Something is moving inside Amazon’s fulfillment cost engine, and the sellers who are feeling it first are not the ones you’d expect. According to multiple sources close to the matter, Amazon has been quietly piloting a recalculation methodology for its FBA storage and fulfillment fees that disproportionately affects mid-tier sellers — specifically those generating between $500,000 and $2 million in annual revenue — while leaving enterprise vendors and Amazon Vendor Central accounts largely untouched.
The alleged changes, which sources say began rolling through affected seller accounts in late April 2026, are not showing up as a formal fee schedule update in Seller Central. Instead, sellers are reportedly seeing unexplained line-item increases in their settlement reports under headings that were previously either zero or negligible. One 7-figure home goods seller, who asked not to be named, told Ecommerce Times that her per-unit FBA fulfillment cost on a mid-size item jumped from $4.82 to $5.61 between her March and May settlement cycles — a 16.4% increase she cannot reconcile against any published Amazon fee change.
What Are Sellers Actually Seeing in Their Settlement Reports?
The pattern being reported is specific enough to raise eyebrows. Sources describe unexpected charges appearing under “inbound placement service fees,” “low-inventory-level fees,” and a newer line item that several sellers have screenshotted and shared in private Slack communities and the Seller Central forums: something labeled “fulfillment capacity adjustment” — a fee descriptor that does not appear in Amazon’s current published fee glossary.
- Inbound placement fees reportedly increasing 20–35% for sellers not enrolled in Amazon Warehousing and Distribution (AWD)
- Low-inventory fees triggering at thresholds sellers say were not previously active on their SKUs
- A new unclassified line item appearing in settlement exports for sellers in specific product categories, including pet supplies, kitchen, and sporting goods
- Fee increases appearing without corresponding changes to published rate cards in Seller Central’s fee schedule tab
Kevin King, the Amazon seller educator and host of the Billion Dollar Seller Summit, posted obliquely about the situation in his private community in mid-May, writing — according to a screenshot circulating in seller groups — that “something is off in the fee math right now and I’m hearing it from too many people for it to be noise.” King has not made a formal public statement, and his team did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
Is Amazon Steering Sellers Toward AWD Enrollment?
That is the theory gaining the most traction among the seller community right now, and it has a certain operational logic to it. Amazon Warehousing and Distribution, the company’s upstream storage and replenishment program, has been an aggressive internal priority since its 2022 launch. Sources with knowledge of Amazon’s internal seller success metrics say AWD enrollment targets were embedded into Q1 and Q2 2026 seller growth scorecards for account managers — meaning there is organizational pressure, not just product enthusiasm, behind AWD pitches.
“If you’re not in AWD, you are increasingly the seller Amazon is happy to make uncomfortable. The fee structure is becoming the nudge. It’s not subtle anymore.” — a former Amazon Seller Experience team member, speaking on background
The alleged dynamic mirrors a tactic Amazon has used before: making the default option progressively more expensive until the preferred program looks like the rational choice. FBA itself was built this way against FBM. Prime was built this way against standard shipping. Critics say AWD is now being built the same way against standalone FBA, with mid-tier sellers serving as the proving ground precisely because they lack the leverage of enterprise vendors to push back.
Rohan Thambrahalli, founder of Upsy Shopping and a longtime Amazon aggregator consultant, told Ecommerce Times he has reviewed settlement data from six sellers in the $800K–$1.8M range over the past 60 days. “The increases are real and they are not random,” he said. “They cluster around sellers who have declined AWD onboarding calls in the past 90 days. I can’t prove causation but the correlation is hard to ignore.”
How Are Amazon Aggregators Responding to the Margin Pressure?
For aggregators — already navigating a brutal post-2021 environment of compressed multiples and portfolio rationalization — the alleged fee creep is arriving at the worst possible time. Thrasio, which has been in restructuring mode since its 2024 Chapter 11 filing and subsequent emergence, is reportedly reviewing its FBA cost modeling across its remaining ~200 active brands. Sources familiar with Thrasio’s current operations say the finance team flagged the settlement anomalies in a May internal review and has escalated to its Amazon strategic account team for clarification.
“Every basis point matters in the aggregator model right now. If Amazon is effectively raising fees by 10–15% on a subset of SKUs without a formal announcement, that breaks every acquisition model we built in the last two years.” — a source familiar with aggregator portfolio operations, speaking anonymously
Perch, the Boston-based aggregator that has been quieter than most of its peers post-consolidation, is also said to be monitoring the situation. A source close to Perch’s operations said the company’s category managers received an internal memo in late May flagging the settlement discrepancies and instructing teams not to adjust pricing models yet pending clarification from Amazon.
Neither Thrasio nor Perch responded to requests for comment. Amazon did not respond to a detailed list of questions submitted via its press office by the publication deadline.
What Are Third-Party Tools Showing, and Are They Flagging Anything?
The Amazon seller tool ecosystem has become an inadvertent early-warning system for the alleged fee shifts. Sellers using Sellerboard — the German-developed P&L analytics platform that parses Amazon settlement files at the line-item level — have been among the first to surface the discrepancies because Sellerboard’s categorization engine flags unrecognized fee descriptors automatically.
- Sellerboard’s community forum shows 47 threads opened since May 1 specifically referencing unrecognized fee line items
- Helium 10’s Profits tool, which ingests settlement data, has reportedly seen a spike in support tickets related to fee categorization errors since late April
- SellerApp and Perpetua users are reportedly cross-referencing ACOS and true net margin data and finding the gap widening without PPC explanation
Sellerboard’s founder, Igor Makarov, posted in the platform’s official Facebook group on May 28 that the team was “aware of new fee descriptors appearing in settlement reports” and was working to map them to the correct categories. He did not speculate on Amazon’s intent but noted the volume of reports was “unusually high” for a period without a published fee schedule update.
Could This Trigger a Formal Seller Complaint to the FTC or Senate Commerce Committee?
Unconfirmed but worth watching: at least two seller advocacy organizations are allegedly in early-stage conversations about whether the undisclosed fee recalculation — if proven — constitutes a violation of Amazon’s seller agreement obligations around fee transparency. The Amazon marketplace seller agreement requires Amazon to provide advance notice of material fee changes, a clause that has been tested but rarely litigated.
Chris McCabe, the former Amazon policy investigator turned seller consultant who runs ecommerceChris.com, told Ecommerce Times he has been fielding calls about the fee issue since mid-May. “The settlement report has always been a black box with a flashlight,” McCabe said. “But when you have dozens of sellers in the same revenue bracket seeing the same new line items with no announcement, that starts to look like policy, not glitch.”
“Amazon’s terms give them enormous latitude on fee adjustment, but there is a disclosure floor. Whether this crosses it is a legal question, not just an operational one.” — Chris McCabe, ecommerceChris.com
For now, the practical advice circulating in seller communities is grimly operational: export your full settlement report in flat-file format monthly, not just the summary view; flag any line item that doesn’t appear in Amazon’s published fee glossary at sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/G201fee; and document the discrepancy in writing through Seller Central’s case management system before assuming it’s a display error. Several sellers report that when they’ve opened cases, Amazon support has closed them as “working as intended” — which, sources say, is itself a data point worth preserving.
Whether this is a deliberate AWD enrollment play, a backend systems migration gone partially public, or something else entirely, the sellers caught in the middle have the same problem they always have with Amazon: the platform is the landlord, the marketplace, and the logistics provider simultaneously, and when the rent changes, you find out in the settlement report.
