. One building between your factory and the algorithm — tell us your SKUs and we will run the numbers.